Carpentaria (2 page)

All this was part and parcel of the excitement of Desperance when the first multinational mining company came into the region. Numerous short-lived profiteering schemes were concocted for the locals, in order to serve the big company’s own interests as they set about pillaging the region’s treasure trove: the publicly touted curve of an underground range embedded with minerals.

The elaborate white linen ceremony, paid for by the mining company, attracted southern politicians who flew in for the day. Most of them were known by the local dignitaries as a bunch of fly-by-nighters. And what’s more, as they rolled out the welcome smile, some locals whispered unmentionable insults behind the backs of their very important visitors. Other locals who liked the sound of their own voices attacked the politicians straight out with a diatribe of insults. Yelling out, the crowd picked up bits wafting in the wind gusts:
Youse are always cowering down on the ground
.
Are youse the runt of the Australian political litter or something? Yah! falling over yaselves to any foreign investor flocking up the steps of Parliament, knocking on the big door, and smelling like money
.

The politicians and mining executives mingled uncomfortably with the crowd, then pushed themselves up against the old hero Normal for a photo opportunity, and got snapped by members of the media circus who had jockeyed for free rides on the official executive jets. Then everything got ruined by a normal sort of dust storm thundering in from the south. A thick wall of red dust mingled with all manner of crunched vegetation and plastic shopping bags gathered up in its path, damaging the cut sandwiches when it came through. The fidget-prone adults panicked, running for cover along with their red and green cordial-stained screaming children.

Then came a violent electrical storm when the rain ruined the day anyway – as the town’s sceptics said it would. A taut occasion, despite these dramatic interventions; enough time for the now disposed-of State Premier to complete the ceremony of officially changing the name of the river from that of a long deceased Imperial Queen, to ‘Normal’s River’. Traditional people gathered up for the event mumbled,
Ngabarn,
Ngabarn,
Mandagi
, and so did Normal in a very loud and sour-sounding voice over the loudspeaker in his extremely short thankyou address, although those who knew a fruit salad full of abuse in the local languages knew he was not saying
Thank you! Thank you!
and belly-laughed themselves silly because the river only had one name from the beginning of time. It was called
Wangala
.

It was a funny thing about the river. Anybody and everybody thought they might ride this river like some legendary buckjumping wild horse called Diesel or Gidgee or Mulga. People were always travelling up to the northern coastline over the rough roads of the Gulf on long weekends. They’d haul up and launch straight over the side into the yellow river: flash fishing boats with sixties country and western names, like
Donna
,
Stella
and
Trixie
. Bright-coloured boats, powered by engines of many horsepowers, bought with top dollar gained from doing stretch shifts two kilometres down underground, hauling up rich ores scraped from the mother load embedded in sequences of rock that looked like the growth rings of a powerful, ancient being.

And on the water they would cast a line here, a line there, over the sides with state of the art fishing tackle, but no knowledge of the way of the river. Nothing was thought about it. There was a considerable number of people living in the region now, with the great influx of mine workers who had nothing to do on their days off. More new mines became established in the region with little regard to anyone’s say-so.

After the mining stopped, neither Normal Phantom and his family, nor his family’s relations, past or present, rated a mention in the official version of the region’s history. There was no tangible evidence of their existence. Even in Uncle Micky’s collection of bullet cartridges.

Micky had lived with a metal detector for God knows how long. He said he had a fever which drove him on because he would never know when he picked up the last piece of evidence – all of those forty-fours, thirty thirtys, three-o-threes, twelve gauges – all kinds of cartridges used in the massacre of the local tribes. He had maps, names of witnesses, details, the lot. A walking encyclopaedia. Now his voice lives on in the great archive of cassettes which he left for the war trials he predicted would happen one day. But no tourists go to Micky’s museum. Maybe because it was built in the wrong spot. That’s fighting for you. Fighting, fighting all the time for a bit of land and a little bit of recognition.

