The Clay Dreaming (44 page)

‘In due process of time white men have introduced new arts into their country, clearing away useless forest and covering the rescued earth with luxuriant wheat crops, bringing also with them herds of sheep and horned cattle to feed upon the vast plains which formerly nourished but a few kangaroo, multiplying in such
numbers that they not only supply the whole of their adopted land with food, but their flesh is exported to the Mother Country. The superior knowledge of the white man thus gave to the Aborigines the means of securing their supplies of food, and therefore his advent was not a curse, but a benefit to them.’

‘Hear, hear!’ Various members of the audience expressed their hearty approval.

‘They could not,’ said Wood, twinkling his eyes, ‘take advantage of the opportunities thus offered to them, and instead of seizing upon these new means of procuring the three great necessaries of human life…food, clothing, and lodging…not only refused to employ them, but did their best to drive their benefactors out of the country, murdering the colonists, killing their cattle, destroying their crops, and burning their houses. The means were offered to them of infinitely bettering their social condition, means they could not appreciate, and, as a natural consequence, they have had to make way for those who could. These I term the unvariable Laws of Progression. The inferior must always make way for the superior, and such has ever been the case with the savage.’

‘
Hrrrah, hrrrah
.’

Copious applause. Sarah’s head was spinning. She had to sit down again.

Wood bowed and backed away as the secretary took the stand.

‘I thank Messrs Wake and Wood for their most excellent speeches,’ he said. ‘Almost everywhere, save in the older and more civilised nations, we see one world of people passing off the stage, and another, more highly developed world coming on. In a few years the surface of the earth will be utterly altered. Whole races that now rule supreme over immense tracts will have passed away for ever, and civilisation will turn to better account the lands that have so long been the undisturbed home of the “black fellow”. A new era will be inaugurated, and human responsibilities vastly multiplied.’

More applause.

Somebody within the audience rose to their feet.

‘Such a worldwide reform has never before occurred,’ he said, ‘but if so, may it not, at some far distant date, occur again? Europe, now pre-eminent in all the attainments of man, may have it for her destiny to repopulate the globe, and then to tarry in her onward career. It may be the lot of nations now springing into existence at the antipodes to outstrip her in the pursuit of knowledge, and, when ages shall have passed away, to supply, in their turn, a nobler race, a more perfect humanity, to the lands which now rank foremost in civilisation.’

Sarah understood the reference made to that same newspaper article, inspired in part by Aboriginal cricket at Lord’s, so annoying to Lambert. The very notion sparked off a good deal of disgruntled murmuring.

Not to be outdone, the unknown speaker raised his voice louder. ‘The New Zealand offspring of the imagination of our great essayist may be no
unreal creation of the imagination,’ he supposed, ‘and England may yet be indebted to her descendants in the south for a people who shall as far surpass her present occupants as the civilised Englishman of this day excels the halfbarbarous Maori.’

Whether he was being brave or foolish, the commentator was howled down.

‘The Chair recognises Dr Bertholdt Seemann.’

‘It is not wort’while to waste time in discussing the dream of Gibbon or Macaulay respecting the New Zealander,’ he said, ‘in his looking at the ruins of London! These speculations are only interesting as showing the profound ignorance of Anthropological science in men of genius and learning.’

Boomerang-like, the comment rebounded on the Fellow who had thrown it out.

Dr Hunt checked at his pocket watch, nose twitching. He looked like Tenniel’s white rabbit from Lewis Carroll’s
Alice
; but, when he spoke, the part voiced was that of the Mad Hatter.

‘Scientific societies,’ he spat, ‘are not intended to be theatres for the display of the eccentricities of their members, or f-f-for the ventilation of individual crochets or crudities, but for the real advancement of science. I do not know at this moment of
ernnhny
race who has raised themselves since we first
gnnnuu
them.’

‘
Mstrrh
Wood?’

‘The
owrahrr
mode of dealing with
theeze
people is the safe one to adopt with
ahhrr
savages…never trust
uhhm
, and
nahrahhr
cheat
ruhhm
.’

‘
Grrr Ga
?’

‘
Hahrrr rahhrrr snarrrrl ra raa. Nhgggnnr
.’

