Craft For a Dry Lake

by Kim Mahood

  They have not noticed the creek before, meandering its shallow course between spinifex and ti-tree to the lake’s edge. This requires a new game, a shift of mood. Intrepid, fearless, they turn their sturdy boat towards the mouth of this great river. Wild savages inhabit the dense jungle along its banks, anacondas and alligators writhe in the shallows. They land the boat with a flurry, dodging reptile coils and fangs. On the white sand lie fragments of worked stone, razor-edged flakes the colour of rust and amber. The boy picks up one of these and makes cutting motions with it, scoring marks in the soft sand. The older child, the girl, sits cross-legged and fits cores and flakes together, then strikes them apart again, searching about in the sand for the stone tools necessary for the task. They gather up these pieces of coloured stone and pile them together. Each stone contains its own mystery, holding in itself the memory of the other hands which have held and crafted and discarded it. The children run fingers and thumb over scooped surfaces and serrations and curves, and measure the weight and shape and warmth of stone in the palms of their hands. They take up their piles of treasure and scatter them again onto the sand.

  The light is changing. Beyond the circle of ti-tree the anthills cast lengthening shadows. The explorers launch their boat onto the river and paddle out into the great still expanse of the lake. The marauding Tanamites are threatening from the east, looming in the guise of giant anthills, red and lumpish, rank upon rank of them right back to the horizon. The children paddle desperately in the creamy water, trying to reach the safety of their campsite on the western shore. The Tanamites cannot cross water. The lake will hold them back.

  The girl is bemused by this boy who is her brother. He has an unself-conscious curiosity which allows him to engage with the world in a way she cannot. He is alive with an extraordinary intelligent energy and goes headlong from moment to moment with a kind of fearless glee. Since she has gone away to school they no longer fight. With her absence he has grown into his own place, and those passionate fierce sibling battles no longer have any point. She has discovered instead that they share a kind of leaping imagination, a delight in this world which is their own place, a language which is largely without words, which is the language of the country.

  They make a campfire before the sun goes down and put the billy on to boil. Dingoes come to drink a little distance from the camp, their coats reddish-gold in the late afternoon light. The waterbirds make a great to-do about the day coming to an end. The lake turns deep pink and then dulls to violet, and the evening star makes its appearance in a sky of the same colour. The children are quiet as the daylight fades, busying themselves with preparations for the night, building the fire up against the encroaching darkness. They poke potatoes into the coals to bake and fry chunks of steak on the flat of a shovel. The night is moonless, and as the sky darkens the stars come on as if a million switches have been flicked. The Southern Cross is up there, and the Saucepan, and the soft luminosity of Magellan’s Cloud. The Milky Way looks like the shining wake of space dust raised by a racing mob of horses. The children imagine their counterparts, somewhere out there on one of those spinning stars, sitting beside their own lake and looking out across the same universe.

  They assure each other that the Tanamites are safely held back by the far shore of the lake, then crawl into their swags, to sleep cradled in the white sand among the protective shrubbery of ti-tree.

  I WILL HAVE TO SPEND TIME and camp here. There is something unnerving about finding the lake still here. For a long time it has existed only in my imagination. Now its familiar contours hold the traces of a remembered time far more intensely than I have ever imagined. And yet its realness simultaneously displaces memory, insists on the passage of time which has separated me from place and memory. I sense something of the impulse which drives the Aborigines to revisit sites, to reinvest them with the meanings and memories necessary to make them habitable. It is one thing to keep a place alive in the mind, another to go back to that place and hold both past and present together. I pull my swag off the back of the vehicle and unroll the white groundsheet. Already it is beginning to accumulate the dirt and marks of the journey. It is almost the same colour as the pale sand. I mark a rectangle in its centre, drawing the boundaries of this country to which I have returned, formal, fictional, necessary boundaries which are no more than a convention, a point of departure. Using a wash of dark pigment I fill the rectangle, crawling about on hands and knees, spreading the black stain across the canvas. The thoughtless, repetitious action is a relief, a respite from thinking. My shadow intercedes between me and the work.

