Corroboree

by Graham Masterton

  They reached the coast one morning in March, on a cool and breezy day when Eyre had decided to put on his shirt; although he still wore his trousers tied around his waist. They came across it quite suddenly. One minute they were walking through thick mallee scrub; the next they were standing on the edge of a cliff overlooking the shore.

  After so many months traversing the desert, Eyre was peculiarly moved by the sight of the sea. He climbed slowly down from his horse, and walked to the very edge of the cliff, and looked down at the tumbling, seething surf as if he had never seen anything like it before. Winja stood a little way off, watching him with quiet paternalism, as if he in his turn had been waiting for this moment, and expecting what Eyre’s feelings would be. Minil came up, too, and stayed close to Eyre, holding his arm, and for a long time they watched the long curve of the ocean, from east to west, and the gulls which dived and screeched for Goolwa cockles.

  Some of Winja’s men clambered down to the shore, where they found a dead pelican lying among the rocks, its beak rising and falling in the tide. Whooping, they brought it up to the clifftop, and hacked it open, so that they could drag out its entrails. Tonight, the families would all share a treat: pelican’s intestines filled with heated fat. Eyre watched them cutting open the bird, and the white feathers flying in the wind, and smiled.

  ‘You have become one of us,’ said Winja, quietly.

  ‘No,’ said Eyre. ‘I can never become one of you. I only wish that I could. Even poor Joolonga could never become one of you; not again. I have to go on; to finish this journey. I have learned now that God wills it, whoever God may be.’

  ‘God is in your heart,’ said Winja.

  Eyre took Winja’s hand, and squeezed it hard. ‘God is in you, Winja. God is in all of us. That’s what my father used to say, and it’s true.’

  The sea surged and splashed below them. Far away, beyond the ocean, lay Antarctica. Behind them stretched the hot and desolate land called Bunda Bunda. Eyre felt as if he had arrived at last at the conjunction of the Lord’s hugest and most impressive creations. This was not the place where He had run out of ideas. This was the place where He had foregone conventional beauty in search of truth, and found it. It was apposite that it had cost Eyre such suffering to reach this place; because no truth could be reached without suffering. Eyre got down on his knees, and closed his eyes, and while Minil laid her hand on his shoulder, he repeated the words of Psalm 86. ‘Give ear, O Lord, to my prayer; and give heed to the voice of my supplications! Teach me Thy way, O Lord; I will walk in Thy truth. Arrogant men have risen up against me, and a band of violent men have sought my life. But Thou, O Lord, art a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abundant in loving kindness and truth.’

  That afternoon, on the beach, while the women baked cockles in the sand, and the men fished, Eyre baptised Winja and Ningina in the foam; and there was singing and stick-clapping, and the fires were lit for a family corroboree.

  Winja said, as they sat around the fire eating the cockles, ‘Tonight we must begin your engwura, Eyre. You have become one of us; but you are still an utyana, an uninitiated youth. Your engwura is your initiation ceremony. You must be a man, not only among the white-faces, but among the black-faces.’

  Eyre scooped another cockle out of its shell. ‘Can’t we leave it until tomorrow? It hurts, doesn’t it?’

  ‘What is pain?’ asked Winja.

  ‘Pain is when your body hurts,’ Eyre answered him, tartly.

  Winja pressed both hands against his head. ‘Your body will hurt, but inside your head you will feel nothing but peace.’

  Eyre frowned, and Ningina laughed. Eyre turned to him crossly, and said, ‘I suppose you weren’t nervous, when you were about to be initiated?’

  ‘I was shaking!’ laughed Ningina. Everyone around the fire joined in, and some of them threw pebbles at Eyre and cried, ‘Utyana! Utyana!’

  Eyre said to Winja, ‘Are you seriously inviting me to be initiated?’

  Winja nodded. ‘Seriously. You are one of us. It was Baiame’s will that we met you in the desert.’