‘
Vvrrr. Shhhhha aahuunnnr gurrrrnn. Pcha, pchaa. Grrrawaa
.’

They were old baboons, sucking at plums and vomiting. Sarah fled. Her feet tripped and thumped on the carpeted stair. She had to grope for the brass handrail, salt tears streaking her cheeks and running into the corners of her mouth. Pharisees! Near-sighted Pharisees!

Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.

The distance from Brippoki’s chosen camp to Number 89 Great Russell-street is about four miles, negotiated at a steady jog.

Dragging his heels, he arrives at the Guardian’s house later than usual. He arrives to find the window-glass shut and the house in darkness.

Brippoki creeps around the tops of the buildings opposite. Huddled into a crouch, arms clasped over his head, he forces his heartbeat to slow.

A firebug shivers from room to room. Thara
baiame
. The Guardian sits with the father.

The light retreats, is snuffed out. Brippoki sky-walks around to the rear of the house, swinging from the branches of the tall trees there.

He observes Tharalarkin in the small room behind that of the father. She stands – dressed in a long white cloth he has seen once before – combing out her silvered hair. Unmoving, she stops and stares long and hard into the looking glass. She stands and stares until his limbs grow stiff, until long after steam from the hot tap has smoked her reflection, wiping out all trace of it.

As sure as day gives way to night, so eventually the night passes once more into day. In order that he might gather up the dew from where it spangles the longest grass, Brippoki rises early from his couch.

Hunger as much as thirst aggravates his wants. Pickings are slim – more so than back in the World, even deep in the desert country. He takes up a small spade of wood fashioned between idle hours, his
karko
. With this he can dig for grubs, edible roots, even a frog should one be sleeping under the ground. From each he may suck sometimes no more than a sip of liquid, and then roast them on the ashes of his modest fire. This bright morning, half an hour’s steady work only wins him a few stems of reed from the marshy bog. These he fires and then chews at length, to extract the softer parts, and as much goodness as they might grudgingly yield.

Wading in amongst the reeds, half burying himself in the mud – all that remains of the small canalside brook as it dries up – chills Brippoki’s blood. Lying supine beside his campfire, he builds it up again, until sufficient to roast a dish of water-beetles.

Brippoki reaches into his
coolamon
to retrieve the strands of bark fibre prepared a few days earlier. He has, meantime, been rinsing them in the cleanest water he can find, and laying them out in the sun to dry. Sitting with one leg tucked beneath the other, he selects two small pieces of the teased bark and, under an open palm, begins to roll them along his outstretched thigh.

With the skill of muscle memory he weaves the fibrous threads into string,
kaargerum
. Such menial tasks fell to him when only a boy, working alongside the women.

A man’s True life does not begin at birth, or during infancy, spent among the womenfolk, when he has only a number for a name. Without status, without sex, without even a proper name, he is called
Kertameru
. Only slightly older, and Brippoki is stolen away by the
Curadgie
, to undergo the first of the ceremonies that would lead to his eventual manhood. The
Curadgie
, foremost among his mob’s elders, is a very wizened old man, able to foresee events before they happen, and to communicate with the restless spirits of the departed.

Life’s journey is no smooth path – so says the
Curadgie
, a clever-man among his people. It is a series of obstacles that must be overcome – knots, along a string – positions an individual must be qualified for, in order that they may then be occupied. Rights of way and rites of passage, each stage of life carries with it its own test, its own ritual, and its own price. These are lessons Brippoki knows all too well. He bears the scars inside and out, each badge of pain an indelible mark.

Although he can never speak of it to anyone, Brippoki remembers his first rites of passage – the ordeal of it – clear as day.

Not ceasing in his labours, Brippoki begins to rock back and forth where he squats, on his heel. His eyes lack focus. He sings.

‘Wiltongarrolo kundando
.’

His voice, pitched high, quavers. ‘
Kadlottikurrelo paltando
.’ ‘Strike with the tuft of eagle feathers, strike him with the girdle’…

He is drenched from head to toe in blood, drawn hot and fresh from the arm of a
bourka
. The anonymity of early childhood ends this day. Still just a boy, he is no longer a number, but receives the first of his names –
Parnko
. Limits are imposed on the
goorong
he is allowed to eat, the living embodiments of the sacred totems. The flesh of the red kangaroo is forbidden him, as are the females or young of any sort; likewise the white crane,
linkara
; the wallaby,
meracco
; the pheasant; three kinds of fish; and two of turtles,
rinka
and
tungkanka
.
Wilya kundarti
now by status, he is allowed to carry a
wirri
for killing birds, and his first
karko
, with which to dig for grubs.

