Death of a River Guide

by Richard Flanagan

  ‘Maybe that’s it,’ said Ellie.

  ‘Maybe it don’t matter,’ said Dolcie, who had seen too many entirely new things and unbelievably fabulous things in her life to be shocked by anything any more. Dolcie’s predominant attitude was one of acceptance.

  ‘But how?’

  ‘You let things be and that way you get on and you are allowed to live. But you want answers to things then you make trouble. You make trouble and -’ She ran a finger across her throat like a knife and made a dreadful gurgling noise.

  And then laughed. ‘Who knows why them silly buggers do half the bloody silly things they do? I never understood ’em and never will.’

  So it was in that small sky-blue cottage built of tin, elevated at one end by bricks and at the other by a Huon pine stump, in the small and declining port of Strahan in the winter of 1940, Auntie Ellie made up a roaring myrtle fire in her front room, which served as both parlour and kitchen, and made up a bath for Harry in front of the fireplace. The fireplace, also made of ripple iron, was almost as wide as the room, so large that Auntie Ellie sat Harry inside it while she fetched water in a kerosene tin from the tank outside. She hung the kerosene tin by its twined fencing-wire handle from the iron cooking rack that swung from the far side of the fireplace. As Harry and the kero tin warmed up close to the crack and spit of the bursting flames, Auntie Ellie bustled about. Harry looked at the blackened iron cooking rack, heavy with crusts and blisters of fatty soot. Auntie Ellie went back outside to fetch the old tin hip-bath from beneath the house. She put the bath close to the fire and took down the tin of hot water. Harry got up out of the fireplace and watched as a thick heavy tongue of water fell into a cloud of steam. His gaze switched to Auntie Ellie, who, he suddenly realised, was at once familiar and different. And the difference, Harry realised, was one he shared. He looked at her intently, hoping to see a physical manifestation of what this familiar difference was. She turned and laughed at his stare, and mistook it for interest in her pipe rather than in herself. ‘You’re a rum ’un, Harry. You want to try, eh?’ And she passed the pipe to Harry, who looked up at her and, seeing the offer was serious and not an adult’s joke, took the pipe and inhaled. As the soft smoke entered his mouth Harry looked above the fireplace to a plain mantelpiece, once painted cream, now wood-smoke darkened. Amidst the yellowing photographs and the wilting red geraniums in their vases full of urine-coloured water sat all that remained of Auntie Ellie’s long-dead husband Reg: his dentures.

  Reg had sold his teeth when things had begun to turn bad around Strahan following federation. He had previously bought a block of land with money he made from gold panning up the King River in the 1880s, and had got as far as framing up part of a house on that block some years later when the depression came. He had grand plans of finishing the house off with the cheap Oregon weatherboards that were flooding in from America, complete with a grand verandah painted in four different bright colours. The house was to have eight rooms, but Reg had only framed up four when his money and luck came to an end. Ellie was with child and Reg, unable to get work of any kind, sold his teeth to the local dentist, who anaesthetised Reg with a combination of laughing gas and laudanum before pulling out all his teeth. The dentist made more money pulling out healthy teeth than he did fixing decayed ones, and he had a lucrative trade going with his brother-in-law who lived in Bristol, England, and who sold the Tasmanian teeth to a firm in Pall Mall that made false dentures for the rich who had lost teeth through too much good living. The teeth emanating from Strahan were prized and fetched an often handsome sum, for although needing some polishing with an abrasive stone to rid them of their tobacco stains, they were generally the fine teeth of young men who had come to the west coast in the hope of striking it lucky on the diggings. When confronted with no work and no money, many chose to have their teeth pulled to buy a boat ticket back to Melbourne or Hobart. Reg and Ellie used part of the tooth money to buy the ripple iron to finish the house, and the rest simply to live on. Reg’s mouth, which Ellie had found his most pleasing feature, collapsed into the puckered hollows of an old man’s, and though he grew a large walrus moustache to cover the worst of the facial ravages inflicted on him by the dentist, he never got over the humiliation. Reg eventually found labouring work on the Strahan wharf and between the little he earnt and the little he stole they had enough to get by. The job had its own rewards, such as the tins of blue paint bound for the Mt Lyell Mining Company. Reg discovered that there was a discrepancy between the shipping docket and the actual amount of paint shipped, the latter exceeding the former by some two hundred gallons. Reg and the wharf clerk made sure that the amount on the shipping docket was trained up to Queenstown. The rest they sold surreptitiously, and over the following year, as people slowly got around to painting their houses, Strahan changed from an uneven hue to one in which sky-blue was predominant, as if an azure frost had settled permanently upon the town.