  Eyre glanced at Minil. Minil looked remarkably pretty tonight, with her headband, and her patterned buka drawn over her shoulders, and a string of red-painted beads decorating her plump bare breasts. He felt that she had found contentment now: with an Aborigine family to satisfy her need for freedom, and to get back among her own people; but with Eyre to love her and to give her the European sophistication which Winja’s people lacked. He felt regretful in a way that she had found such contentment, because it could never last. Winja and his families would have to be on their way, and Eyre would have to return to Adelaide; and where would that leave Minil? Eyre could sense the pain that would inevitably end their relationship; he could sense it already, now that he was down by the sea, and closer to civilisation. He just hoped that it would not be so great that neither of them could bear it.

  He looked at Minil laughing and clapping her hands by the fire. He smelled the brine from the ocean, and the sizzling aroma of charcoal-roasted cockles. He saw the clouds overhead, fine and golden-grey. And he wished then that this moment could last for ever; that it would never pass, and that he would always be here, on this evening, for the rest of his life.

  But the night came; and passed; and in the morning the sun stretched itself across the ocean. Eyre noticed, however, that Winja’s people were not making their usual preparations for travelling on. Instead, they were lighting fresh cooking-fires, and the women were preparing food, and the children were playing in the scrub. Winja came up to Eyre wearing a heavily decorated buka, and said, ‘Today we have decided to rest and hunt. Perhaps you will take your gun and see if you can find kangaroo or toora.’

  Eyre ate a sparse breakfast; and then took his rifle and the rest of his ammunition and set off alone towards the north-west to look for game. He was glad of the opportunity to think in silence. Usually, whenever they went hunting, Ningina came with him and chattered incessantly about the fights he had had with other tribes; and the time that he had outrun a big red, and jumped on to its back. The morning was clear and sharp, and there was a fresh autumnal wind blowing inland from the sea; although once he was below the line of the cliffs, and walking through the scrub, the desert was more sheltered, and very much hotter.

  He spent hours stalking a toora, a scrawny-looking mallee hen, and twice fired at it and missed. At last he caught it by throwing a stone at it, knocking it stunned and fluttering on to the ground, and then clubbed it with the stock of his rifle. It wasn’t much to bring back to several families of hungry people, but it was better than nothing. There had been plenty of days when he and Ningina had gone out all day and come back empty-handed, except for a few lizards. The sun was beginning to go down, so he made his way back to the cliffs, following his own tracks in the dust.

  Winja and Ningina and two other tribesmen were waiting for him a little way out of camp. As he came closer, Eyre was surprised to see that they were fully painted with pipe-clay and wilga. Winja called to him, ‘How was your hunting?’ and Eyre lifted up the toora to show what he had caught.

  At that moment, all four of the Aborigines ran forward and seized him, snatching away his rifle and his game, and running with him as fast as they could back towards the camp. Eyre shouted, ‘Winja! What the hell’s going on! Ningina!’ but neither of them took any notice. He struggled and kicked and tried to leap away from them, but their grip on his arms was too firm, and they were obviously determined not to let him go.

  As they ran through the camp, past the flickering fires and the brushwood shelters, the women and children came hurrying out, shrieking and ullulating, and calling out, ‘Don’t take him! Don’t take him!’ in Wirangu. Some of the women tried wildly to snatch at his arms, but Ningina and his men pushed them away. Even Minil came struggling forwards, shrieking, ‘Don’t take him! Don’t take him! Don’t kill him!’ but Winja pushed her out of the way with his spear-shaft.

  The men hurried with h
im down the sloping pathway that led to the seashore, leaving the women behind. Eyre fought and twisted, but most of the time his feet weren’t even touching the ground, and he was taken down to the beach with his legs kicking in the air, like the toora he had just managed to catch. He was badly frightened: it occurred to him that Winja and his people had been keeping him all this time as a living totem, as a human good-luck charm, and that now they were going to please Baiame by sacrificing him.