All the old mines, old mining equipment, old miners, old miners’ huts, skeletons of miners in the cupboard, anything to do with mining was packaged in a mishmash of nothing words and marketed on gloss as the ultimate of local tourist attractions. The shiny covers of these tourist brochures celebrating selected historical sites and museums ought to grab you from across the room at airports, hotels and motels, or from the rack of any tourist or travel centre selling the highlights of mining. You can’t even hide the stuff because of its iridescence.

But this was not Vaudeville. Wars were fought here. If you had your patch destroyed you’d be screaming too. The serpent’s covenant permeates everything, even the little black girls with hair combed back off their faces and bobby-pinned neatly for church, listening quietly to the nation that claims to know everything except the exact date its world will end. Then, almost whispering, they shyly ask if the weather has been forecast correctly today.

If you are someone who visits old cemeteries, wait awhile if you visit the water people. The old Gulf country men and women who took our besieged memories to the grave might just climb out of the mud and tell you the real story of what happened here.

Normal Phantom turned away from the glory of the storm clouds lacing the sea, to look in the eye, grab by the horns, all the grey-coloured calamities of a man’s life. Behold the sight of welcome home, embedded in the never-ending rattling corrugated-iron shanty fortress, built from the sprinklings of holy water, charms, spirits, lures acquired from packets of hair dye, and discarded materials pinched from the rubbish dump across the road.

This was Number One house. Normal Phantom’s house was the first blackfella place built on the edge of Desperance, before the two warring nations, one with, one without land, ended up circling the whole town. The structure of the house was a tribute to far-off monuments representing noteworthy moments of history.

His marriage to Angel Day had climbed the crest of a mountain of misgiving, and, ‘only when she had gone’, was he able to understand that the woman had always been a hornet’s nest waiting to be disturbed. After three decades of shared life, such a single, independent thought was a total revelation to a big man like Normal Phantom.

The house was a hornet’s nest, like Angel Day, and Normal spoke of it as if it were her. The house had been inadvertently built on the top of the nest of a snake spirit. He always blamed her for that. From day one, he knew and always said
,
‘This house makes my bones ache
.
’ He told her how he felt something was wrong, how he could feel something coming from under the ground into his bones. He only spoke to deaf ears. But he knew whenever he left the house, he would instantly feel as though he had unshackled himself from the weight of a sack strapped over his back. Then, when he came back, he felt as though he had been hypnotised into thinking that he would never be able to move away from its field of gravitation again, even if he willed himself from it. Perhaps some day he would be stuck forever. So what? He should have told someone who cared.

He knew such a phenomenon existed, because each time he left, it was harder to pull himself away from the house. ‘Move,’ he told her, but if she had heard anything he said, she gave her usual response to the movement of his lips and in her flattest voice said, ‘No way.’

‘I was born near lilies so I must see lilies,’ she once told him, calmly pouting towards the waterlilies growing in the swamp at the back, and once that happened, not even a grappling pick would have plied another word about the matter from her own sweet lips.

To be fair, Angel Day had looked around for days before choosing what she called ‘her spot’, if anyone could be so blatantly shameless to go around thinking they were so high and mighty, to just pluck out a spot for themselves in the bush and say, ‘This is mine.’ Well! Our Angel did that and got away with it. The spot she chose was amidst a grove of prickly pear thickets, right next to the mosquito-swarming swamp. She said she chose it because it was a private place not seen from the road. Afterwards, still all hot and bothered from searching up and down the countryside for her house site, she parked herself.

The first six children born had sat beside her under the shade of a snappy gum until she erected a more permanent shade with two blankets. This was all she owned, but it was good enough. She told Norm, when he returned from the sea next time and found her there, that she would not move again. He retaliated by not speaking to her for days. While those two fought out their differences, the whole family lived their daily lives under the blankets, six months of cold winds, then heat, followed by rain blowing left, right and centre down on top of them, again and again, until? Until there was peace. Norm did nothing, not a single thing, to help her to build a roof over their heads – as if that would stop Angel Day from doing what she wanted.