  A shadow moves too on the lake surface, though when I turn to see what casts it, there is nothing. Only the echo of a presence I have glimpsed before, moving through the pages of my journal.

  The windy days are the most difficult, the dust gets into eyes and mouth and nostrils, and the wind blows away the drawings on the lake surface before they are even completed. The maps must be redrawn daily. The half-erased maps of the windy days are a measure of the lives we now lead, moving aimlessly about the perimeters of the lake systems, adrift somewhere between the memory of a nomadic past and the dream of a transformative future.

  Sometimes this temporary nature of the maps suggests the fragility and impermanence of our way of life. And sometimes it seems like an act of faith, a folly which celebrates each moment in which the marks are made, exist and fade. There are times when I am alone, far out on the lake surface, when I feel as if the bones in my body are continuous with the stratas of limestone which break through the surface of the country, when my blood is the same as the salty fluid that still runs between veins of rock beneath the surface, when my teeth and hair and nails are the brittle grasses and ti-tree scrub which grow about the rim of the lake. It feels as if the lake dust holds the substance of all the people who have made the journeys I write into its surface, as if every particle of dust is a word from the songs.

  The wind has blown lake sand across the wet pigment, blurring the edges of the boundaries I have drawn. The shadows are growing longer. It is time to go.

  9

  MY MEMORY OF TRACKS RUNS as deep as an instinct. I feel my way towards the sites I remember, and they are still there. I drive back from Lake Ruth along the sandy wheel tracks of the old road, searching for the track to Dakoty Bore, which is on a small watercourse south of the homestead. In good seasons there is a waterhole in the creek bed. This is the next point after Lake Ruth on the track between Tanami and Inningarra. It has another name, an Aboriginal name which I don’t know. But I do know how it came to be called Dakoty.

  IT IS CHRISTMAS EVE, AND THE children have rigged makeshift lighting and some props on the back lawn. They have discovered an obscure recording on the flip-side of an EP and are entranced by it. They have been quoting from it for days. A small stretch of the imagination transforms the scene into a Western bar-room, with a small blonde bartender, an androgynous teenage cowboy and a tiny bearded old man. A dog lounges at the foot of the bar. A small dapper figure in a very large hat struts into the bar and announces himself.

  —Howdy, barkeep. They call me the Denver Dragon. I’m a-lookin for a feller named Billy the Kid.

  The bartender glances at the cowboy, who makes no move, and answers the newcomer.

  —I heared he was waay up in Dakoty.

  The Dragon struts and preens, orders drinks all round, and proceeds to outline what he will do to Billy the Kid when he finds him. He lets it be known that he is a dangerous customer with a string of dead outlaws to his credit. Tiny Granpaw in his cotton-wool beard downs his whisky and watches the Dragon with bright sceptical eyes. The bartender plays along, bats eyelids and murmurs—You must have a mighty lot of notches on your gun.

  —Lady, I got so many notches on my gun I just natcherly whittled the handle plumb away.

  The Dragon, gratified with his captive audience, including the group of adults on the perimeter of the lawn, hams outrageously. He sidles up to the silent cowboy at the
bar.

  —What’s your name, small fry?

  There are a few snorts from the audience, since he is not much over waist high on the cowboy.

  —William Bonney.

  —William Bonney! Now ain’t that just the sweetest name.

  —Some folks call me … Billy the Kid.

  Granpaw chortles and scampers up onto the bar for a better view, utterly carried away by the drama of it all. The bartender swats at him, angel face bright.

  —B … B … Billy the Kid! But I heered you was waay up in Dakoty!

  —I was in Dakoty. I’m here now.

  The Kid is relishing the deadpan, laconic role.

  —W … W … Why Billy, I’m mighty pleased to meet you. I been wantin’ to make your aquaintance for a long time.

  —That’s what I heered you say a while ago.

  —Aw Billy, I was just foolin’.