  After he died of a stroke, Reg’s cheap false teeth (not comparable in the least to the superb dentures into which his teeth had been fashioned) sat in the middle of the mantelpiece, for a time in a glass of water, but then without fluid company following a family party (the only kind of party Auntie Ellie permitted) in which they found use during a dance as a set of castanets. So they sat among the photographs and ashtrays and curling postcards and wilting geraniums, two yellowing crescents bound by a musk-coloured frame, a small memorial to one man’s sacrifice.

  Auntie Ellie had moved from the Mole Creek district to the west coast in 1891 via Melbourne, Victoria, following an incident on a farm where two of her brothers, Jack and Bert, laboured. The brothers worked for a farmer called Basil Moore who had a property out back of Mole Creek. At the time there had been an outbreak of cow plague and Basil had to slaughter much of his herd. He ordered the brothers to dig a large pit in which the animals were to be driven and slaughtered. While they dug, Basil, depressed at the ill fortune that had struck his farm, drank from a flagon of rum, pausing only long enough to gee them along, telling them to dig harder and deeper. When he had finished the flagon he threw the empty bottle at his feet, then wandered off. He reappeared about an hour and a half later. Evidently he had been back to the homestead, because he had another bottle of half-drunk rum as well as a shotgun. He leapt into the pit, which was by now seven feet deep, some three feet deeper than when he had last looked into it, falling face first in the clay at the bottom. He pulled himself onto his knees and looked up at the faces smiling down at him from the top of the pit. His rum-flamed eyes burnt with humiliation out of his muddied face.

  ‘Throw me the shotgun!’ he yelled at the brothers at the top. They looked at him, then at each other, then back at Basil. ‘Throw down the shotgun, I said!’ hollered Basil. He threw the empty rum bottle up at them. It rose up slowly, hit a wall of the pit near the surface and fell back down on Basil, who had to duck to avoid being struck. The brothers tied a piece of baling twine around the gun barrel and carefully lowered it down to Basil, who snatched it the moment his fingers could reach. He snapped the shotgun open, pulled two cartridges out of a coat pocket, loaded them into the barrel, then snapped the gun back together. He put the gun to his shoulder, raised the barrel to the sky, closed one eye, wobbled a little, regained his balance, then let his other eye roam the sky until he found one of the brothers in his sights. He put his finger on the trigger. And then he roared, ‘Bury me, youse black bastards!’

  The brothers looked down incredulously, perhaps even with a slight smirk on their faces. ‘Bury me!’ Then they realised that Basil was serious. ‘I should never have left Devon,’ said Basil, who, even when drunk in front of the brothers, persisted in the fiction he was a free settler from Devon rather than what all the district knew him to be, a convict from Salford, sentenced to death for bestiality, his sentence commuted to transportation to Van Diemen’s Land for fourteen years. That had been when he was a young man. He was old now, and broken - by the System, by his own desire for a respectability he c
ould never gain, by his inability to remake the land he had bought into his own image of himself.

  ‘If you want to take your land back, bury me!’ he cried.

  The effort of standing erect and looking skywards without swaying proved too much at this point, and Basil lost his balance and fell over. Before the gun exploded the brothers were already well away from the hole. They ran off with Basil’s curses chasing them.

  ‘You pissweak black bastards. Get back here and bury me. That’s what you want. That and my land. Well, come back and finish me off now. Bury me now,’ and now he laboured every word, ‘youse - filthy - black - bastards!’

