by Ed Hillyer
The orchestra finished a popular number; the dancing couples separated and clapped to show their appreciation. Applause at such a juncture sounded sardonic in the extreme.
Before Cuzens even, the players had been coached by Old Tom Wills – a fine cricketer, but a dangerous drunkard. His influence had proven fatal: four of the Aborigines died from alcohol poisoning. Others, including Dick-a-Dick, took severely ill, almost dying. Wills had left the team in disgrace.
As his successor, Charles Lawrence utterly condemned the former laxity. History could not be allowed to repeat itself.
Nor should it be repeated in present company. In seeking a way out of their predicament, Bill Hayman succeeded only in digging them deeper.
‘A glass of grog is a potent reasoner with a blackfellow,’ he breezed. ‘An Aboriginal will drink anything any time, and he calls everything “rum”… everything that he don’t call “him”!’
The promising scent of scandal attracted a growing audience. Lawrence looked into the flushed pink faces gathered around. He stood abruptly, grasped Hayman firmly by the arm, and whisked him away.
‘Well, I never!’
‘Quite extraordinary!’
The eyes of all at table followed their retreat into the milling throng.
‘Perhaps the orchestra struck up a favourite…’
As the partners passed Trollope, his sharp tongue cut Lawrence to the quick. ‘’Twas an evil hour for cricket,’ it rasped, ‘when shrewd men saw where money was to be got.’ The literary giant seemed to turn and leer, baring vast yellow incisors. ‘The English,’ he sneered, ‘are accused of reducing all things to pounds, shillings and pence. I trust the Abhor-riginals will reap some benefit from the revenue they have helped to earn.’
He knew he was right.
Charles Lawrence was almost shocked to find the world still turned on its axis. The ball swirled about them, orchestral music a speeding carousel. Resolving not to drink any more, he advised they both should stick to sober-water. Hayman sulkily announced his retirement to the dunny. Lawrence undertook a circuit of the room – to clear his head as much as to reassure the flock of his abiding presence. The soul of constancy he was, clambered onto the wagon, steady as a judge, temperate as an…as an ammonite.
He wanted to belch.
The grand occasion was not nearly so intimate as that enjoyed at Went House, by dint of its sheer scale. Scattered throughout the great hall of the Athenaeum Club, the Aborigines, finding themselves isolated, became subdued. Unfailingly polite when approached, they by and large sought to avoid direct conversation, grunting their responses with a surly sort of civility. Swamped by extravagance beyond their experience, they were simply overcome.
Stout Twopenny, encircled, took questions from the curious crowd.
‘Are there no Aboriginal women?’ a body asked.
‘Course!’ spluttered Twopenny. ‘Course it true! Dem all back ’ome.’
‘Are you married, Mr Tuppenny?’
Twopenny looked down at the shiny floor and shook his head.
‘Then you are a stray tup?’
This rudeness was howled down.
‘When I see me first whitepella,’ offered Twopenny, ‘many whitepella…I think you only men. Dem ’ave no gins. Makes no sense, men come all dat way alone, without wimmen to gather mirka and to puck.’
The gathering is bemused. ‘“Puck”?’
‘Puck!’ repeated Twopenny, his hair a woolly triangle.
Bill Hayman intervened. ‘Use your loaf, Twopenny,’ he said. ‘These good people don’t want to know about things like that.’
‘Oh,’ they cried, ‘but we do!’
‘No,’ said Hayman. ‘You don’t.’ He led Twopenny aside, still conferring. ‘When speaking in a foreign tongue,’ said Hayman, ‘betimes we must needs employ greater restraint than that accorded to us.’
Twopenny screwed up his face. ‘Boss,’ he said, ‘you talkin’ shit.’
Lawrence watched as a grey-haired old spy, without so much as a by-your-leave, openly conducted a microscopic study of Red Cap’s face and form. Bloody ‘ethnologists’ – they had already had to deter one from taking measurements at Malling.
