‘I’ll tell you how I bore it,’ said Arthur. ‘I didn’t bear it. I was just there while it was being done to me, and that was all. They tie you up to an X-frame, wrists and ankles, stripped to the waist, and then they flog you in front of the whole company, with the six-tailed cat. It’s better if the cat is knotted; it bruises more but it doesn’t cut. But some of the gentlemen preferred to cut you, and one or two of them were so expert they could cut you one way and then the other, so that the flesh flew off in perfect squares. I didn’t bear it because no man can bear it. A flogging is beyond bearing. It is the nearest thing to hell on earth outside of the solitary. The second time they flogged me I looked down between the angle of the X-frame and saw the ants carrying off great pieces of my back. I came away that time and I had a hump like a hunchback, and it was eight weeks and a day before I could walk.’
Eyre took off his hat. He looked northwards, out towards the scrubby horizon. ‘I think we’d better get on,’ he said. ‘If I hear any more of this, I’m going to start questioning the very basis of my life here, and the very motive behind our going.’
Both he and Christopher were silent as they remounted their horses, and set off. Arthur, however, was in good spirits, and started to sing.
‘All around my hat, I will wear the green willow;
All around my hat, for a twelvemonth and a day.
And if anyone should ask me, the reason why I’m wearing it,
It’s all for my true love who is far, far away.’
Seventeen
They were to follow the coastal plain between the Gulf of St Vincent and the foothills of the North Mount Lofty mountains until they reached the northernmost point of the gulf, where the Yorke Peninsula protruded into the Indian Ocean like the cocked leg of a saucy dancing-girl. They would carry on northwards across the ‘thigh’ of the peninsula until they reached the head of the next inlet, the Spencer Gulf; and it was here at Kurdnatta that the Indian Ocean thrust its deepest into the underbelly of the Australian continent. Beyond, to the north, lay nothing but The Ghastly Blank’. Unexplored, unmapped territory, into which only the bravest and foolhardiest of doggers and prospectors had ever penetrated. Those who had seen it and survived had brought back stories of mountains like the moon and deserts that never ended, of mysterious glittering lakes that could never be reached, of dragons and monsters and extraordinary insects, and green fields that could appear and disappear overnight. It was at the same time the most alluring and the most frightening land on earth: and that night, as they camped amongst the mallee scrub, their lonely fire flickering in answer to the stars, Eyre felt the stirrings of its ancient and sun-wrinkled soul.
Joolonga sat and chewed tobacco, while Midgegooroo unloaded the horses and watered them, and Weeit squatted by the fire and cooked them up a potful of pork and brown beans. Although their fare was necessarily plain and filling, Weeip was a good enough cook. He had been taught baking at the mission, he said. Cakes, pies, and ‘York Shark Pudding’. He could make a passable mug of tea, too, very hot, with molasses stirred into it.
Now that they were out of Adelaide, Weeip discarded his leather apron and went naked, except for a thin string of twined hair around his stomach. Midgegooroo kept his buka, but dispensed with his loincloth. Only Joolonga remained dressed in his white man’s uniform and cocked hat; although on several occasions he would forget to put on his britches. Eyre had seen scores of naked Aborigine men before, but never at such close quarters, and he was fascinated to see that their penises were not only circum cised but slit open all the way from the urethral opening at the end, right back to the scrotum. He asked Joolonga about it, but Joolonga was evasive, and simply said that it was ‘usual’. The sub-incision caused the Aborigines to urinate in a wide spray, but obviously it had not affected their sexual capacity, for later as young Weeip slept and dreamed, and Eyre kept watch, the boy’s penis rose several times in a jutting erection.
