by Mudrooroo
There is a dusty tang of eucalypts and a faint drift of smoke. High summer rings through the hot afternoon. Cicadas and sharp bird notes and a fitful wind among thin leaves and brittle grass. And under it all like the beat of a pulse, the old man’s song. It could not carry this far, but he has sung it into my mind for as long as I have left to live.
In the yellow sand of the track ahead a stumpy tail lizard lies inert. I pause for breath and look at it, scaly and fat, its head wedge-shaped, its legs stunted and absurd. It turns, huffs defiance, and flickers out its long blue tongue at me.
“Sorry, brother,” I say and step carefully over it. It is a sort of apology to all the lizards I ever tortured with sticks as a kid, perhaps to all the bush and its creatures for my indifference.
The wind drops suddenly and the cicada note stops dead. I am the only living thing stirring in the bush. I long to rest but my fear drives me on through the furnace heat. I dare not drink more than a sip or two from the canvas bag, for God knows where I will find water in this summer dry wilderness. The country may know me as the old man says, but it does not tell me this.
The bark of a dog breaks the eerie silence. I stop in my tracks, alert. The sound comes from behind. Closer, until now I hear the unmistakable sound of horses’ hooves. Run! Get in behind those rocks. Hide in a tree. . . . What’s the use? If it’s the police, the dogs will smell me out.
I sit down beside the track, the rifle in my hand. Have I the guts to end it here? Why not? There’s no hope for me. No future except at the end of a rope. I have told myself so often that I want to die, but I guess it wasn’t really true. I’ve always wanted to live. It was just the God-damn way life always went for me made me decide it was futile and absurd. I tried to stamp out any hope I had in me, but I never really killed it. It wouldn’t die. And now when there’s nothing to look forward to but the long-drawn-out misery of trial and punishment, I want to live more than I ever knew before. I even feel I might know just a little how to live.
Only yesterday I would have wanted to shoot it out like the big shot movie boys and become a sort of posthumous hero to the gang. Ned Kelly in bodgie dress; but I feel different now. Like I was somebody else. Before I’ve always tried to run away. Why not stick around and face up to something for a change?
Great thoughts. Swell sentiments. I guess it only means I haven’t got the guts to kill myself. I throw the rifle from me with all my strength.
The dogs come first, they leap and yelp around me as I stand against a tree like a cornered kangaroo. Sharp teeth clamp on my trouser leg and rip my skin. I am real scared now. Almost glad when the horsemen show up and call them off. One of them walks up to me and shows his badge. He asks my name and charges me with attempted murder.
The meaning takes a while to register. Attempted murder. Attempted. I haven’t killed him then. Relief surges and recedes. But he might still die. . . .
“How bad is he?” I ask.
“Bad enough.”
“Is he going to live? I didn’t mean to Toll a man. It wasn’t in my mind.”
The copper is tall with a stern face. He looks at me and I look back at him. I have never found or expected any kindness or pity in a copper’s face. Is it possible there is a hint of humanity in this man’s eyes? And why now when I have done the worst thing in my life?
“He’ll live,” he says, and snaps the cuffs on my unresisting hands.
Appendix I
Foreword by Mary Durack
When Colin Johnson left Western Australia for Victoria early in 1958 it seemed hardly likely that he was to become the subject of a curious success story. We saw him off at the Perth railway station, a long, lonely streak of a youth in black jeans, black shirt and flapping overcoat, playing down his apprehension of the big strange city on the other side of the continent. He was nineteen years old and part Aboriginal, though his features would not have betrayed him and his skin colour was no darker than that of a southern European.
At the time he professed to know little and care less about his indigenous heritage. He had tried, in fact, by seeking white companions, to remove himself from the shadow of the native dilemma, and yet it lay upon him as heavily as upon the rest of them. It had darkened his youth and was driving him now, against his every natural instinct, into alien territory where whiteman letters of introduction did not guarantee hospitality as had the message sticks of his Aboriginal ancestors.
These forbears had been members of the big Bibbulmun tribe whose boundaries embraced the fertile south-western triangle from Jurien Bay, 120 miles north of Perth, to the southern port of Esperance and which, in 1829, had welcomed the first white settlers as the spirits of their dead returned.
On the west coast both newcomers and Aborigines made sincere efforts to come to terms, but the end results were much the same as in other Australian colonies where the races engaged in mutual hostility. By the end of the century the tribe had more or less disappeared, leaving a people of mixed white and native blood. Some became assimilated into the white community, but the majority continued to breed among themselves or back into the Aborigines from other parts of the State, resulting in a drifting coloured minority caught in the vicious circle of a lack of opportunity and their own lack of stamina.
The situation that had developed over the years is shown in the circumstances indirectly responsible for my meeting with the writer of this book. These concerned a group of south-western Aboriginal children whose distinctive art work, produced under the inspiration of their teacher, Mr Noel White, had been successfully exhibited both at home and abroad. The demand created for the young people’s work gave them an incentive and prestige that augured well their future and that, it was hoped, would draw attention to the lack of opportunity offered to many such naturally gifted children. Instead it was turned to their disadvantage. The publicity drew attention to the conditions in which they lived and the Department of Native Welfare, embarrassed by lack of funds and staff problems, closed the settlement pending its transfer to a private missionary body. In the interim the children became scattered, mostly returning to the outskirt camps of their relatives.
