Moonlight Downs (12 page)

Once, years before, I’d been out bush with Lincoln and the mob. It was a stiff winter’s night, and I was caught unprepared: not enough clothes or dogs, my knees knocking, my legs laced with ice. Lincoln, personally oblivious to weather, must have heard me shivering. He threw on another blanket but it didn’t help. Then he dug up a shovelful of hot coals and buried it under my swag.

‘Ere ya go, li’l Nangali,’ he whispered. ‘That’ll warm ya.’

Warm me? My God, it suffused me, it seeped into my bones in ways I’d never felt before. And hadn’t felt in all the years away from Moonlight.

Until now.

Taboo

I AWOKE at dawn feeling strangely uncomfortable, chilled. Hazel was lying with her back to me, perfectly still, but there was none of the peace of sleep about her. I touched her shoulder, and she rolled over and looked at me. She was holding an owl feather to her chest, and it was wet with tears. I touched her cheek.

‘What is it, Hazel?’ I whispered.

No reply.

‘Are you crying for your father?’

‘Maybe. Maybe for you too. Everything so tangled up—just like it was when you went away. You stir everything up so much, Emily. Things are just beginning to work out for us here, then you come back and it’s crazy again.’

I didn’t know what to say, except that I’d been asking similar questions of myself.

She lifted herself onto one arm, looked down at me. ‘That painting,’ she said, nodding at the one on the chair. ‘Remember the story I told you?’

‘The diamond dove and the white devil?’

‘You’re in that painting too, Em. Trouble is I can’t figure out where. Dunno if you’re the devil or the dove.’

I lay there for a while, saying nothing, then climbed out of the swag, went and sat on the back step.

This was where it had happened. Somewhere in the swirling colours of the dawn I saw myself again, saw a fourteen-year-old slip of a girl in a yellow dress walking along the track down by the waterhole, her arms folded, her eyes glowing with wonder at what the world was doing.

It was afternoon then, a crackling, ozone-laced afternoon. Lightning cleaved the western sky; batteries of rain hammered the distant hill-tops. The ranges were disappearing under a swivelling grey veil, but it wasn’t here yet: golden beams lowered in through the thunderclouds and turned the trees into a kaleidoscope of green and yellow. Wind stirred, creatures were scuttling for cover, but to me it seemed that an unaccountable stillness slowly arose and enveloped me.

Hazel was nowhere to be seen. We’d been doing a bit of muckabout hunting and had separated, trying to track a wallaby. She was probably back at the gaolhouse by now. I stopped, stood there listening, waiting for what I didn’t know, hardly daring to breathe.

And then, somewhere in that roaring silence, I heard it: music, a strange, ethereal melody that seemed to shake the very leaves in the trees. I looked around, alert, an ominous curiosity looming up inside me. The music was coming from the west, from the direction of the cave hill.

My heart told me to piss off as quickly as I could, to get back to the gaol, find Hazel, ride home. This place was taboo for women. But I was of an age where I was beginning to listen as much to my head as to my heart, and I felt as if there was a massive rope around my waist, dragging me in. I hesitated, then turned around, crouched low and headed for the cave.

It was getting on for dark by the time I got there, and I made my way nervously through the bush. As I drew closer to the hills the music seemed to swivel around and come from another direction. I followed, but it shifted again, and I became disoriented: the song was a circle whose centre was everywhere at once.

I began to back away, but the music changed tempo and key and took on a new intensity, a screaming-in-your skull quality, a vicious rhythm that threatened to tear the top off my head.

Panic and bile reared in my throat. I ran, cascading through the melaleuca, my bare feet flying over rough ground, until at some point I slipped on a root and slammed into the earth. Fire and darkness jarred in my mind, a rush of images roaring through. Snakes hissed, scorpions twisted; the wind screamed and a shadowy figure seemed to rise out of the earth, firing a volley of crystals into my brain. I lay huddled on the ground, my ears covered, my eyes clenched, a chasm of dread opening before me. I was on the point of falling when a hand touched my shoulder.

Hazel.

This all occurred many years ago. Since then I’ve travelled the world, been to some desperate places, seen a lot of good and a lot of evil; but Hazel following me into that place remains the most courageous thing I’ve ever seen.

‘Emily,’ she mouthed, her face stretched with fear, ‘what are you
doin
? We gotta get outta here! Come on!’ She dragged me to my feet and we ran, white-eyed and tear-arsed like there was a howling tornado at our backs. She held onto my hand; kept holding it as I stumbled through the spinifex. Held on still as I tripped one last time and fell, a wave coming over me, gathering me up and sweeping me out into the merciful night.

When I came to, it was to the accompaniment of a slow, bouncing pain in my temple, the slap and jangle of leather and metal, the smell of horse sweat. I raised my head. The ground swivelled for a moment, then flew up at me, but before I could fall too far I felt a steadying hand on my shoulder. I dragged myself upright, rubbed my eyes, realised I was draped across a horse’s withers. I turned around, found myself looking at a familiar, reassuring face.

‘Lincoln?’ I rasped.

His expression was a fearful mask of sorrow and resignation.

‘Lincoln, what’s going on?’

‘What goin on?’ he said, wearily shaking his head. ‘Old Emily bin muckin up, like always.’

I noticed Hazel on her own horse, moving along behind us. She was grim faced, silent, staring into the distance.

I heard a dog bark and my own house appeared before me. Lincoln walked the horse up to the veranda, where my father was standing with his hands on his hips and a scowl on his face.

The horse drew to a halt. I made to jump down, but before I could do so Lincoln put a hand on my shoulder:

‘Nangali…’

I turned around, looked up at him, lowered my eyes: ‘I’m sorry Lincoln.’

