The Last Pulse

by Anson Cameron

  ‘It is, Em. Way yummier than ducks. We won’t get ducks.’

  ‘We won’t get anything,’ Em says.

  ‘Nothing,’ her father assures her.

  South of the Queensland border, running through red dune-fields, is a grey floodplain called the Overflow and at its centre the river, its grey-brown waters bursting its banks and spreading across the land between the trees in a million amorphous bays and inlets. With this water life is excited and accelerated. Years of living must be done in these months while it runs and the Overflow is full. The yapunyah gums and coolabahs and black box are in blossom and the place is an opera of birdsong and frogs, their calls so beautiful and alien now.

  Word of the water’s passage has passed through the towns of the south and reached the cities of the coast and been discussed on radio and the net. Man-made or not, it has sparked a natural wonder in the desert and been recognised as an epochal event.

  The Overflow is a vast delta of lakes and natural wetlands and braided channels of cane grass and lignum and leopard wood and yapunyah and kangaroo and emu. A place of ephemeral abundance akin to the Etosha Pan of Namibia or the Okavango Delta, where that river irrigates the sands of the Kalahari Desert.

  People have come to see it. In miniature distance at the shores of the flood, Em and Merv and Bridget Wray can see campers who have come up out of the south to witness this last vast immersion. Wisps of smoke mark their location, caravans and tents and vehicles camped facing the water, backing off into the plain as the flood widens, reforming and settling into camp as it pauses. The people are watching pelicans herd fish, and freckled ducks in their last flocks and brolgas dancing on the wind. They have rushed out here to witness the tumbling lead waters of the Darling and experience the multi-coloured insurrection of life taking place in its wake. There is the Salt Pipewort, the Painted Snipe, the Striped Burrowing Frog, the Freckled Duck, the Darling Lily, the Flannel Cudweed, the Red-capped Robin, the Showy Burr-Daisy, the Smooth Cat’s Ear, the Woolly Mantle … the Hardhead, the Nankeen Night-Heron …

  The sky out here becomes cinema when there is water. By night an atomic wheel of stars run through by the Milky Way and distant storms strobing the horizon with lightning. By day, pale near earth and deep blue at its zenith with cirrus dragging across it and black kites cruising the lower breezes through a roiling wealth of wood swallows and in high blue distance eagles with the world revolving small beneath.

  Bridget Wray thinks about escaping to the campers, but the flood is too shallow for the boat to reach anywhere near its edge and it would be impossible to walk the kilometres of shallow water bottomed by mud before reaching dry land. The river is isolated from the edge of the flood. The land is unreachable from the river.

  And she is not sure, anyway, now that she should leave Em before delivering her into safe hands. She knows Merv wouldn’t harm his little girl intentionally, but there is going to be some gauntlet of chaos and danger before this is over.

  She and Em sit in the sun with the paper and coloured pencils Em brought along to draw pictures of her flood holiday for show-and-tell at school. Bridget waves her brown pencil at the scene, looking this way and that. What should she draw? This river, in its pomp, is a profusion of possibilities. Everything is flashing a coloured rump at her. Ducks, ibis, shags, coots, pelicans, brolgas, parrots, cockatoos, eagles glide and circle and finches flash and feed, and from high in the trees lizards and snakes cover all with slow-eyed surveillance.

  She smiles vacantly and sits swishing her pencil back and forth above the page, watching Em, who has her eyes thinned in concentration and her pencil beetling back and forth across her paper drawing a woman pushing a child on a swing.

  Dickenson had a heyday whose ghost can still be seen in the gutted two-storey sandstone buildings that line its streets. For a few decades all the wool from a million square miles was drawn by bullock dray to this port and loaded onto paddle steamers and flowed downriver along the Darling and into the Murray and out to sea and across the world to the mills of Manchester where it joined the slave-raised cotton of the American South and was made into clothing. Each flood would launch a flotilla of paddle steamers south.