It is in his fourteenth summer that he is ready to enter the third stage of his life. Like every other male child, he must endure the trials of man-making before he can be fully accepted as a mature adult, through rites of circumcision.

Early one morning the boys are seized from behind, a tight band fastened across the eyes of each. They wail in fear of their lives. Their captors lead them a few thousand paces distant from the camp, out of sight and earshot of any of the women or children. They are made to lie on the ground, and
covered over with a possum-skin cloak – unable to see what the men are about to do. He hears a curious sound, an intermittent thump, like the limping of a cripple – first one, and then others joining. The air soon fills with dust. He can tell from the grit between his teeth, the drought on his tongue. Above them starts a terrible groaning, among them whimpering, and then dampness. One of his brothers has wet himself. A shriek and a beating of limbs as someone is seized and dragged out from beneath the cloak. Upside-down, through a chink of material, he witnesses the fate of the unlucky boy. Then another, and then rough hands grab at his ankles, and it is his turn. Pulled free of the skins, he breaks free of the elders’ grasp and falls flat on his face, only to jump up and run full pelt for the tree-line. Barely ten paces and the heavy body of a Red Ochre Man brings him down, drags him back. The dust of enchantment is blown into his eyes, clouding his vision. Pulled up by the ears, loud cries are ringing in them. The Men, all the men of his clan, little more than silhouette and shadow, they circle him in single file. A
katto
, or long stick, passes from hand to hand.

More of a blur then, bodies in motion – the young bodies of his fellows, frozen. The
katto
. Stamping feet, groans, cries. His tears. The
katto
, all hands on the
katto
, the press of bodies, smell of sweat. His own body is picked up and thrown through the air. His eyes burn. The eyes of the
Curadgie
, face to his face…

Blood. He tastes blood.

Brippoki pauses to wipe the sweat from his brow, and to staunch his bitten lip.

After the operation the new beings are kept in isolation, well away from the taint of females, until such time as they are fully healed. Living on a vegetable diet, their heads are constantly anointed with grease and red ochre, bandages wound around them but no blindfold. At the last, they are crowned with ornamental feathers. For some moons following circumcision a
yudna
, or pubic covering, is worn. When it is removed, according to custom, his boyhood will be over. Having survived his ritual death, the worthy individual is reborn a man.

Bripumyarrimin
throws his head back and roars out his anguish. Shame runs down his cheeks – his short breaths puffing out, then in.

His
yudna
finally removed, the worst of his fears is confirmed, his non-status revealed for all to see. The sacred cutting has been denied him. Uncircumcised, he remains a child, and condemned as such. In outrage, in bitterness, many
times he vows to do the necessary himself, but his trembling hands shake too much. Self-mutilation, he knows, will not make him any more acceptable in the eyes of his people.

The other children and his erstwhile peers laugh to see him. Among the adults, it is worse – they will not look at him. He is the
Murrumbidgee Biam
, a supernatural being who has taken the form of a
guli
, a black man, but one whose lower extremities are deformed. Such a one may compose ritual songs and
corroboree
dances, but is also reckoned to carry diseases, especially those leaving telltale marks on the face.

Brippoki, forever since, makes a point of never sitting cross-legged on the ground, as is that foul creature’s custom.

Sarah lay in her bed, unwilling to greet the new day. She shivered with a chill rage all the more bitter for its impotence.

Coming away from St James’s Hall the night before, she had lain in the bath for over an hour, beyond midnight even. As with the clay whose ghost still clung to her shoes, she feared she might never think herself clean again.

In disparaging the Australian Aborigines, the buccaneer William Dampier had set a dangerous precedent: lethal, in fact, precisely because it had persisted. Through decades of hearsay, reportage and gossip posing as official record, it had become horrifically bloated, out of all proportion with the real, human dimension. Ludwig Leichhardt, in his
Journals
, described his party being received as ‘pale-faced anthropophagi’ – refreshing insight and honesty, given the circumstances. In quest of exploration they had perpetrated evil. What evils, Sarah wondered, might yet arise, through the dogged pursuits of those self-appointed men of science, the Piccadilly Misanthropes.