He caught bream fish if he felt like it: he did no more, and no less. If there were no fish, he expected her to provide, which she did. The whole of Uptown rallied over that poor Aboriginal woman struggling under a tree with her children, condemning Normal Phantom. If he thought there was going to be an end of it, he was wrong. She, smarter than a snake, plied enough work out of pity to permeate the pure, undiluted quintessential essence of herself into that ground, much as she used magic to erect a home from scraps.

Angel Day always claimed the spot where she forced Norm to continue building their house was the best place they had ever lived, because all she had to do was walk across the road to the rubbish dump, and there she could get anything her heart desired –
for free
. She thought the dump was magnificent, as anyone dirt poor would. The way she talked, you would have thought she was a very rich woman, and it was nothing for her to walk back and forth to the dump two dozen times a day to cart back pieces of sheet iron, jerry cans, bits of car bodies, pieces of rope, logs, plastic, discarded curtains and old clothing. She got the family through the Wet as dry as a bone. Diligently, she undertook the chore of checking for leaks, making alterations, choosing the right bits and pieces from her pile of accumulated junk which she leant, tied or stitched to the original blankets, until she ended up with an igloo made of rubbish.

Norm fretted, saying, Blah! Blah! This and that. Saying that he thought his children had disappeared forever in amongst the piles of old clothes stored inside their dark, dank dwelling. Constantly he called them, ‘Come outside,’ so he could see them, lest they were tricked by the lurking snake. She never heard a single word. She was busy with blood on her bare hands from extracting nails from rotted timber. The six little children helped her by sizing the nails, bolts and screws. And months passed by.

Norm was still a young man who either wanted to be out at sea fishing, or else riding wild horses on the spinifex-covered high plains, working with the cattle. Away jobs in the stock camps. Oh! Those were hard but fair days that was the truth. Working with cattle, grown men whipped the living Jesus out of other grown men but who cared? He looked at all this newfangled activity of self-sufficiency being built on sheer stubbornness and said to her his final word, ‘Let’s go back to the river country.’ He loved the sound of the clear waters running through petrified forests hidden for millions of years beneath the gently calling sounds of fronds dangling down from the old palms and fruit-giving date trees lining the river. But Angel Day had crossed the bridge. She had no jolly intention of leaving. Look! Can’t you see the pile of riches she had accumulated? Was all this for nothing? ‘How would I be able to move all of this down there?’ she replied.

Goodness! Those were modern days, and Angel Day was a very rich woman, too good now in comparison to the years she had spent living, eating and sleeping…where? in a swag? Oh! Those were the good old days Norm dreamed for. Her fortunes were growing out of hand. She now possessed dozens of Heinz baked bean tins and pickle bottles full of nails, loose screws and bolts. She became a genius in the new ideas of blackfella advancement. Bureaucratic people for the
Aborigine
s department said she had ‘Go’. She became a prime example of government policies at work and to prove it, they came and took pictures of her with a Pentax camera for a report.

The old Pricklebush people said what Angel Day had was purely magical, it was true, but sorry to say, of no benefit to anyone. This led them to say privately that she had acquired a disease from making her life out of living in other people’s rubbish. Who knew what kind of lurgies lurked in white trash? The dump was full of disease. And the Pricklebush said,
If she had
any sense, she ought to stay right away from the rubbish dump
. It was of no benefit to anyone if she had magical powers to make her more like the white people.

At the same time, there was no sense in denying the truth staring them in the face because there evidently was some: the great magnanimity given to Angel Day by the haunting spirits residing in the smelly residue, deep down in the gloomy, slime-dripping serpentine caverns of the dump. The ponderous, thinking people among the Pricklebush jumped to her defence,
Who was Normal to say
he wanted to live elsewhere, under a log with a bit of rag, worse than a
dog?
Angel accused him of chucking rubbish in her face. She said he did not think properly. When she told him he made her stomach sick just by thinking she should go and live like a dog in the bush, he replied: ‘You sure it is not the snake keeping warm there? Can’t be anything else.’ She was not listening, she was a genie counting her nails like a millionaire, drawing the world to her beck and call like a queen, mind you.