  The main streets were fronted by colonial grandeur, yellow sandstone banks and wool stores and hotels and a land office and general stores. Buggy horses tied up beneath peppercorn trees sniffed at the river’s muddy airs and made small-talk while waiting for ladies in hooped skirts. This speck of geometry and stone-masonry and Victorian society on a grey riverbank in a wilderness died when wool died.

  Money dried up and white society broke away piece-by-piece. White families packed their belongings onto vehicles and moved to the coast, east or south. The Yangarna people, who were only ever allowed into town as servants, now began to move into town from their diaspora among the sheep stations and the shanty camps along the riverbank. And when they got to town they found the white people had gone.

  People who had been given ironic names like King Freddy and the Duke and Lady Astor and Jesus, because they had been nannies and cooks and boundary riders and rousabouts and jackaroos and stockmen, suddenly, with little experience at responsibility or family, became the elder statesmen and women in a town that was theirs.

  Even people adept at civic governance can’t run a town whose purpose has died and whose income is nil. To the Yangarna people Dickenson became a cruel mystery. Looked at from street level it seemed the same as always. The buildings and riverfront parks and bare footpaths. But it was, oddly, without a town’s necessary energies. It was dead. They knew it had once worked. They had seen it work. It had provided starched collars and shiny leather boots and picnic races, loud schools and shops with refrigerated air huffed down aisles filled with bright-labelled cans and cordials and fresh vegetables. And there had been chromed cars honking hello to one another on her streets and night-long balls and there was even a smattering of tiny exotic dogs able to walk its streets on leashes as if the place was a fine city from another hemisphere.

  All gone. The Yangarna sat bewildered in their ghost town, watching it slowly become a ruin. For some of the elders this was the second way of life that had disappeared since white man arrived. The second way of life that had broken down and been mysteriously lost. First the blackfella way of life had been swept away; now the whitefellas’ life was gone.

  The Commonwealth was happy to pay the Yangarna money to stay in Dickenson, out of white sight. They began to drink. The sandstone buildings were, one-by-one, gutted by fire. And the Yangarna people took to camping on the earth floors inside the gutted sandstone shells beneath chirruping swallows and bats.

  Dickenson has slowly become a thoroughgoing dystopia and a delight to the failed states of the globe. A hammer and sickle flag hangs from a power pole at her central crossroads. Beneath it a sign reading: ‘The Russian People Wish Thanks To The People of Dickenson’. A gift from a television crew that had flown in from Moscow to film a news feature on Dickenson. The feature was commissioned by NewsPlast and designed to run after the latest report on the collapsing economy of the Volga Federal District and put that crisis into context by letting the Russian people see the West was mired in beggary, hatred, civil unrest and race problems that made their own plight look trifling. Dickenson has a knack for making the third world feel good about itself. In the past it has performed a similar function on Chinese state TV, and several African autocrats are currently marshalling aid-money to send crews from their state news agencies to this exemplar of Western catastrophe to placate the growing cries for Western freedoms and food in their own countries.

  Today is payday in Dickenson. The town runs on a fortnightly cycle of welfare cheques and like a great heaving heartbeat the money arrives every second Thursday bringing a dizzying oxygen and carnival to the streets. Good-natured shouts ring out and laughing groups of people stand on street corners. They have queued at the Post Office and then taken their cheques across to the windowless bar of the Club Hotel and cashed them and bough
t cartons and casks and smokes.

  In the trashed and neglected Commission Estate on the outskirts of town in a house with broken windows that are rimmed by burn marks like mascara around haggard eyes a boy named Barwon is watching TV. When he hears his father coming in the front gate swearing, without happiness, at the gate itself and at their dog Bukluk. He jumps off the sofa and his mother hands him a pack of Barbecue Shapes as he heads for the back door. Neither says a word to the other, but his mother runs her fingertips down his arm as he goes. It is pension day, his father is drunk, the house is no place for a boy. Barwon is cool with this. Payday is no day for any kid to hang around Dickenson. The shaded thoroughfare of the river is full of Yangarna kids on payday.