On that first night out, they talked about Mr Chatto and Mr Rose, and Yonguldye, and what might lie ahead of them. They also talked about the penal colonies at Botany Bay and Macquarie Harbour, and Arthur gave them a long and unsettling account of his life as a ‘guest of the Crown’. ‘In particular, I think of Tom Killick—a young pale fellow fresh out from England; an accountant I think, transported for life for embezzling £2 from his employers. The first night at Macquarie Harbour, the guards amused themselves by treating him as if he was a master-criminal; and pretending they were afeared of him. They locked him up for the night with eleven of the worst knaves on the whole island; men who were little better than animals. They buggered him that night, all eleven of them, and most of them more than once; and the other unnatural acts they forced him into—well, I saw acts of that nature many a time, and I regret to say at times that I was party to them. But the effect on that delicate young fellow was to turn his mind, and by daybreak he was screaming and sobbing like a woman. You would have thought they were a-killing of him; the noises he made. And in the end, they did, in their usual way, because he killed himself. I saw him do it, in the exercise yard; stand on a box with a broom, and push the handle into his back-passage; then just let himself drop. Right through his guts, that handle went, right through his stomach and liver and lungs, and lodged inside his chest. Four of us tried to get it out, but we couldn’t, so in the end we just sawed off the brush and left the rest inside of him.’
They listened to these stories seriously and unhappily. When he had finished, however, Arthur lifted his cup of rum, and said, ‘There should be no long faces here, gentlemen, for you have rescued at least one wretch from that kind of life; and given him an opportunity for freedom. So here’s your health, and may we find the success we’re after.’
‘Well, I’ll drink to that,’ said Christopher. ‘I think I’ll also drink to the hope that I never get to see the inside of one of Australia’s prisons. The idea of being kept in chains!’
‘Ah, it’s not the chains you have to worry about, Mr Willis,’ said Arthur. ‘It’s what they do to your mind.’ He tapped his forehead, and said, ‘If’s up here that they do the damage. Inside your bonce. They make your brave man frightened, and your good man evil, and your weak man as wild as a snarling, snavelling beast. They corrupts the pure, and they spays the strong, and they makes your wisest man into a idiot. They knows their stuff, sir; but all I can say is, on reflection, that no man ever came out of those prison settlements a better man than what he went in.’
By ten o’clock that night, Arthur was asleep, wrapped up in his blankets, in his own words, ‘as snug as a sossidge roll’. Eyre wondered how a man who had suffered so long and so acutely could ever sleep again, particularly since the danger of recapture was always close. He kept thinking about the ‘young pale fellow’ who had impaled himself, and wondered if he would have been driven to seek the same kind of terrible escape, if he had been imprisoned at Macquarie Harbour. He though of the scarred gristle of Arthur’s back, and tried to imagine what pain Arthur must have felt.
Christopher came and sat beside him with a fresh mug of tea. ‘Do you want some? Weeip’s just brewed up some more.’
‘Yes, I will.’
‘You’re not brooding,’ said Christopher.
‘No,’ Eyre replied, shaking his head. ‘I was just thinking about those penal settlements.’
‘Well, yes,’ said Christopher.
‘Is that all you can say?’ Eyre asked him.
‘What do you want me to say? That they’re cruel, and barbaric, and that no man should ever be allowed to inflict such pain and indignity on other men?’
‘If you like.’
‘It won’t be any use. The law is the law; a sentence is a sentence; and if a sentence is carried out more harshly than it ought to be, well, my only reply to that is, abide by the law. Which we haven’t, of course, bringing Arthur along with us, and I must say that Arthur’s stories don’t make me feel any happier about it.’
There’s nothing that Chatto can do now,’ Eyr
e reassured him.
‘I wouldn’t lay any money on it.’
They sat in silence for a while, and the fire flickered and popped and lit their faces in kaleidoscopic orange. Up above them, the sky was rich as ink and prickled with stars. Cicadas sang, even though a cool wind was getting up; and there was a fragrant smell of woodsmoke in the air. Eyre was beginning to feel very tired now, exhausted not only by the day’s travel and by this morning’s send off, but by the enormity of what he was doing. He was seeking out a strange Aborigine medicine-man in an unknown land; quite apart from whatever riches he could discover; and more than that he was also beginning that longest of all journeys—the journey to discover his own soul. To understand at last what he actually meant—why he was here, what forces and reasons had brought him here, with these companions, on such a night—that would be the greatest discovery of all.
