This Red Earth

by Kim Kelly

GORDON

  ‘Will you have a good look at that.’ Errol takes the lid off the bedourie and shows me the damper he’s invented especially for the day. It’s a giant currant bun, but made with quandongs. That looks as good as it smells. ‘That is Christmas,’ he says.

  ‘That is Christmas,’ I agree, and I look at the lid by the toe of his boot, in some kind of thanksgiving. Those two bullet holes in it. Somehow Errol has made it seem like all bedouries are made that way. Or should be. It’s taken a year, just over, to be able to look at it without wanting to bolt. Errol’s not one for a backwards glance, though, or wasting a decent bedourie with air vents. I raise my mug of tea to him: ‘Here’s to the good life.’

  To being alive. Because you’re a long time dead.

  One of the camels grunts in agreement, and I look behind me, to the sunset on the Flinders Ranges. How lucky am I? Sitting here, under a quandong tree, on Christmas Day, watching this sunset, with a view out to Mount Painter. The summit is glowing like a molten arrowhead. It’s taken almost a year to get here too, the wheels of bureaucracy have moved that slow. You wouldn’t know there was a war on, except for the amount of time politicians waste on getting universities to make pointless investigations into ridiculous ideas. How many bombs dropped into the vent of Matupi will it take to blow up the Japs at Rabaul? None, you idiots. That’d be about as useful as dropping a lit match into an already raging bushfire. But I still had to spend three months putting it in a report, in want of an actual vulcanologist to do it, while we were waiting for approval for this expedition from the various departments involved – that took eight months, with two forgettable tungsten surveys in between.

  Teaching me something about patience. We’re here now, and the combined air forces of Australia, New Zealand and the US are getting on with bombing the islands by the usual means, while me, Errol and our guide, Tim Gottlieb, go out and get some uranium, for death rays. Instead of hunting little yellow mongrels in the jungle, I’ve spent a decent part of this past year studying the little yellow streaks and clouds of old pitchblende samples: I know what I’m looking for. Officially, though, we’re diamond prospecting for a company called Pontoon Minerals, a joint venture with the South Australian Government who would like a tourist trail put through up here. Easily believable. Great hiking country. These views … the colours …

  Tim walks across the postcard of Mount Painter, and I say to him: ‘It’s no wonder you think the world was created by a giant rainbow snake – look at that.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, without looking, squatting near me. ‘He likes red around here, too. The red of the rocks. You know, my people, the Anyamatana people – that name means the rock people. These ranges are the rock paradise.’

  ‘You’re not wrong.’ These ranges are a geologist’s paradise. A favourite rambling ground of Mawson, as in Mawson of the Antarctic – he’d rather be here than anywhere else on earth. A pilgrimage you have to make at least once in your geological life.

  Tim waves a hand at the fire. ‘You find the paradise you’re after and you gelignite him, ay?’

  He laughs, taking a hunk of quandong bun from Errol. I’ve never met a man like Tim Gottlieb. We met three weeks ago now, just beyond Hawker, a one-pub no-Abos town on the Ghan train line at the foot of the ranges. He said then: Welcome to my country. My name is Tim Gottlieb. I am an Anyamatana man and I have learned my Bible lessons. The Lord said: Blessed be the meek for they shall inherit the earth, except for what gets leased from the Department of Mines. Errol hurt himself laughing – mostly at the look on my face. At a black man, having a go like that. And it’s true. He’s thirty-six and he’d have seen it a hundred times. We find what we want, mostly copper, and his people get moved off the land so we can blow it up and cart it away. The same will happen if we find the high-grade pitchblende we’re after, and mining is viable. Merry Christmas. Not a fair exchange, and there’s something about Tim that’s got hold of my wanting to do something for Johno. Don’t know what, though.

  ‘That why they call him Dozy, Errol?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where do you go, when you go quiet like that, ay?’ Tim’s not having a go at me with the question, I don’t think, handing me a brew. ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing.’ A bit embarrassed. And not; I tell him: ‘I was thinking of a mate I had once. You remind me of him.’

  ‘Good bloke?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right then.’