  Barwon’s mother’s mother had lived in the shanty town on the twenty-first river bend above Dickenson before the town itself became available for indigenous habitation and she and all her neighbours had upped sticks and moved in. That river-bend shanty had not often been visited by whites. It ran to a loose hunter-gatherer rhythm subsidised by infrequent visits of the New South Wales Health Service and the police and station matriarchs who arrived with flour and oranges and clothes. Rough tellings of Yangarna lore were still available in that tumble of corrugated-iron and cement sheet. Wisps of blackfella history existed there. When the people from that place came back to town they brought with them a few ceremonies and a handful of stories. Other Yangarna people who returned from other places had lost all lore.

  Most of Barwon’s friends spend their free time, and it is all free, playing the Stone Warrior and Rhino Cull video games in the Club Hotel. When their money runs out they emerge blinking onto the streets of Dickenson, under the blue skies and circling kites, and re-enact scenes of those electronic slaughters. The slaughter of Arabs and rhinos has replaced their creation stories.

  Sometimes the dreamings of the Yangarna, as told to him by his grandmother, play in Barwon’s boyhood mind and break out into his daily play. But Yangarna creation stories are not cool with boys high on Rhino Cull and Stone Warrior and for whom every stick is an automatic weapon and every bush a burnoosed Arab. So Barwon often plays alone.

  He has heard from his grandmother, before she was shipped to Broken Hill into a hospice and hitched to a machine, how in times of drought, the river man burnt secret herbs and performed a dance and sang the river back to life. The river man held an exalted place in the tribe, for only he knew the fragile magic that could bring the water again. He kept the songs and incantations as his burden, they were neither easy nor free, and perhaps three or four times in his life, when the river was long dead and the tribe dying along its banks, he would descend to its bed and begin the long and intricate opera that would entice the waters back from the custody of the angry spirit, who was keeping it captive to address a slight offered him by the Yangarna.

  The river man lived a coddled life while the river ran. He gazed down at its waters knowing they were a validation of his magic and a sign of his worth to the tribe. He was feted and fussed over. Grub pastes and goanna eggs and sugar ants were brought to him. He must be kept strong, for when the water fails he has to rise and sing, and the tribe’s fate is in his hands. Only he can bring a dying world back to life.

  The river man would be spent after his song. Like a warrior who had wrung his body and risked his life, he would need nursing back to health. And just as a warrior only has so many battles before death, a river man only has so many songs before he succumbs to his exertions or, more tragically, his dance fails and he is sent from the tribe.

  Then, having whispered and mimed his chants and choreographies to the new river man, the superannuated man would wander away from the river onto the gibber plain into the dry north where his death could not be mocked by water. The new river man must be someone brave enough and wise enough to sing the river back to life several times before the vicious burden of his dance crushes him, too.

  Barwon is only eleven and too young to be a river man. Anyway, the chain of knowledge, the telling of dance and incantation by old to young, has long ago been broken by sheep farmers with rifles. The dance is lost forever. There is no one to teach the song that brought the river alive to Barwon. That song is forgotten.

  But holy men invent themselves, and like other holy men Barwon has dreams at night in which he performs vast magic and in which his deeds are cheered. He dances and hollers and draws patterns in the sand of the riverbed with his toes and he lights small fires that have gas-blue flames and all this entices the water out of the north tumbling along the river into town with the bush blooming and the world turning green behind it.

  In this dream he has a feeling that the bush is an authentic and wonderful world and the cheques that arrive from the coast are a distortion and a blasphemy. He stands on the riverbank and the water rises until it reaches his toes and climbs his legs, then it is at his waist, and the Yangarna people cry tears of joy. The glory of this recurring dream clings to Barwon throughout the waking day.

  Throwing his pack of Barbecue Shapes high and catching it, Barwon descends from the town into the riverbed. Half a dozen Yangarna kids are smoking and chroming under the bridge. Sucking fumes that turn their eyes to slits and make their laughter slow. They shout to him to come here but he waves them off. They abuse him as he walks away downstream.