  But the brothers were not to return, not the next day, not the following week, not ever, for that night there was a knock on the family’s shack door. Basil had been found dead from a shotgun wound in the bottom of a pit. The brothers had planned to return once the word went around the Mole Creek pub that Basil had been chastised by his wife for drinking and had resumed his normal God-fearing Gospel Hall ways, once Basil was back to threatening them only with the wrath of the Lord and not with a shotgun. But now there was no going back.

  ‘They’ll hang us for sure,’ said Bert. ‘Ain’t no one going to believe the word of two blackfellas.’

  Bert, Jack and Ellie fled across the water to Melbourne where they stayed for three years, until the fateful day that Bert met Reg Lewis in a Collingwood pub, the evening before the Melbourne Cup. Reg was over from Strahan for a holiday and had lost all his money in a two-up game. Bert took Reg home to the tenement he shared with Jack, Ellie, and two other families. They fed Reg up on silverside and spuds, and Bert lent him a pound - half his week’s pay as a slaughterman at the local abattoir. Reg told them how the west coast of Tasmania was exploding with life, of how Nellie Melba had even sung in the mining town of Zeehan, a town about which there was talk of making the capital of Tasmania, so rapid and astonishing was its growth. The three of them were sickening for their home and people, and they told Reg why they had to leave and how much they wished to return. Reg began to sense something about the brothers’ sister, a small dark attractive woman who smiled a lot as he told his stories of prospecting in the wild rainforest of the west. His tales grew wilder as her smiles grew bigger. He told them of how some lucky diggers who struck it rich lit their cigars with pound notes, and about how they told diggers from California that the Tassie tigers ate lone prospectors. Then at the end of it all he confessed that the greatest attribute a person on the west coast could have was to bullshit even more than the bloke next to him. They laughed a lot at that. ‘Hell,’ said Bert, ‘I knew it was bullshit. I was just amazed how much bullshit one man could produce from a feed of silverside and spuds.’ And they laughed all the more, till the tenement rocked with their laughing and Reg had to wipe the tears from his eyes.

  Reg talked more of how they ought come to the west coast, which was awash with people from everywhere around the world and where they would never be found out and where there were plenty of jobs to be had. They nodded their heads and thought no more of it. The following day, in the race before the 1891 Melbourne Cup, Reg put the pound Bert had leant him on a thirty-six to one horse that ended up winning. Reg tracked Bert down at the abattoir the next morning, paid back the pound fivefold, and then handed over three one-way boat fares from Melbourne to Strahan. The family met and discussed the offer and in the end decided to go, feeling that it ought now be safe enough for them to return to Tasmania under aliases. Before the steamer had even got to the heads of Macquarie Harbour, Ellie had accepted Reg’s proposal of marriage.

  Auntie Ellie, 1941

  It was near the end of Harry’s second year at Strahan that Auntie Ellie felled the white cow belonging to the manager of the Mt Lyell mine. Her granddaughter Daisy had fallen badly ill with a fever. At first Auntie Ellie had not worried unduly. But when night came and the fever became so pronounced that Daisy went into convulsions, Auntie Ellie decided to go out and fetch the doctor. She walked across to West Strahan to his house, only to discover that he was playing cards at the other end of the town at Lettes Bay. She walked along the long dark lonely road to Lettes Bay and felt all her old fears resurface. The darkness felt like a hole into which she might fall. She had, like the old people, always been frightened of the dark, but this time the fear grew and grew in her stomach until she could no longer hold it down. She screamed and began to run. And behind her she could feel a white face, chasing her. She held her dress up high and ran as hard as she could. Her clay pipe fell from her mouth as she began to pant and she had to leave it where it fell, scared to even pause to retrieve it. She ran until her guts ached and her throat burnt. Still she ran on, and as she ran she felt the stories of the old people coming back, stories she had forgotten since childhood, about how the whites had come for them in the dark, about how the mothers stuffed bark into the babies’ mouths to stop them crying lest the noise give them away to their hunters, and how because of this the babies sometimes died. How there was not even the light of a fire to keep Werowa from stealing the dead babies’ spirits away, for fear the smoke from the fire be sighted. She ran and her arms ached and her chest was afire, and still she felt the white face behind her. She remembered how they had told her their forebears had been snared and handled like wild beasts, how at Oyster Cove Dr Milligan gave them medicine to prevent them having babies. And the terrible stories that her mother had told her, how soldiers would keep a black girl tied up all night, then set her free and shoot her running in the morning. The story that Lallah had told her mother, of how some soldiers had roused them from a corroboree, and Lallah saw one of them stick an infant on his bayonet and put it on the fire.