I had previously collaborated with Mrs Florence Rutter, staunch friend and promoter of the young artists’ work, in a book1 telling something of their background and the development of their talent. After their dispersal, their former teachers and a few other friends had tried to keep in touch with the youngsters, help find steady jobs for them, and encourage them to continue with their art work. Many of the girls, however, drifted into prostitution, the boys into casual or itinerant labouring jobs on farms, timber mills, orchards, or on vineyards where, in fact, they received part payment in wine. Before long most of them had served prison sentences on minor charges of drinking, receiving liquor for the elders2, or petty theft. From first offences that, in the case of white boys and girls, would have been dismissed as mere peccadilloes, it became very difficult for them to avoid being returned to jail. They were constantly under the surveillance of the police, some sympathetic and helpful, others seeking native convictions as easy stepping-stones to promotion.
Early in 1958, I was asked to find accommodation for a boy who was coming to a job in the city. I expected to see one of the youths we knew but he turned out to be a complete stranger with little of the familiar coloured boy’s willing-to-please manner. In fact he showed little obvious trace of native blood, but he had, what most of the darker people have lost, the proud stance and sinuous carriage of the tall, tribal Aboriginal.
As it turned out the “someone” who had promised him the job had regretted the impulse and it did not materialize. Other contacts had likewise grown wary of coloured boys and Colin did not go out of his way to ingratiate himself with prospective employers. “Who knows?” he would retort, when asked whether he would diligently apply himself to a job in question. It was a sort of last ditch stand for his right as an individual to speak the truth as he knew it, no more and no less. How, in fact, could he guarantee he would stic
k a job of which he had no experience? “Why not?” he would ask of a suggestion to which he could express no immediate objection. It was an honest enough question and left it up to you.
We gathered that Colin had been born in the farming town of Narrogin, 120 miles from Perth, in 1938. His mother belonged to that district and he had brothers and sisters scattered about the State. He had never known his father, who had died soon after he was born. He had been baptized a Catholic but had since dismissed all Christian denominations as hypocritical. In the process of a broken education, partly acquired in an orphanage, he had attained his Junior Public certificate, a qualification all too rare among coloured youths. He had at some stage belonged to a Bodgie group, but although he clung to their mode of dress he had finally rejected this cult as beneath his intelligence.
At the time of our meeting he had hoped to get a city job and study for his matriculation at night school. This seemed well within his capabilities, for we soon realized that, from whatever odd combination of genes and circumstance, the boy was a natural intellectual. He was an omnivorous reader and had somehow acquired a surprising general knowledge of the classics and more than a smattering of psychology, philosophy and comparative religions. He was also interested in drama, art and music — particularly jazz. His hunger for knowledge was matched with a retentive memory that my own children were quick to exploit — one of them to provide points for an interschool debate on the merits and demerits of automation.
An above average I.Q. could, however, have been more burden than advantage had he inherited the typical instability of the out-camp people. We observed that Colin was not apparently lazy. He found jobs for himself about the place and did them well. He also had a sense of time and he began to seem — was it possible? — even dependable.
He had hardened himself to expect failure and rebuffs but had none the less enough conceit of himself to believe that he could somewhere make his mark if given an ordinary chance. Before long he had the offer of a steady clerical job, but he now had his doubts about living in Perth. Some of his former associates had got into trouble and it was difficult, in a small city, to avoid running into them under the watchful eye of the law.
An alternative was offered by the Reverend Stan Davey of the Aboriginal Advancement League in Victoria, who had helped many young people similarly placed to find jobs in Melbourne.
“Why not?” Colin asked, when the proposition was put to him. Melbourne would be sink or swim — a genuine test of stamina.
Despite the confidence we had in him, it was not without misgivings that we watched his train move off. It might have been to his advantage had he been more conspicuously of native blood and with more of the endearing Aboriginal trustfulness and obvious will to please. Would the people “over there” have time in their busy lives to recognize the qualities we had found under his veneer of toughness and indifference? Would he now disappear, to be next heard of in jail, as other young friends had done despite protestations of faithfulness and promises to go straight? Somehow we thought not, although Colin had protested nothing. He had not, I think, even promised to write.
Before long we received a letter describing his journey, his quite unexpected, perhaps Aboriginal, reaction to the desert, and his impressions of Melbourne. A little later he returned the money for his fare and basic equipment and thereafter continued writing at fairly regular intervals, telling about his job in a filing department, his attendance at night school, and his continuing search for some truth that would be “valid” for himself. He began attending Buddhist meetings which impressed him so much that he decided to “give up meat for ever”, along with Rock-and-Roll and ballet. However tempted towards these pleasures, “Mara”, he wrote, “shall not prevail”.
It was mooted that he might go to Burma to become a monk and in the process of inquiries he was presented with a life of Gautama Buddha by the Burmese consul. Meanwhile he continued his ordinary studies, but with Buddhism and Yoga in ascendancy. “How wonderful,” he exclaimed, “to escape from dreary civilization into sweet nothingness!”