Poor old Normal Phantom, he caught a lift and took his soul down to the river country by himself, and when he returned weeks later, she had one basic room erected. ‘You can’t come back,’ she told him, unless he helped her. The old people intrigued, buttoned their lips and whispered: ‘She has airs for a woman.’ The stand-off was to last one minute with Norm
.
‘Alright then. You won’t see me for five years.’ She was not a complacent woman, the old people remarked. His ultimatum was over-the-top, so she claimed. So it was final. He walked back up the road, all the children were crying. She ignored the whole scene and continued working on the nails as though he did not exist.

Normal Phantom kept his promise. He went to sea and stayed away for five full years. When he returned, after the storms, he had his own small fishing boat. He had inherited his father’s memory of the sea, and he walked straight up to Angel Day, and told her in the face that he was prepared to hang around. He said there was too much water under the bridge to have to go around fighting his wife all of the time. Why waste his breath? In any case, the spot she had chosen was now just across from the driftwood piles thrown from the sea. She accused him of coming home smelling like a catfish but that didn’t stop child number seven being born: Kevin.

Angel was on her way to the rubbish dump palace where her seagull sentinels sat in the thousands on dead foliage, cardboard boxes, rusted iron, slashed tyres, pink plastic purses and cheap whatnot, guarding for nothing a humpteen amount of untold treasure.

It was Angel Day’s palace, so she thought. The other Pricklebush women said she thought of herself only, since that dump belonged to everybody. Oh! If that was so. It should be said that sometimes light breezes turned sour as lemons, as they did on that particular day. Back in the bay, where Normal Phantom was working on his boat, was the one place of tranquillity on earth left, where total ignorance reigned. Those idly watching Normal working, while taking little notice of him, scrubbing or something up and down along the side of his sea vessel, would have been mesmerised by the purity of peace and goodwill that belonged to the simple man out in the warming sun, trouser legs rolled up to the knees half covered in tidal mud. A leisurely job scraping the summer-dried fish guts from his paint-weathered boat, his head down to the work, wondering about painting the boat some fancy colours – capillary red, or a kingfisher’s azure blue, or sunflower yellow. Oh! The good old days. What a memory. A reminder of the showing-off days when men were men, and the fish were plentiful, and boats never dreamt about the colour of camouflaged grey.

Angel walked on towards the rubbish dump away from the children left asleep in their beds. She wanted to be alone with the seagulls who waited on guard while others followed, flapping quietly in her wake. Occasionally, one would flutter above her head for several moments, emitting small squalls, telling her secrets, reminiscing, reciting little prayers recalled from prior reincarnations, before, and just as suddenly, swinging off into formation again to rendezvous with the flocks following in from behind. After having spent the night roosting in the precinct of low-lying headlands and the swamp marshes of low tide, these large groupings of birds joined the ones already waiting, noisily parcelling out their prized scavenger lots for the day.

The morning jostling at the tip grew more infectious, as increasing numbers of birds squawked and screeched with their beaks open wide at one another, or flew above in threatening circles. Angel walked through it all, as if it was nothing. The mist was still heavy, and she went about her business, tearing apart the piles of rubbish delivered to the dump over the weekend.

The steamed contents smelt high. Her followers gladly tore apart the rotting scraps from the dinner tables of Uptown –
Oh! Yum! Fish and chips, steak and chips, sausages and chips
. Angel paused for a collection of well-used children’s storybooks, and sat down on the ground to gather them up into a pile, all of the little picture books, pages flung open halfway through the adventures of Mickey Mouse
,
Donald Duck, Peter Pan, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland. She flicked through the books with her thin childlike fingers. The blue-eyed gulls hovering, watched with disdainful interest, over her shoulder. They were just as engrossed as she was with the fantasy lands created in faraway places, of icy winters, cool forests and the paradise land of the rich people. Eventually, she placed the books carefully into the bottom of her sack so they would not become damaged. She had more to do. Ahead of her there were many mysteries to be discovered in the piles of fat green bags.

With the mist lifting, it would soon become too hot. She could already feel the sun piercing down on her head. The humidity was thick in the air. A light frown crossed her face. The crease in between her eyebrows was deepening with the thought of her chaotic life.