  After half an hour, having rounded three bends, he is fully alone. The red gums along the river here are brown-leafed and the shade in the riverbed motley and sere. On a high bar of sand in the middle of the riverbed surrounded by a mosaic of cracked clay Barwon sits, planting his packet of Barbecue Shapes into the coarse sand beside him. Black kites wheel overhead, watching.

  Alone, the world his for the making, his flesh becomes goose-bumped with the thrill of privacy, the snugness of secrecy. A boy alone has fully enough ego to be a god, sole owner of reality. Here in this riverbed, inventing dances that might work magic, is the place Barwon feels best about himself. He takes off his t-shirt and flexes his scrawny biceps, watching them left and right, left and right.

  Crawling to the edge of the sand he spits on a tile of grey cracked clay and dabs his finger in the coin of dark paint he has created. He begins to draw a line across his chest with his muddied fingertip, dabbing the finger in his spittle, swirling it into the clay and daubing his chest before it dries. The painted line is only halfway across his chest before his spot of mud is used up. He will never make enough paint for a ceremony using just spit. Looking around he realises he should have brought water from town for the making of paint. If he doesn’t have a river mud turtle on him how can he call up the water?

  He makes a crater, pounding his left heel into the cracked earth at the edge of the sandbar. Then he stands and pisses into it, filling it frothily. By the time he sits again the piss has seeped into the earth leaving the bowl rimmed with a white beard of bubbles. Setting his face hard he dips his finger into the blackened bowl of mud and begins to daub his chest.

  Within minutes he is daubed from head to toe with stripes, signs, dots, explosions, asterisks, serpents, a miscegenation of dreamtime art and the gamer’s gothic gore. And in the middle of his chest a turtle that might have been rendered by an artist for whom the turtle was only hearsay. He looks at himself, his arms outspread. ‘Ooh yeah,’ he says. ‘Cool, eh.’ He smells of piss. But he will swim in the waterhole beneath the bridge before climbing back to town. The last waterhole in the district.

  In the middle of the sandbar he scrapes together a small pile of leaves, burs, twigs and grass and lights it with his orange Bic. The fire flares and sitting downstream from it he puts his mouth close and blows its rope of white smoke upstream with a puffy mantra of gobbledegook fraying and fracturing the smoke in a northerly direction on the wind of his breath, carrying news of the dryness of the land and calling the water to end this suffering and injustice.

  As the fire dies white grass ash dances out across the sandbar tracking wisps of breeze and Barwon knows this as the diaspora of his wishes heading into
the spirit world. He rises, and the dance begins. He works his way into it with a rhythmic humming that climbs and falls, feeling his way forward, it becomes a chant, oy-ya-ya-oom-aa-aa … the voiced version of a didgeridoo. Standing on one leg he scratches at the sand with his raised foot like a foraging fowl, hopping backward, making a small trench in the sand to entice water, his arms out wide flapping, a brolga playing on a rain-bearing breeze. Then he starts to move forward, leap and freeze, leap and freeze. Ohh-aahahh-Ung-aahahh … his voice rising like the ululations of fevered corroboree. He stares upstream toward the next bend from which water might be bidden, waving it in with his hands, calling it forth with senseless ululations and squeals. The dance itself brings forth an abandon and freedom in Barwon, a letting go, conscious thought retreats behind the urgencies of his body, he knows this is the spirit taking over, connecting him with the ancient numberless line of river men who have commanded this river.

  A dance to sing a river alive would normally be taught by an elder to a chosen youth. But the elders around Dickenson have only the faintest memories of what used to be and such dances are just tantalising rumours to them; they know of them but they do not know them. In their place is an unfocused sadness at what has been lost and stolen. Barwon is inventing his dance as he goes along, and being a boy who has done more TV than school and attended more dance parties than corroborees it is unsurprising the moonwalk of Michael Jackson, the pogo-stomp of the punk, and the robotic rap of the gangstas creep into his more traditional choreographies. When he recognises these modern iconoclasms creeping into his dance, being a dutiful boy, he quickly banishes them and begins to mimic the kangaroo and the emu and the goanna and even gets down and slithers through the sand on his belly as a snake. The true magic of childhood is that all magic is true.