At the opposite end of the hall, towards the enormous fireplace, fizz was found in the new descriptive nouns the Aborigines had coined concerning various European animals. Rabbits, for instance, were ‘stand up ears’ or ‘white bottom’; pigs, ‘turn ground’; and cockerels, ‘call for day’. For others, they arrived at simpler solutions: cattle were ‘boo-oo’; sheep, ‘ba-ba’; and horses, ‘gump-gump’ or ‘neighit’.
The nation’s greatest minds, arm-in-arm with her most glamorous aristocrats, took up the Christy Minstrels’ standard ‘Merry Green Fields’, with its distinctive verse-chorus.
‘With a boo-oo here, and a boo-oo there,
Here a boo, there a boo…’
A fat man bursting out of his dinner-suit waved to Lawrence.
‘The place is become a barnyard!’ he called. ‘Tell your man there!’ He pointed at Red Cap.
‘Tell him yourself,’ retorted Lawrence. ‘He’s quite capable of understanding.’
The ethnologist, if that was what he was, still loitered. The fat man, however, raced on past. Red Cap wisely melted away into the crowd.
The grey-haired spy broke his silence. ‘D-d-dashed impertinence!’ he stammered.
‘Red Cap is his own man,’ said Lawrence.
‘I refer, sir, to yours,’ the spy said. ‘I expect and therefore excuse his.’
‘Lord Hogg’, meantime, ‘oink-oink’ed here, there, and everywhere for all he was worth – doubtless a very large amount. Lawrence realised he might have judged too hastily. This new attack, alas, was a different matter.
The spy closed with Lawrence – a wounded old lion, dangerous malevolence lurking in his rheumy eye. ‘A wild, untameable restlessness is innate with s-s-savages,’ he said.
‘They are not savages,’ insisted Lawrence.
‘Savages they are, and savages they shall always re-…always remain.’
They stood toe to toe. Neither had the advantage of height, but Lawrence began to quail before the older man’s belligerent aspect.
‘A puh-person’s race can explain and justify almost anything,’ the man spat. ‘D-D-Doctor James Hunt, Puh-president of the…of the…’
Moustaches flecked with a stutterer’s spittle, he settled for holding out a printed card.
Lawrence already despised such items. He studied the curious pyramidal emblem inscribed there – a triangle inverted within one larger, to produce four smaller triangles of equal proportion. In heraldic style, each of these contained a symbol. At the apex was an eyeball. In the three spaces below, reading from left to right: a human skull; a fat carrot – the depiction of an early tool, or flint, perhaps; and last and least, a brain, presumably also human. An inscription encompassed the entire design, one word on each of the emblem’s three sides.
SOCIETAS / ANTHROPOLOGIE / LONDINENSIS
Nonplussed, Lawrence flipped the card over.
Dr James Hunt, Ph.D., F.S.A., F.R.S.L.
PRESIDENT,
Anthropological Society of London.
Lawrence looked back up, poised to introduce himself in return. During the interim, however, the contentious old cuss had gathered himself for a speech.
‘I am quite aware who you are,’ snapped Dr Hunt, cutting him dead. ‘And let me tell you, I have collected numerous instances where children of a low race have been sep-puh-puhrated at an early age from their puh-…from their puh-…from their parents…and reared as pa-part of a settler’s family. Yet, after years of civilised ways, they have abandoned their home, flung away their dress, and gone to seek their countrymen in the Bush, among whom they have subsequently been found living in contented bar-bar-bar…’ Another pause enforced for breath, he appeared to quite lose patience with himself. ‘…barbar-barbarism!’
‘I hardly – ’ began Lawrence.
‘And w
ithout a vestige of their gentle nurture! There…what do you say to that?’
Lawrence very much wished to contradict the old lion: separating children from their parents hardly seemed a civilised act. But, when it came to it, his heart simply gave out. ‘If you will excuse me, “doctor”,’ said Lawrence, handing back the card, ‘I feel sick.’
An unhappy Lawrence quit the room.
‘They talk the moon down from the sky,’ says Cole.
‘Garra Gnowee,’ Sundown sadly agrees.
King Cole and Sundown stand side-by-side some way apart from the press of the crowd. They hold on to an unlit cheroot, in contemplation of the gigantic chandelier suspended high above their heads. Kinsmen, they express their frustrations in the language common to them.