  —Well I ain’t!

  Billy pulls her gun and aims at the Dragon’s feet. Granpaw whoops and does a war dance on the bar and the bartender puts the bottles out of harm’s way. The Denver Dragon howls and dances across the lawn to the accompaniment of cap-gun reports, and the dog gets into the act by trying to bite Billy. The audience roars and claps and the players line up for a curtain call.

  THE BACK YARD HAS NO LIMITS, it simply stretches out into the mulga. Each child has marked out the boundaries of its chosen territory, on which it proceeds to create a child-sized version of the world in which it lives. The older boy builds a tiny bough shed as a concession to a homestead and busily builds paddocks and a set of yards, perfect in detail down to the bronco panel. A plastic toy horse drags roped lizards up to the panel, where a pretence is made of branding and earmarking them. He track-rides his boundaries and sinks bores and puts up windmills in strategic places. Southern Cross, who provide the windmills for the stations of the adult world, send out several small demonstration mills, which take pride of place on the children’s stations. The boy’s friend, who has come to stay indefinitely, works his property in a similar vein, but taking his lead from the other more forceful child. Both of them employ the smallest boy to help with fencing and drilling, since he has decided that he does not want a station of his own. He feels the enormity of such an enterprise and prefers to be an itinerant among his propertied siblings. Perhaps he is already suspicious of the thrall which land exerts, an attitude he is to carry into adulthood.

  The little girl puts much of her attention into the homestead, carefully built from a cardboard carton, with all the necessary rooms and a piece of tin for its roof. She plants a lawn and small twigs for trees, which she waters regularly, and has her small brother help her build a fence to keep the stock out. Many of the dramas of her world take place around the homestead, with its people, poddy calves and foals, dogs, cats, and chooks. Beyond it is a magical domain, in which anything is possible. She is a beautiful child with a determined nature, miscast in her position in the family as the third child out of four.

  The smallest boy lives to a great extent in his own world, largely overlooked among more assertive and capable siblings. He spends a lot of his time in the Aboriginal camp, pottering about annoying the women, who tell him about the demons and spirits which inhabit the local landscape, in order to instil in him a proper fear and respect or to frighten him into going home to the safety of the big house.

  He is a willing participant in the games devised by his blonde sister. These two live in the shadow of the older brother and sister, knowing they cannot hope to achieve the status of the Girl and the Boy. This disturbs the little girl more than her younger brother, who is happy enough to avoid the expectations attached to such status.

  When the oldest sister comes home from boarding school for holidays, she is taken on a detailed tour of the stations, given a demonstration of lizard branding and bore drilling, shown the careful small fences and the dimensions of each property. She is so taken with them that for a moment she is tempted to join them, to mark out her own piece of country which will encompass the rough outcrops of limestone and bits of bare baked red sand. Her mind is busy with possibilities. But regretfully she gives up the idea. She is not part of their world any more.

  The arrival at the station always takes her by surprise. Often they arrive towards nightfall, having left town the previous day and camped somewhere along the track. She is overwhelmed by the colours of the falling dusk, the beat of the generator that is such a small sound in the prevailing silence, the yellow light of the homestead verandah and the cheerful shouting of children. These arrivals are in their way almost as painful as the departures. All the closed vulnerable places in her are invaded by feelings which she can hardly bear.

  The children dance along the verandah and claim her. She is clutched and pulled to come and look, see here. A white mouse with babies, a drawing of a rough-tail goanna stealing duck eggs, new puppies. And tomorrow we have to show you the new chickens, and the colts that are being broken in, and the poddy calves. The smallest brother is hovering, not big enough to make himself heard, about to be tearful. The girl reaches through a welter of arms and legs for him. She is home. It is real.

  Away from it, it does not exist. It must be a place she has imagined, infiltrating between the louvre-banded light of classrooms. It is neverland, a dreamscape displaced by the scepticism of schoolgirls.

  —Nobody lives out there!