Men might talk, but that was no guarantee they knew their subject, not even first-hand; to that extent, her experience might in fact be the greater. The twist of the Society Fellows’ ‘logic’, their outrageous justifications, resembled nothing so much in her mind as the smooth-talking language of professional murder. Far from being in denial, perhaps they simply didn’t know any better.

Worst of all, nor could she.

Science itself was not necessarily evil, but much evil might be done in its name, when allowed to be so inexact. Turning in the bed, away from the light, Sarah thought it a wicked irony: that a greater truth could be found in the world of myth.

The Golden Age, as according to Ovid, was a period when the earth itself produced all things spontaneously. Men were content with the foods that grew without cultivation, and to know only their own shores. Once Saturn was consigned to the darkness of Tartarus, however, the world passed under the rule of Jove, bringing a definitive end to such halcyon days. The Golden
Age was replaced by one of Silver, inferior to it in every way: only Gold did not tarnish.

Leichhardt, Mitchell, and men like them, were the heralds of that new age of Silver.

Then, according to that same legend, other metals would come on in swift succession, increasingly base. In an age of hard Iron, modesty, truth and loyalty would flee before deceit, violence and criminal greed, and sailors spread their canvas to the winds.

That age was already here.

Australia, once the fabled land of milk and honey, had itself passed into myth, undergoing its metamorphosis into a land of mutton and corn.

Mr Gilbert’s ghost, invisibly speared through the clavicle, would haunt Sarah for evermore: with his death, any ideas she entertained of a peaceful resolution between black fellow and white had been dashed. She knew then that bloody conflict was inevitable, was occurring, had occurred – the retribution harsh. Gentle Gold could not help but give way to weapons forged in the age of Iron. Hands would be bloodstained, and the virgin earth blood-soaked.

‘RRuhhHr!’

Refusing all offers of help, Lambert struggled to gain a sitting position. The best Sarah could do was to dart forward occasionally and adjust the bedding behind him, to provide more support.

‘Hrrugh! Hkcough!’

Eventually she was able to present him breakfast, although it had already gone cold. He munched, slowly.

‘Look,’ he murmured, ‘at what your old father is reduced to…an old slugabed.’

‘You have not eaten your egg,’ she said, flatly.

‘It is very good of you…to treat me to eggs,’ he said, still chewing at his last mouthful, ‘but if I have another this week, I’ll be bound. More…than I am already.’ Lambert mopped his lips and any dribbles from his moustaches. ‘I sleep very fitful,’ he said, ‘and wake with a lingering fever. My joints ache, my teeth are rattling loose, and to top it all, I cannot even enjoy a good motion any more.
You
eat the egg!’

He shoved his plate away.

Sarah did not react. Lambert eyed her.

‘“Life itself is a disease,”’ he declared, ‘“a working incited by suffering.”’

Sarah half-smiled: self-consciousness, effacement even, from him was a rare thing. He acknowledged that his ability to complain was itself a sign of life.

‘Carlyle?’ she asked, removing the tray. ‘Or Novalis?’

‘Either,’ said Lambert. He gave a little belch, hand balanced across his mouth. ‘Both.’

He still wore his nightcap.

Lambert knew that she had been out for some hours the evening before, come home late, taken a bath. He knew that she lately kept secrets under his roof – kept them from him. He strongly suspected there was a man involved: there usually was, where a woman’s secrets were concerned. He could not begrudge her that. His darling girl was a woman now. It was good, for the best, if someone could be there for her when he was gone.

She seemed very distant, and her mood was not bright. Lambert donned the aspect of good cheer.

Sarah stared at him blankly: sat up in the bed, propped on a bank of pillows, Lambert looked more gnomic than ever.

‘Don’t stand there staring, girl!’ he shouted, but playfully. ‘“
Behold and begone about your business!
”’

Sarah took up the breakfast tray and turned out of the doorway. The second she was out of sight she scooped up the egg with her fingers and swallowed it. Ugh. He had sprinkled too much salt.