  I take a mouthful of quandong bun; it’s all right too. Tim’s kelpie, Fritz, is trying to convince Errol to give him some, wagging his tail, begging. Succeeding. I’m thinking about Johno’s Second Law. Chaos and equilibrium. I want to give away the chaos part of this system altogether one day. After this survey, maybe I will. Do something different anyway. What would I do? I don’t know. Go and plant saltbush up the Paddock? Someone probably should. It might be natural, but we take more than we give from this land. I want to create more than I destroy … I should write to Johno’s father is what I should do. But I can’t, not yet. Just can’t.

  I look the other away, out to the hills, due west. They’re not marked on my map, and we seem to have skirted round them to get here from Leigh Creek colliery, about sixty miles back, where we left Dad’s ute in favour of the camels. It’s a nice trick of the dusk that these hills are about the same colour as a quandong right now, and I ask Tim: ‘The rainbow snake likes blue out that way?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know what he likes that way – you don’t want to go there.’ Tim tosses his dregs at the fire.

  I ask him: ‘Why?’

  He says: ‘Bad spirits in that country.’ And he’s not having us on at all.

  ‘What bad spirits?’ Errol asks.

  ‘Can’t say,’ Tim tells the ground at his feet. ‘It’s just the law. Go to that country, Akurra will get you, the rainbow snake, he’ll catch you, suck out your spirit and leave you there. The whitefella call them Gammon Hills, but no whitefella will go there. I’m not allowed to go there either.’ He looks at me: ‘You reckon this is blackfella bullshit, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ I tell him, and I’m not having him on, either. What you reckon and what you actually know are usually two different things, and I don’t question blackfella bullshit as I once might have. I’ve come to understand that there’s usually a logical if not immediately obvious reason behind just about all bullshit and I’m prepared to accept Tim’s as gospel. We won’t be going out to those hills. At least not with a guide, not unless we’d like to take our chances finding water on our own.

  We reach the end of our tourist trail just before midday the next day and Tim says, ‘See ya’s later,’ going off with Fritz for water, leaving us to it.

  I toss Errol a pick, and he says: ‘You’re a hard man, Doze – it’s a public holiday, and it’s lunchtime.’ As keen as I am to get into it.

  Most of his preliminary work is done now, for the road, and my own is just beginning, on the pitchblende deposits. They’re all already mapped out for us, in old diggings that run across an arc of ridges less than three miles long. It’s hardly a speck on the surface of the earth but this place used to turn out £12,000 worth of medical radium a month. Before the Belgian Congo monopoly decided no one else could play. Now, every old hole across the free world has been reopened for business, all looking for high-grade, for California. We know there’s another party looking at a site somewhere over the border, back near Broken Hill, but we don’t know who they are, or exactly where. Nevertheless, the competitor in me takes over: I want to finish first.

  We start in the pit nearest our camp, which happens to have the shortest adit of about a hundred and fifty feet, and we’re not expecting to find anything today. This hole, called Little Gem on my map, hasn’t turned out anything since 1924. But we have to go in them all, thirteen of them; might as well get this Little Gem out of the way. The adit is steep going in, though, a decline inconveniently not indicated in the data. It’s
quickly pitch-black too, and I think we’re going to need more than our two-cell torches to see anything in here. I’m just about to turn back for the carbide lamp when Errol shouts: ‘Jesus!’

  I watch his light tumble away ahead of me. He’s slipped on something, and taken a significant amount of rubble with him by the sound of it.

  ‘Are you right?’ Shit. This is not good.

  But his light jumps up again. Then bounces around the walls of the adit as it tails down near perpendicular, and he yells up at me: ‘Holy bleeding eureka! Brockie, come and look at this.’

  I slide down on my arse to see that in his hand he’s holding a piece of rock that, even under the two-cell, appears to have not so much a yellow mist as a fat vein in it. A yellow crack of lightning.

  ‘Whoa.’

  I scramble back up into the light to check: yes, this is the business. And it was just lying on the floor of this adit, in a mine of historically little output. So said the data. But this is the highest grade uranium I’ve ever seen. When I go back down I see there’s a lot more: looking at us from the granite walls.

  After we get five, then six, samples of the same, I say: ‘I think we should just get the miners straight in here. Get this to Adelaide now and get it going. Don’t you reckon?’ There doesn’t seem to be a reason to wait.