‘Sorry no matter. Just listen to me, one time. You always lookin for somethin. Lookin ahead, long way. That’s okay, might be you learn a lot of thing, but sometime you gotta slow down, listen to them ol people. Take a look inside yourself. Understand?’

‘Understand,’ I nodded, shame-faced.

I climbed down, went into the house, where my father’s anger seemed almost a relief after Lincoln’s disappointment. He calmed down soon enough, though, made us both a cup of tea and joined me at the kitchen table.

‘What are we going to do with you, Em?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Jesus, Emily. You broke into a men’s sacred place. There’s people out there who think you should be dead.’

‘Jesus.’

‘That won’t happen, of course—not with Lincoln and me around, but you’re not to go anywhere near the camp. Not if you want to stay in one piece.’

And that was when he laid it on me: he thought I should leave the station. Straightaway.

Still rattled by my own stupidity, I sat there in a stony silence as he outlined his reasoning and his plans. He told me he’d been worrying for years about my lack of formal education, about what he called my ‘wasted talent’. Said I was fourteen now, that the crunch years were looming, and that if I was ever going to make anything of myself it was time to get started. He had a sister in Adelaide who’d offered to take me in, and the Aboriginal Scholarships Program would cover most of the costs.

‘And it’s not just you,’ he said, frowning. ‘Right now I’m worried about the whole box and dice.’

‘Which box and dice?’

‘All of us here. The community. Sivvier’s bringing in more and more of his own people.’ Brick Sivvier had taken over the property a few weeks before. ‘The other day I had some shifty git come sniffin around the workshop like he owned it. Went down to the Big House to talk to Brick about it, and he looked down his nose at me as if I was some kind of cockroach. And he’s talking about the blackfellers like they’re not even there. Thing is, Em, I dunno if any of us are gonna be here much longer.’

My initial reaction was anger: Moonlight Downs was all the home I knew, and I was buggered if I was going to see us kicked off it. But as the day wore on, as Jack went off to work and I mooned around the house, other ideas began to rise to the surface. I’d never been further south than Alice Springs. I’d always thought of ‘Down South’, the city, as some kind of mechanical monster looming across the other side of the desert, something that chewed you up and spat you out.

But if there was danger in those crowded streets, there was, as well, a certain allure. The city was the place where things happened, where the decisions and the money were made, where fashions and ideas were fomented.

And there was something else. As I grew older I was feeling more and more hemmed in by the restrictions and narrow-mindedness of the community, more torn between the black and white aspects of my heritage. The incident at the cave was the crowning shame of a series of indiscretions: I’d been arguing with the elders, asking too many questions, talking back, chatting up boys of the wrong skin.

Could I see myself spending the rest of my life in this dump?

No way.

The wide, white world was beckoning. I knew I’d have to tackle it some day; given the mess in which I found myself, maybe now was the time.

That night, after Jack had gone to sleep, I snuck out of my bedroom window, ran down to the camp, hid in the darkness and spied upon Hazel and her family. Eventually the others drifted off to bed and she was left alone by the fire, brooding over a pannikin of tea. The depression seemed to radiate out from her, and I cursed the bloody-mindedness—my own—that had brought her to this pass. I crept in close, flicked a pebble at her back.

‘Hazel!’ I called softly.

She looked around, spotted me in the darkness and frowned, but sidled over to where I lay. ‘What you doin here?’ she whispered.

‘Had to talk to you.’

‘Don’t let anybody see you, Emily. You should go back home now.’

‘What’s going to happen to you, Hazel?’

A brief silence ensued, then she said, ‘They’re marryin me off.’

‘What! Who to?’

‘You know that Jangala, Jimmy Lively, over Kirrinyu?’

‘Shit. He’s older than your father. And he’s already got a wife.’

She shrugged.

‘Hazel,’ I said, ‘I’m goin away…’

‘Where away?’

‘Down south.’

‘Alice?’

‘Adelaide.’

‘Adelaide!’

‘Got no choice, Hazel, but I’ll be back, I promise.’ I squeezed her hand.

A voice called out from the shack. ‘Hazel!’

‘Comin,’ she responded, then looked back at me and whispered, ‘Oh Emily, why you gotta break every rule in the book? Can’t you at least read the bloody thing first?’

I didn’t know what to say. She kissed me, fiercely, then went to join her little sister in the swag.

‘Goodnight Hazel,’ I heard her father call, and then his voice dropped a decibel or two: ‘And goodnight to you too, Emily Tempest.’

I sat there in the darkness for another ten minutes, an ineffable weariness stealing over me. ‘I’ll be back,’ I mouthed to the sleeping camp.

The next day Jack drove me into Bluebush, where I spent the day getting ready to go down south. That evening Jack put a call through to Brick Sivvier and was told that he needn’t come back to work, his services were no longer required. Neither of us was surprised, though we put a different spin on it. To Jack it was the incentive he needed to get to work on a promising mining lease out at Jennifer Creek. To me it seemed part of the punishment for my transgression. And when we found out, soon afterwards, that the Warlpuju had been given the arse as well, the proximity of the events was not lost on me.

Our last day was their last day. Jack and I drove out to pick up our gear and we met them on the road to Bluebush. The picture is still there, mig-welded into my memory: the line of cars, the women weeping, the kids gawking, the men ash-faced. Hazel was nowhere to be seen.

Twelve years on I’d grown up, acquired an education and travelled the world. But still, apparently, I’d failed to redeem myself in the eyes of the person whose acceptance I wanted most.

I heard the door of the gaol rasp and she came out and joined me. We sat there in silence, until I rolled a smoke and offered one to her.

‘Shit, Em,’ she said, ‘you trying to corrupt me? I’m supposed to be the health worker, you know?’

‘Not exactly a huge crowd for you to set an example for, is there?’