  And who is she, against all this female certainty, to hold out and say—I do. She is rendered homeless, the world circumscribed between dormitory and classroom walls. But here among children on the evening-lit verandah it is real, and she is home. The pain of having to leave it again is inseparable from the joy of being here.

  At night, unable to sleep, she goes out into the darkness and begins to walk. There is a half-moon, bright enough to see clearly by, and she walks for a long time, away from the homestead, until she is on the track to the lake. About her she can sense many small movements of night creatures, and once a piece of the darkness takes the shape of a black dingo which crosses her path and becomes darkness again. She must touch everything as she passes, the hard earth of the anthills, the soft shredding bark of the ti-tree, the fine sandpapery texture of leaves of the desert gums, even thrusting a hand into a spiny clump of spinifex and pulling it back through the soft feathery seed heads. As she approaches the lake the sand becomes softer, and she kneels and then lies flat, face-down, hearing a heartbeat which must be her own drumming back into her head from the earth.

  The lake is shallow, the moonlight makes the surface appear like a sheet of tin. The ti-tree throws bent and twisted shadows which make a mad black unmoving dance on the sand. At the edge of the water she takes off her clothes and wades out. It is like wading into a pool of mercury, heavy silver stuff which beads and runs from her thighs. In front of her the water is perfectly still, and she can see to the far shore. Behind her the ripples are sluggish, a slow drift of indigo channels back to the shelf of sand where she entered the water. At the centre of the lake the water is waist high, and she turns then and looks back, and spins about slowly until she has scanned the whole circle of the shoreline. The water is warm, and she crouches until she is kneeling in the mud on the bottom, and then dips further, beginning to pull up handfuls of the mud and plaster it on her breasts and face and belly. She smears herself in an ecstacy of mud, rolling about in the water, and stands mud-coated, sliced off at the navel.

  SHE GOES DOWN IN THE MORNING to the yards, where they are breaking in the new colts. It involves sweat and dust and some blood, and a subdued but focused energy. To watch the horsebreaker in action is to see a process of attraction and seduction, the horse, once it overcomes its initial fear, as coy and tentative as a shy teenager. The girl watches from the steel rails of the round yard. The horsebreaker moves like a boxer, or a dancer, responsive always to the creature with which he is engaged in this fragile partnership. When the colt nudges the man and is rewarded with a palm sliding gently and firmly down the side of its head, s
he feels the same hand brush her face from brow to jaw, closing over nose and mouth in an inexorable, quiet grip. She watches the brown hands touch the colt and imagines them touching her.

  When they do, some years later, it is exactly as she had expected. Like the colt she reels away, afraid of and desiring to be touched, and then comes back for more. Whether it is only horses that he understands, or girls, she couldn’t say. He is gentle and infinitely patient. The most recalcitrant colt is won over in the end by his strange tenacious affection.

  The horsebreaker is bound to this country by blood and knowledge. He belongs here, and only here. Through him she touches the country. Later, when she hears herself described as being ‘broken in’ by him, she can only concur. It doesn’t matter, because by then she has long moved on, but she remembers him with affection. After all, he loved all his horses, and always treated them well.

  10

  TODAY I OFFERED TO DO a day’s mustering because they are a man short in the stock camp. They are mustering around Wild Potato Bore, bringing the cattle back to the homestead. Wild Potato was the main camp. I know this country so well, though there is a fence line now from the camp to the bore. They have fenced in some of the plains country. The timber yards are ramshackle, the remains of the bough shed at the old camp are still standing. I have forgotten nothing, the daylight start, the sudden chill just before sunrise, the smell of saddle blankets and the recalcitrance of cold leather. I am already thinking I must be mad to do this voluntarily. I know exactly how it is going to feel. The skin rubbed raw on the legs, nose and mouth clogged with dust, the ache of unaccustomed muscles being called on.

  The Aboriginal stockmen ride a little apart, bemused by my presence. I ride up and ask the oldest of them how long he has worked here. He has white hair and a young face, it is impossible to tell his age.