While they finished their tea, Joolonga came over, and said that everything was ready for their departure at sunrise. Today was a slow day, Mr Walker-sir. Tomorrow we must make much more distance.’
Eyre said, ‘How far north have you travelled, Joolonga? What kind of country can we expect?’
Joolonga said, ‘I have travelled as far as the place they call the diamond-sparrow-water, Edieowie. The country is difficult; flat land, salt water; mountains on the east side, salt marshes on the west.’
‘And ahead?’
They speak of a lake there, Mr Walker-sir. Sometimes they say that it is a magic lake, sometimes they say that there is no lake there at all, but just the memory of a lake. They call it Katitanda. But I have never been there, Mr Walker-sir.’
Eyre emptied out the dregs of his tea on to the ground. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if we are to find this lake, magical or not, we had better get some sleep.’
Christopher said, ‘It would certainly solve some problems if there were a lake there. I’m not too keen on this bottled water, are you? It tastes as if it’s been gently simmering in an unwashed stew-pot all afternoon.’
Joolonga took off his cocked hat. His hair was bound tightly with kangaroo-skin twine into a pigtail; and he looked to Eyre like a black-faced parody of a dandified lawyer he had once known in Baslow. What always struck him so forcibly about the Aborigines was that they did not resemble negroes in the least, in spite of their wide-spread noses and their thick lips. They were like an ugly variety of European; and Eyre always felt that they were far more intelligent and far more alert to what was going on around them than they ever allowed anyone to see.
Joolonga said, ‘Midgegooroo told me that one of his brothers’ families came from the west to Katitanda; but that they died there, and that Katitanda became their wand-alwallah, their burial-place. He does not know why, exactly. It has become a story now, a legend, and his family have retold it so many times that nobody is sure what happened. All they know is that his brother, and his brother’s two wives, and four of their children, all perished. Narahdarn swept his wing over them, and that is all they will say.’
‘Narahdarn?’ asked Eyre.
‘Narahdarn is the Bringer of Death. Many tribes have stories about him. Captain Sturt says the story is like the beginning of the white man’s Bible-book.’
Tell me,’ said Eyre.
Joolonga took out of his jacket pocket a small pipe made out of a crab’s-claw, and filled it up with some of the sticky tobacco which he always carried with him. He picked a glowing twig out of the fire, and laboriously lit up. He was obviously considering at length whether he wanted to tell Eyre about Narahdarn or not.
Eventually, though, when the tarry fragrance of his tobacco was mingling with the smell of mallee scrub he said, ‘All of this happened in the days of Ber-rook-boorn, who was the very first man to live in Australia. He and his wife had been made by the great being Baiame; and had been permitted by Baiame to eat and drink everything that they could find, except honey from Baiame’s own sacred yarran tree. But the wife of Ber-rook-boorn was tempted by the honey, and tasted it; and out of the tree with great black wings flew Narahdarn, the monster of death which Baiame had charged with guarding his honey.
‘Ber-rook-boorn’s wife hid in her gunyah, which in the northlands is what they call a tantanoorla, a brushwood shelter. But the harm was done. She had let out death into the world, and after that, men were no longer able to live for ever. The yarran tree was so sad that it wept, and some of my people still say today that the red gum on the trunk of the tree is the dried tears that it sometimes sheds for the dead.’
‘Adam and Eve all over again,’ remarked Christopher. That’s remarkable, isn’t it?’
‘And the woman still gets the blame,’ smiled Eyre, ‘no matter what her name is; and no matter what language they tell the story in, English, Latin, or Aborigine!’
Joolonga smoked his pipe in silence, staring at the fire.
Eyre said to him, ‘You don’t seem particularly anxious to tell us much about the Aborigine.’
Joolonga frowned. He didn’t seem to understand; or else he deliberately didn’t want to.
‘You don’t appear to have any desire to tell us about your people,’ Eyre repeated. ‘Why is that?’
Joolonga took the crab’s-claw pipe out of his mouth and spat into the fire.