Too many faces – Cole can endure no more. He only delays a moment, to share his lament, and then leaves.
He makes his way up to an open balcony, just below the level of the roof. Alone at last, King Cole stands at the top of the Athenaeum building, perfectly still, like a strange phantom or statue. Light bleeding through the great hall’s upper windows, at his back, reduces him to a slender silhouette; it gilds the outline of his locks, stirred by the stiff breeze, to lend a fierce coronal. For a silent hour – neither speaking, nor stirring – he takes in the vast panorama of the London night.
The flare of countless gas lamps overwhelms him.
At first he believes that he stares into an immense crystal cobweb, parent to those suspended in the false sky, below. Every surface shimmers aglow with light either direct or reflected: the city itself, burnished and blazing, blinds him with its glare.
Glowing like hot coals, his black eyes mirror the scene. Ringed with fire, he is afire.
And yet London, for all its burning, gives off no discernible heat – all of its energies spent on illumination alone; any warmth it might produce swiftly disappears into the night sky, to be swallowed up by the freezing vacuum of space.
In time, the semblance of a chandelier is forgotten: the dancing sparks and flickering tongues of flame become the bewitching firebugs of his Dreaming. He watches them as they dart in pairs, up and down the streets below. Edging forward until his toes grip the very brink of the balustrade, King Cole is newly aware of a shadow realm revealed at his feet. Beneath the coruscating nimbus of light lurks a black mass that spreads below and beyond like a dark stain.
He hears screams and shouts in the night, a countless multitude of different voices raised. Indifferent towards his eavesdropping, the ruminant city talks tunelessly to itself. Deeper still, and duller, an incessant grumble rises up from out of the depths.
Sleepless in his bunk, in the hollow bowels of the Parramatta, he would often listen to a sound very much like this – the restless swell of the oceans.
The longer he listens, the louder it seems to roar, as deafening as the crashing thunder. It is a cataract, onrushing, that hurls itself endlessly over the edge of some mad precipice.
His body quivers with vibration. His foot slips, and, with that sudden start, he knows. The noise that he feels more than he hears is matched by the frenzied drumbeat of his own heart. It is the pump and rush of his life’s blood, answering the call – an odd familiarity; reminiscence, displaced; second nature. Before awareness even that he moves, King Cole is in motion. Seeking surrender, craving oblivion, he throws himself down.
The balcony stands empty.
King Cole is gone – only jacket and shoes, left behind in a small pile, to show that he was ever there.
CHAPTER X
Wednesday the 27th of May, 1868
TJUKURPA
‘Once more within the Potter’s house alone
I stood, surrounded by the Shapes of Clay.
And once again there gather’d a scarce heard
Whisper among them; as it were, the stirr’d
Ashes of some all but extinguisht Tongue,
Which mine ear kindled into living Word.’
~ Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
A waxing crescent moon leads the bright star Rex through the night.
As the hour advances, the ghost folk – or whatever else they might once have been – fade away. Either it is the absence of the crowds, or else the deserted streets grow wider than before, into a wilderness of hard, unyielding stone. King Cole alone seems to occupy the vast wasteland. Jogging quietly along, he welcomes solitude. He has at last space in which to move, and breathe.
What is it he is looking for? Does it have a name?
He is not hungry, trailing good game. He is not thirsty, in search of water. Spurred ever onward, instead he thinks himself the hunter in search of fresh knowledge.
What is it the Ancestor Spirits are trying to tell him?
Tombs carved from out of the rock, a numbing procession of side-streets passes him by. One after another, after another, the monotonous regularity numbs Cole’s physical senses, but concentrates instead his inner eye – a glowworm circulation that beckons him ever onward.
Overriding every due caution, Cole hastens down his lonely road.
His own hand held up in front of his face is without colour, turned translucent. Through it an image floats, suspended, in mid-air. Sometimes darker, sometimes lighter than its surroundings, only captured at certain angles, picked out in moon gleam, it radiates a fine web – a cracked windowpane, star-glazed.
Cole slows.