  Perhaps they had come to believe what Yonguldye had said about him: that he was the true djanga, and that somehow he had betrayed the Aborigine people by not giving them the magic knowledge which had been promised by myth and by legend. Perhaps they believed that if they killed him, the true gods would look on them favourably, and protect them from white men and devildevils. Yonguldye had wanted his brains; perhaps Winja had decided that he too had an appetite for the white man’s magic.

  Panting, terrified, coughing, he was dragged along the sand and around a rocky limestone headland, until he reached a cove that was out of sight of the main encampment. Here, there was a huge fire burning, its flames rolling and flaring in the dusk; and all the men of the tribe were gathered, their faces painted with circles and stripes; so that they looked like a rabble of horrifying demons, hot from hell. Eyre shouted, ‘No!’ but the men forced him down on to the sand, first on to his knees, and then flat, face-down.

  Winja came up and stood over him. ‘Eyre-Walker, you are about to die. Everything you have been, up until now, has been a way of getting ready for this death. All of your life; all of your thinking; all of your friendships. All your prayers, too, have been directed to this one moment.’

  Eyre was turned over on to his back. He looked up at Winja; and to his surprise, the grey-bearded old man was smiling at him.

  ‘This is your engwura, your initiation ceremony. Tonight, the Eyre-Walker you once used to be will die; and the new Eyre-Walker will be born. You will take a new life, and a new name.’

  Eyre said, ‘You scoundrel, Winja.’ His relief was enormous.

  Winja prodded him in the shoulder with the point of his spear. ‘Tonight is not a night for you to be disrespectful. Tonight you are a boy. Only when you are initiated will you become a man. Now, you will lie there, and Galute will paint your body with the totem of our people.’

  Eyre lay flat on his back on the sand while Galute and Ningina stripped him completely naked and rubbed his skin all over with pelican-fat. Then, with tongue-clenching care, Galute began to paint Eyre’s skin with moistened pipe-clay and ochre, an inverted white crucifix pattern with red stripes and triangles on it. Galute painted his face, too, a mask of white with diagonal red arrows, which tightened as it dried and made Eyre feel that his whole face had turned into a clinging, rigid mask. Finally, Galute painted pipe-clay into his hair, so that it looked like a wild configuration of plumes. When Galute had finished, Eyre lay back with his arms raised, looking up at the stars and the sparks that blew from the fire, while Winja and Ningina led their people in a long song that told of the boys who came for their initiation, and discovered the secrets of the tribe.

  Out of a kangaroo-skin package, they produced flat, boat-shaped wooden churingas, attached to long twists of twine, and as they sang they spun these around and around over their heads, producing an eerie droning noise. Winja said to Eyre, ‘The women and children believe when they hear this noise that they are hearing the voices of the dead. Only initiated men know that it is the sound of the sacred churingas.’

  The singing and the chanting continued for hours; until at last Galute returned, this time with a knife and a wooden bowl of ashes from the fire.

  ‘We will mark you now with the marks of a man,’ he said. Eyre watched him with a tingling feeling of anticipated pain. He could have stood up now, and refused to take part in any of Winja’s initiation ceremony; but he knew that it was going to be an important step forward in his life; and that it was probably going to be the ultimate expression of his radical belief that every race and every religion must be respected, no matter how bizarre it might seem to be to those brought up on the Prayer Book.

  While another young man tightly held Eyre’s wrists, Galute produced a sharp shell knife, and knelt down beside him. ‘This is the mark of a great hunter,’ he said, and before Eyre could wriggle, he sliced his shoulders, left and right, in two swift stinging strokes. Eyre bit his tongue to keep back his pain, and most of all to stop himself from crying out loud. But then Galute said, ‘This is the mark of the warrior,’ and cut his chest in a herringbone pattern, one deep incision after the other.

  ‘Now the mark of Pund-jil, the great god, who caused men to wander throughout the world.’ And Galute slashed his thighs.

  The churingas whirled around and around, and the evening was overwhelmed with their endless humming, and with the sound of the surf breaking on the shore. Eyre lay mute and helpless while Galute rubbed ashes into his bloody wounds; although the stinging was almost more than he could bear; and the edges of the cuts flapped open in a way that made his nerves shrink like sea-anemones.