‘What white people know, they destroy. Their knowledge is more dangerous than their rifles. You see what they have done to me? What manner of a man am I? Blackfellow, or white? I can speak like white, dress like white, hold a knife and fork like white. I can think like a white man, too, which is my worst punishment of all. And everything I know, I destroy, just like white men do. They have destroyed me, and in my turn I destroy my people.’
He looked at Eyre and Christopher for a moment with a fierce, almost frightening pride. It was the wasp, making a last noisy effort to escape from the jar of jam.
The dreamtime may be true and the dreamtime may not be true. It is not necessary for you to know about it. It is not necessary for you to hear about Narahdarn and Baiame and Priepiggie. You should close your ears to these things. And this expedition of yours to find Yonguldye … do you know how much you will destroy with this expedition? Thousands of years of sacred secrets. You may even destroy a people—a people who have no need of you, and who ask for nothing more than to be left to live their lives according to legend and tradition.’
Eyre stared at Joolonga for a long time over the leaping flames of the fire. Then he said, ‘You’re wrong. You’re wrong about me in particular and about the white immigrants in general. I have set out on this expedition to do nothing more than find Yonguldye, and bring him back to Adelaide to bury the boy Yanluga. That’s all. If I find the inland sea that Captain Sturt believes in; if I find opals; or copper; or gold; or a cattle-route to the north of Australia: well, I shall be lucky, and those who invested their money in this expedition shall be rewarded. But my principal aim is to see that justice is done to a single young Aborigine boy, and if by chance the expedition has other more profitable results, then I can only be doubly satisfied. This is a huge land, Joolonga. There is space in Australia for all of us, white and black. If we white people seem to be selfish, and destructive, it is only because we are struggling to survive here, just as your people have struggled to survive here for centuries. You must forgive us for that.’
Joolonga smiled. ‘Of course. And shall I forgive you for my mother, who was cudgelled to death by British sailors because she refused to take off her buka for them? Or the friend with whom I grew up, whose name was Bundaleer, who was burned alive in his tantanoorla, he and his baby daughter, because a white bushman believed that he had taken his boots? Let me tell you something, Mr Walkersir, I despise the Aborigine because he is ignorant and filthy, and scratches the ground to survive in a country which could give him so much more; I despise him because he cannot and will not fight back against the white people, and for that reason I also despise myself. I have become their flunkey, yes Mr Walker-sir, no Mr Walker-sir. I am full of hate and yet I have to remain polite, and I w
ill always remain faithful to you, as long as you need me. But never expect me to believe that this land is a better place because of the white man coming here. The white man has a power which is more dangerous than a bush-fire, and consumes everything it touches. After a bush-fire, the burned trees begin to grow again; but after the white man has passed, nothing grows. In a hundred years time, Mr Walker-sir, there will be no, blackfellows here. The man I used to be has gone already. My father’s son Joolonga has joined Ngurunderi in his place in the sky. This Joolonga who sits with you now is a white man’s dog.’
Eyre took off his hat and ran his hand through his hair. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what to say to you.’
‘It is not necessary to say anything. It is destiny.’
‘Joolonga—’ Eyre began.
But Joolonga raised his hand to ward off whatever Eyre was going to say. ‘Say nothing, please, Mr Walker-sir. You will not hear me speak this way again. You will learn nothing from me; and come no closer to me. And whatever promises you make yourself, you cannot promise anything on behalf of any other white man. What has happened has happened; what is about to happen cannot be avoided. In this land it is better not to think of anything but your own survival. My mother’s spirit rests in a certain rock; it will always be there. When the wind and the sun break the rock into dust, the dust will blow across the plain. My mother will always be there, long after the men who took her life are being punished by their own God.’
Eyre was silent. He turned to Christopher, but Christopher could do nothing but shrug. Joolonga finished his pipeful of tobacco, knocking the dottle into the fire. Then he said, ‘We must sleep now. we have far to go tomorrow. I will watch first. Then Midgegooroo.’
Eyre brushed his teeth with dry liquorice-flavoured dentifrice, and then wrapped himself tiredly up in his blankets. The night seemed even darker and even windier when he was lying down; and the fire crackled like a fusillade of pistol-shots.
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