On brief holidays he discovered the lush beauty of the Dandenongs, camped, read and luxuriated in a landscape “where, between two breasts of green a township rests serene as a child in its mother’s arms and ferns and undergrowth creep up over roads and clearings. . . .When the wind blows up, the trees moan and groan in a sort of agony of joy and here and there a dead gum stretches ghostly arms to the sky as if praying for life again. The air is full of the sounds of birds and insects exulting to be alive and free, and of a milky stream that hurry-hurries down the valley. . . .” Early in 1959 he was asked to go as a Western Australian delegate to a Federal conference of the Aboriginal Advancement League. “I did,” he told us, “but sat there too chicken to do anything. . . .I was a failure, but I enjoyed the meetings as they gave me an insight into what is being done to elevate and to obtain citizen rights for my people.”
About the same time he wrote of going to hear Billy Graham.
It was rather terrifying to see how so many people (including myself) can be influenced emotionally by a voice, a choir and their own fears. . .
After a longer silence than usual he wrote, in November 1959:
Time has pried loose a few months of my life and I cannot tell what he has done with them. . . .
I am a Bohemian type now. Well, not exactly that but a Beatnik engaged in the Holy Search for Self. I have grown a small beard and wander vaguely through Melbourne just looking and looking, thinking and thinking. . . .
But I still listen to music. I go to classical concerts now and appreciate them, but I also still feel Rock and Roll and Jazz, and dance and sway to them. I can be moved with the Blues and cry with the Negroes of old.
I also like Art. I go to exhibitions and know some of Melbourne’s Bohemians and Intellectuals. So you see my mind has broadened a bit, or so I hope. . . .At the moment I am out of a job, being typical Beatnik, but I have written a play called “The Delinks”.
I did not read the play, but he sent me some poems written about this time. They were somewhat cliche ridden expositions of Beatnik philosophy in which people were “immersed in shadows and nothingness”, bent under a “leaden weight of sorrow”, wondering whether the world had ever been young and gay, the trees green instead of blue and the moon “a yellow orb of serenity”. This conformity of outlook held in check for a while the original expression of which he was capable, but to have made a creative effort of any sort was at least some departure from the nihilism that had previously absorbed him.
When the University quarterly Westerly announced a competition for stories or sketches by people of Aboriginal blood I suggested that he enter something written from his own experience or observation. He sent two sketches, one of a boy whiling away some dreary hours in a downtown Melbourne nightclub (very Beatnik), and another the feelings of a boy on the morning of his release from jail. The latter, he said, was part of a novel he intended working on.
Entries in the competition were foreseeably few, but in any case Colin’s starkly telling little sketch would have found its way to the top. Encouraged by his win, he set himself seriously to writing his novel, on which he sent occasional progress reports.
The book concerns a part Aboriginal boy trying to find himself and failing ... a sort of mock hero, a stupid, self- pitying, broken-down mess, barely existing. He is not myself, though a little perhaps what I might have turned out. He talks and acts like many delinquents I have observed and I have put into his mind some of my own doubts and foolish contradictions. I’m afraid it is pretty dreary and uneven. . . .
* * * * *
I lead a mere, vague, bumbling existence now, broken by frenzied spells of writing. At night when I am working it sounds all right. By daylight I know that my glorious novel is bad. Sometimes I get quite disgusted with it and don’t care if it is lost or destroyed. I tell myself however that I am just lazy, as most primitive people are supposed to be, and that when I see hard work ahead
I want to disappear. Then I come back, look again and get enmeshed in it once more.
* * * * *
I think style is my main difficulty — the smooth connection of sentences and images, the switching from subjective to objective points of view. . . .I am going about seeking dialogue these days, examining people’s words and also going to plays for this purpose. . . .
* * * * *
Thanks for your criticism of the section forwarded. I wanted the book to be a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress rather than a particular person beset with his own separate problems, but I can see I have not brought this off. I am therefore making my character more positive in tone and altering his outlook a little, while keeping his ambiguities, false thinking and contradictions. . . .He must continue to reject life, shoulders slouched, head low, hands in pockets, shuffling. . . .
Yes, I will prune because I see it is necessary, but about the repetitions — Aboriginal poetry and songs are full of them and so are the French writers — the neo-realists. . . . Perhaps I am too much under the influence of the Existentialists and the French school of abstract aloneness or whatever of Beckett, Sartre, Robbe Gillet and the rest. I realize I tend to imitate them and am getting myself out of this. Still, I excuse myself by saying (even if it’s not valid) that I am young and Australian and most of them are old and European and therefore my findings must be different. . . .One point I want to stress is that the character I portray is not against the world — he thinks the world is against him. I consider this important because it shows that he is not a juvenile dramatizing his condition, but rather that his faulty perception of the world causes him to dramatize it. In The Catcher In the Rye the position is reversed
Unfortunately — or could it be otherwise? — I feel very detached from what they call “The Australian Way of Life”. Australianisms seem false and meaningless to me — “fair dinkum” they do, but I “dig” the beatnik jargon. It comes naturally....