  Errol says: ‘Suits me.’

  We climb up and out again and Tim’s back, already got the billy on, and he says to me: ‘You look like you been chased by Akurra. You find what you’re looking for in there?’

  Errol shows Tim a piece. ‘This – see the yellow? That’s what we’re looking for.’

  I look at Errol: Shut up about it, will you.

  Tim doesn’t notice; he’s nodding eastwards. ‘This colour rock?’ Pointing over at an outcrop about a couple of hundred yards away. ‘Plenty of this one over there. What you want it for?’

  ‘Medicine,’ I tell him.

  ‘Must be powerful medicine,’ Tim laughs to himself in a way that says he’s accustomed to being lied to.

  Guilty I might be, but that’s not my concern at the minute. I tell him: ‘It is powerful. We need it. And we need to get back to Adelaide now.’

  He shrugs and starts packing up the camp he’s just laid out, all our bullshit. He picks up Errol’s theodolite and dances it up to the camels. ‘Come on, we’re in a hurry, Betty.’ Having a go at me. He probably hates me. I’m tearing over to that outcrop for a quick look, aren’t I. It’s a flaming open pit of uranium. You can, virtually, pick it straight up off the ground. I take a few more samples and run back to the camels.

  ‘You planning to run to Adelaide, Dozy?’ Tim says, laughing again, straight at me.

  It’s four hundred and twenty miles to Adelaide from here.

  It’s three days on foot to get back to Leigh Creek, back to the ute, and then another couple of hours’ rough driving to drop Tim back where we found him, on the Barndioota Road north of Hawker. ‘Here’ll do, fellas, thank you.’

  He gets out. In the middle of this strip of gum forest that sits between the Lake Eyre salt pan and the Strzelecki Desert, the size of Scotland. He says: ‘Ask for us at the hotel if youse want me again, ay. I’ll come for you.’

  He starts walking away, Fritz close at his heel, back up the road we’ve just come down. Suddenly this doesn’t seem right. Dropping him nowhere, asking for him via a pub he can’t enter. I lean out the window: ‘You don’t want a lift home?’ Wanting to tell him I’m not like the rest. I’m not just another thief. It’s not that simple.

  He just waves his hat and keeps walking, doesn’t turn around. ‘No thanks, Dozy.’

  ‘Don’t take it to heart,’ Errol says. ‘He’s probably just protecting his family, from any government man – you know, worried they’ll steal the kids.’

  ‘Steal what? Bullshit. Who steals whose kids?’

  ‘The Protection Board, or whatever it is.’ Errol looks at me like I’ve been living in a cave. ‘They take the kids, the half-castes, and put them in convent schools and that, civilise them. ’Spose the children would be given an education, but I wouldn’t be happy if it was me or mine.’

  ‘No.’ I put my foot down. Education, pig’s arse. It sounds like just another way of clearing them off to me. The uranium ore in the back of this ute will do the job just as well, and I don’t like that. It’s not right. Not my concern; but it is. What can I do about it? Don’t know. Ignore it for the next five hours’ driving.

  We get into Adelaide at about half-past three and all I’m set on by then is dumping this bag of ore with the Department of Army. Here that’s in an office of the Chemistry Department, with Doctor WW Rochester in gold lettering on the door, and a Major Clive Gibbons on the other side of it. I’m pretty sure this bloke doesn’t have any scientific qualifications, but whoever he is, he’s the one to tell us what we’re to do next.

  I tell him: ‘This is what you’re after. It’s all over the Mount Painter site. We could get going with the mining of it right away. There’s already an existing crushing facility out there and the ore could be brought up by camel train, as it used to be, until the road’s graded. There seems no good reason to delay.’

  Major Gibbons holds up a hunk of the pitchblende and says to it: ‘Yes, well, let’s see.’

  Let’s see if it doesn’t make the Geiger-Müiiller particle detector go mad. Go on, send it round to the Physics Department.

  Errol and I stand there, waiting.

  But Gibbons just shoos us out the door. ‘Yes, well, you can go now. Don’t wander too far. I’ll be in touch with your further instructions.’