  And then she could run no more. She slowed her pace to a jog, then to a stagger, then halted altogether. At first the sound of her own panting, the pounding of her own heart, was so great it temporarily overwhelmed her fear. Then, as her breathing became more regular, she felt hot breath on her neck and knew the white face was behind her. And she knew it was Werowa’s breath announcing a death. But whose death? She felt paralysed with total fear. She felt air surge through her flaring nostrils, felt her whole body tremble, felt the sweat on her nape grow cold as the breath of the white face that fell upon it.

  Auntie Ellie suddenly swung around and threw as powerful a punch as she was capable of. She felt her fist strike something soft and velvety, then slide onto slobber and teeth, and then there was a tremendous bellow and a huge form slumped to the ground. Auntie Ellie looked down to see an unconscious white cow. She stood transfixed. Then she cried and cried.

  Still weeping, she walked the remaining short distance to Lettes Bay, found the doctor, and together they drove back in his baby Austin to Auntie Ellie’s home. But, as Auntie Ellie already knew, it was too late. They came into the house to find Harry sitting on the floor in front of the fire with Daisy’s little limp body cradled in his arms. She had died some time before, of meningitis, the doctor said. Harry said she had gone into convulsions for a second time, then gone quiet. He had known, he said, the moment she had breathed her last. He didn’t cry, though Auntie Ellie wished he would. He was a man, all right, she thought, even if he was only twelve. But when he looked up at her and asked why there was so much death, she could not help but seize his head and pull it into her own belly, black, damp and pungent smelling with the rain, heaving hard with heavy long sobs.

  Auntie Ellie, 1946

  She sat on the floor in front of the fire and Harry knew from the amount of rouge on her face that she wasn’t right, for the worse she felt, the more she powdered her face. She was proud of her skin, always talking of how lovely and light it was, though it never looked that light to Harry.

  Not long after he first arrived in Strahan Harry looked at Auntie Ellie and asked, ‘Is you an Abo, Auntie Ellie?’ Ellie, for the first and only time that Harry ever remembered, laid into him.

  ‘Don’t you go talking about decent people in that sort of way. It does no good, you hear? We are good
decent Catholic folk, good decent white Catholic folk, you understand?’

  Harry didn’t understand.

  ‘I’m truly sorry, Auntie Ellie, I just thought you mighta been an Abo -’ Harry got no further before Ellie cuffed him again and again, this time with a methodical violence that Harry recognised did not come from her, but was learnt, as she wanted him to learn it. For that reason it did not hurt him, but he took care to listen. She would slap him one side of the face and then say something, then slap him the other side and say something else. And as she slapped him the tears ran down her face, though her voice was fierce.

  Slap.

  ‘We ain’t no Abos, we ain’t no boongs, ya hear?’

  Slap.

  ‘Ya talk like that they’ll take ya away, ya understand? They’ll take ya back to the islands. I already told you what we are - decent white Catholic folk.

  Slap.

  ‘What are we?’

  Slap.

  ‘White Catholic folk.’

  She stayed her hand at the side of her face. ‘That’s right.’ Her head momentarily turned and she caught sight of her open palm, ready to strike again if necessary, and then her eyes quickly moved back to staring fiercely at Harry, as if she had glimpsed something alien and frightening which she had no wish to see. ‘Decent white Catholic folk,’ said Auntie Ellie, but her voice was now shaky and somehow less certain.

  Though he did not understand, Harry knew not to say such things again, and neither of them ever referred to the incident. But Harry, with a child’s unerring sense, proceeded to explore the area by subterfuge. He found that as long as he didn’t specifically mention the word ‘Abo’ or ‘Aborigine’ there was much Auntie Ellie would tell him. Not that he consciously sought information to discover what it was that Auntie Ellie didn’t want to talk about. He continued to push though he did not know he was pushing, or what purpose his questions and dissembling served.