The air curdles, sluggish with a sweet and sickly stench. To the north, a long stretch of high wall blank-faces broken-tooth terraces, rotten with decay. Fixed on irons half as tall again as any man, infrequent oil lamps shed little in the way of light.
King Cole comes to a complete stop.
He stands before a hazy portal, threshold to an inner courtyard into which he feels compelled to go. The rot-stinking cavity stands clear before him, yet he cannot breach it. The syrupy air is itself a wall.
Feeling his way like one blind, four doors along he comes to the mouth of a narrow entrance; set close between two back-to-backs, a dark and stinking ooze seeps down its centre. Neither moonlight nor lamplight dare enter in, but Cole does.
He slinks down this back street, chilled innards aching, barely suppressing the urge to retch. Water streams from his eyes. The stink of shit spears his lungs, even as it slops over his toes. Were it not for evidence to the contrary, he cannot imagine such a place inhabited.
Oppressed on all sides, a bend in the blind alley lends no respite. The pressure crushing his insides only grows stronger. He has to crouch, loosening the belt that holds up his trousers, and evacuate his bowels.
No longer able to stand upright, Cole flattens against the filthy brickwork. It closes in. Eyes swimming, he can barely see a foot in front.
‘Aaaauuuuughh!’
His head pinned underarm, an invisible fist smashes repeatedly into his face. He’s been in bad fights before, back in the woolsheds of South Australia. Never was any good in a fight. Snot clogs and tears fall. He wants to surrender.
In-gna! Demons!
‘Whsssht!’
Mind no longer his own, he feels he must break free. Stumbling on, Cole emerges onto a wide street lined with shops. By day it would appear a major highway.
Breath returns in shallow gasps. He recovers slightly, vision clearing, yet his pulse gallops ever faster. Lifeblood pumping through arteries, the dead silence bangs at his ears.
He fears his head may burst.
One block, two blocks on – here, at the heart of his Dreaming, an unassuming street, down which he is impelled to go.
One…more…step.
Blessed relief washes over him. It is as if he has pierced an unseen veil. His head clears, and the leaden silence, once so fraught, is simple, peaceful, and absolute.
His body drifts, weightless. Air becomes wall, becomes windows. Windows become wall, becomes air. Black space alternating with blue sky, days cross paths with night and back again.
Cole glides through a realm that flows around him. This land should
be a stranger. It is not. Sure now of himself, of his situation, he retraces a route that is more than familiar, certain of the direction he must take.
Hand caresses wall. Flesh strokes stone. Stone grazes skin. This is the image of Truth he has always known, but never until now realised.
He senses the faint stirrings of a sleeping presence; breath steadily drawn and exhaled, in darkness, by darkness.
Drawn closer to the hole in shattered window glass, he cranes forward to peer inside. Glass shards encircle his bare scalp. Stare keenly as he can, King Cole cannot conceive of what lurks hidden in the blackness, although something most certainly does. The frisson of another life, deep among the shadows, calls to him.
His body is cradled in the early morning. Mother’s palm, warm and rough – he feels the touch of her firm, guiding hand on his forehead, then eyes, his nose, mouth, and on down to his feet. Wuduu, the warming of hands, is what he misses most of all.
Dandled in her lap, he looks up into sad and loving eyes. They blink him to sleep, so patiently.
Cole’s face breaks into a broad, toothsome smile, then falls, lost to sorrow. It has been a lifetime since he was held.
Hot grief rolls down his cheeks. A sudden jolt – pain, deep down in his belly – drops him to his knees. He clutches at the bare walls, wretched and mewling.
This is conduct unbecoming a bourka, a full-grown warrior of the Wudjubalug – the man he most desperately wishes to be. Taking firm grasp of his resolve, Cole rips away at the knot of shame. He pulls himself up and forces himself back. Recovering the main street he sprints a hundred paces clear, determined to put as much distance as possible between himself and this dear, dreadful spot.
Never again will he return, to the Well of Shadows, to the stone cell there and not there – the pulsating heart in the darkness.
And the stranger in the London night is marked, fair game. Blood and feather, let him be led to the hive.