  Right. I get a rush of blood at that as we leave the room. There’s thousands of kids taking bullets in mud up to their knees for you at this present moment and you say: I’ll be in touch.

  Errol claps his hand down on my shoulder as we head back out into Adelaide’s blast-furnace heat. ‘Don’t know about you, Dozy, but I need a root. Want to come?’

  I have to laugh. Errol’s got more equilibrium than is natural. But I have to say: ‘No thanks, mate, you can have that pleasure to yourself.’

  He gives me a worried look, as he always does at my reluctance with this, as if not wanting to visit one of Adelaide’s brothels of good repute is beyond his understanding. ‘I don’t know how you do it,’ he shakes his head. ‘See you around seven for tea?’ And he’s off.

  Leaving me to not know how I do it either. It’s as if that one part of me hasn’t woken up, as if the Japs took Bernie’s photograph and all my interest with it. Or probably more accurately, Bernie took it herself and chucked it. I’ll get over it, eventually, when I meet someone else. Probably not in a brothel.

  Adelaide in the middle of summer is like Canberra at a hundred and ten degrees. It will strip the will from any man. We’ve had four unrelenting weeks of it. We’ve got the miners teed up, as well as an engineer from Roads and a quantity surveyor, and I personally would like to leave for the kinder climate of the ranges, but, at the last minute, we’ve been told to wait. Not a military holdup, but the South Australian Department of the Interior. We’ve been waiting these past three days for a journalist and photographer to come from Sydney, to join us for the purposes of publicity for the tourist trail. Good on the Premier for wanting to encourage the nation to spend their holidays and any money they have in his State. You’ll find me playing with the particle detector to check if I’m emitting any sign of energy at all.

  All the things we could be doing instead, up in the ranges today. Even without the mining. We could be fitting a new belt on the crushers. We could be going on a fossil hunt. We could be not in Adelaide. Waiting for a couple of jokers to come down from Sydney.

  So, I’m not too happy to start off with when I decide to waste some time going round to the law school to ask a couple of questions about leasing rights and compensation. If we’re going to continue to move Aborigines off their land, surely they’re entitled to something more in return than sugar and flour and tea on the missions. A farm
er wouldn’t cop it. This is the modern world. We’re not a colonial outpost any more, despite all Adelaide’s appearances.

  The lady at reception directs me with her best wireless voice to a Professor Todd, and when I find him, he smells like a swaggie after payday. Asking me across his desk: ‘Compensation for whom?’

  ‘Um, anyone. But natives in particular.’

  ‘Natives?’ He blinks at me as if I just asked after the red Lizard Men of Ergamon. ‘There’s no right of compensation for natives – they don’t own any land.’

  ‘But they live on it,’ I say. ‘What’s the diff–’

  ‘The difference is, natives don’t do anything with the land.’ He sways in his seat, slurring his words over centuries of judicial drunkenness. ‘Never have. Never will, my boy. Our British forebears found this continent in the state of terra nullius–that is, the empty land. A land empty of people. Natives might be human, but they are not people in the sense that you and I understand what it means to be a person, a Briton as you or I, part of a greater society or polity. They are not citizens. They don’t vote, they don’t make or do anything at all that contributes in any meaningful way to the civilised world. You tell me, boy, what’s the difference between an Aborigine and a kangaroo?’

  A fair bit, I’d say. But I can’t say anything. I’ve just understood how a consortium is stealing an entire continent. It’s probably a good thing my will is a bit spare today. Not a person? Johno’s not a person. Neither’s Tim Gottlieb. This is wrong. But it’s the law. I shouldn’t have asked.

  I say: ‘Yeah, thanks.’ And walk away, telling the flagstones I’m no flaming Briton. I’m a Scot, with Dad’s grandfather come out here via New Zealand, and there is nothing I can do about this terra nullius bullshit, except put a pebble in my shoe for it. Remember it, for another day.

  And go to the pub. I haven’t had a drink in the daytime since I met up with Errol at that Pig & Whistle in Broken Hill. But I’m going to have a least two this day, and then I’m going to go and sit in a cold bath and stay there until that photographer and journalist turn up. I’m used to the desert heat, I grew up with it, but there’s something about the way it bears down on you in Adelaide. It’s wrong too.