  He closed his eyes and tried not to think of the pain. The pain seemed to wash in with the surf, in waves of scarlet. And all the time the churingas droned and droned, and the sticks tapped, and Winja sang his songs of Baiame and Yahloo the moon goddess, and the days in the dream-time when men had walked the earth like gods.

  Winja told him how their families had first been born. Eyre could understand very little of it: it was a lengthy and complicated fable involving all the gods who had helped and guided them. He told of the first churingas, and how these thin pieces of wood, when they were twirled around and around in the air, could bring back the voices of spirits and demons. He told of suffering and drought; of days when there were so many kangaroo that the desert had rippled like the sea; of moons and lyrebirds and Bunyips and wallabies. He told of pain and punishment; of joy and laughter; and above all of friendship and love. It was desperately hard, surviving in the desert, and the love that grew between both men and women was defiant and beautiful.

  Eyre saw pictures in his mind. Dark figures, dancing through a dark night. He heard noises, too; hollow hums and strange sibilant whirrings. And when they approached him at last with the circumcision knife, he was prepared for what they were going to do. He lay back on the sand, watching as they lifted the blade, and as they blessed it; and when they knelt down beside him, and took his soft penis in their hands, he closed his eyes and offered no prayers to the Lord, but only to those spirits who would now accept him as a man and a warrior, to those ancient gods whose land he had chosen as his home, and these people he had chosen as his kinsmen.

  Galute pinched his foreskin, and drew it out as far as he could. Then he inserted two fingers inside it, stretching it wide, and began to cut through it with his knife. Little by little, the skin bloodily came free, until the purple glans was naked. Eyre no longer thought of the pain. The pain was too dull; too much; too insistent. He looked at Winja and gave him a slow, bleary smile. Winja nodded, and held up the little fold of skin which Galute had cut off.

  ‘You must swallow this,’ he said; and offered it to Eyre on the ends of his fingers, with a wooden bowl of water.

  Eyre raised his head, and opened his mouth, and accepted on his tongue the soft salty-tasting envelope of skin. He was beyond nausea now; beyond anything but going through this initiation ceremony until the end; until it was over. Winja pressed the water to his lips, and he drank, and swallowed.

  But now came the greatest of all tests. Galute inserted the point of his shell-knife into the cleft of Eyre’s already-blooded penis, and made the first cut downwards, to open out the urethra in the same way that Joolonga’s urethra had been opened out; and Midgegooroo’s, and Weeip’s.

  Agonising as it was, Eyre’s penis rose into a stiff erection; and Galute held him tight in his fist like a spearshaft. Then, without hesitation, Galute cut deep into the underside of his flesh, right down to his tightened scrotum. He s
plashed the incision from his bowlful of water to make sure that it was clean; and then stood up, and lifted both hands, and cried out loudly, ‘This is a man now!’

  Eyre felt hot, and then chillingly cold. He couldn’t feel his genitals at all. The tapping of sticks faded; the surf sounded as if it were pouring all over him. And the drone of the churingas went on and on; until he couldn’t decide if the droning was inside his mind or outside on the seashore. He shivered with a pain that he was too far gone to understand. All he wanted to do was to sleep, and to forget it forever.

  Winja covered him gently with a buka. However harsh the initiation ritual might have been, Winja knew how to cope with the bodily shock that always followed. Keep the initiate warm and quiet for at least a day; and then gradually begin to tell him what had happened; and why; and all the stories and fables that were connected with his new totem. There were hours of stories to tell, and Winja knew them all, just as his grandfather had told them; and his grandfather’s father; right back to the days of the giant kangaroo.

  Eyre slept fitfully for a while; then woke in agonising pain that made him cry out. The night passed in torrents of suffering, and there was nothing he could do but lie crouched-up on the sand and endure it; while the chilly wind blew from the Indian Ocean, and the fire popped and crackled and died down, and the sun gradually rose again from the eastern horizon.