The Grass Castle (27 page)
‘I have a book for you,’ Abby says, sitting on the couch. ‘I stumbled over it in the library and bought you a copy. I thought you’d find it interesting.’ She opens her backpack and pulls out a small thin book and hands it to Daphne.
‘
The Moth Hunters
.’ Daphne holds the book at arm’s length so she can see the cover more clearly. It has a photo of a lean muscular Aboriginal man sitting on a rock. ‘He has an impressive beard, doesn’t he?’ she says. ‘You don’t see many beards like that today. He’s a fine-looking man. And lovely dark skin—they get such a healthy sheen. Quite a glow.’
The Aborigine reminds Daphne of Johnny Button, except Johnny was always smiling. This man is serious and focused, his right hand wrapped around a big stick, his other hand resting on his left knee. It looks as if he has been instructed to look like a hunter capable of violence. He wears a dried animal skin strapped around his waist to hide his manhood. Johnny wore ordinary clothes, like other stockmen. It was only the colour of his skin and his bush sense that set him apart.
Abby is watching her expectantly so Daphne obliges and opens the book. It forks out at the centrefold of glossy coloured photographs. Daphne’s eyes are drawn to a picture of worked stones just like the one that is in the cardboard box in her bedroom with all her other special things. She found it at a rock shelter on the family property years ago. She points. ‘Where are these stones from? I can’t read the print.’
Abby reads out the location for her, and Daphne listens thoughtfully. It seems that other people—anthropologists—have visited her rock shelter. They have dug and found these stones. They have dug deeper than Daphne could when she was just a girl of eleven. She turns the page. There is a picture of the rock shelter: a large arched granite boulder with an undercut face. Beneath is a photo of rock paintings, and, seeing them, Daphne remembers. These paintings haven’t changed since she was a girl. She wonders if someone has touched them up or if they have simply been preserved in the shade of the overhang.
She flicks forward two pages to the last of the colour prints. There are several plates: a Bogong moth, a rock coated with hundreds of the creatures, and three round white stones. Daphne has seen stones like these too. She reaches to pat Abby’s hand. ‘Wait here,’ she says. ‘I have something to show you.’
She goes to her room and opens one of the boxes, reaches in and scrabbles around underneath the hank of horse hair and Gordon’s jumper. There it is—the dark piece of sharp-edged rock. She lifts it out, feels the chiselled margins bite her skin. Carefully she carries it back to the living room and shows it to Abby.
The girl examines the stone carefully, scraping her thumb gently across the chipped surface. ‘Where did you find this?’ Abby asks.
‘In a rock shelter on one of our runs,’ Daphne says. ‘This is the only one I have, but there were two stones. A smooth white one, and this one with the sharp edges. I found them under the overhang where those paintings are.’
‘That’s amazing,’ Abby says. ‘This is a special artefact. Who knows how old it is.’
‘Probably ancient,’ Daphne says. Gently she retrieves the stone from Abby’s hand and turns it over in her fingers again, feeling the weight of it. ‘The Aborigines were there long before we came. My father insisted the land was empty, but we drove them out, I’m sure of it. I don’t know if my family shot any of them, but I’m rather afraid we might have. My father wouldn’t speak of it. Fact is we stole their land. Then the land was taken from us. I know how they felt. I can’t forgive my family for what we did.’
Abby places her hand over Daphne’s, enclosing the stone between their palms. ‘Maybe you’ve already paid the price,’ she says quietly. ‘As you said, the land was taken from you too.’
Daphne hears, but she’s not convinced. She looks up into Abby’s clear kind eyes. ‘Sometimes it would be good if we could see right back into the past,’ she says, ‘so we could know exactly what happened. Then I’d like to pick up a pen and rewrite history. Change things. But I can’t, so I have to live with what’s already been written. It seems unfair to me. But it’s a fact. Not much I can do about it.’
Abby smiles and releases Daphne’s hand and pours more tea. ‘You’re being hard on yourself,’ she says, adding a dribble of milk to her cup.
And you too, dear, Daphne thinks. It’s a shame you won’t let yourself live.
That night Daphne dreams of the mountains. She’s been dreaming often lately, and remembering her dreams, which is most unusual. She wonders if it’s because the dreams have been coming to her like lightning flashes in the night, followed by loud thunder-like claps that jolt her from sleep. She wakes with images and reverberating sound pulsing in her head, everything clear and startling, as if it has just happened.
She dreams of dark-skinned people walking indistinct paths, following lines of connection, rocky crags jutting from the fog, wind-torn clouds seething over the high tops. In an alpine meadow a cluster of people is sitting round a fire. An old woman with long flat breasts, a wide nose and crooked eyes sings as she places a handful of moths, wing-plucked, on a rock and mashes them with a round white stone. Others of her tribe scatter more moth bodies on a hot granite slab, heated over the fire. They watch the steam rise, and they chatter over the sweet smell of roasting fat as the moths hiss and pop. When they are ready a man sweeps them from the slab with a fern frond. Hands reach to snatch up the nutty morsels and pop them into mouths. There is laughter, the calm that comes with full bellies. Nearby, tattered moth wings twirl in the breeze. They land in the fire and disappear in small crackles of flame.
Then time shifts and transforms into a mass of grey cloud swirling around granite buttresses, wind heaving over grass, whipping trees. Years and centuries tangle into knots. Flashes of light and sound jolt through the semi-conscious sky of Daphne’s mind.
Now cattle are spread across the valley, grazing among the stark skeletons of ringbarked trees which poke their dead arms at the sky like stiff scarecrows. There are no more black people in the valley, none among the crags. Instead a slab homestead huddles like a beetle in the cleared grasslands, and the sun beats on the backs of several horses standing in the yards.
The rush of landscape and colour fades, and Daphne wakes to pale moonlight which falls in streaks through the curtains. Her heart is clanging in her ears and she feels dizzy, so she sits up and switches on her lamp, shuffles her pillow and leans back against it.
The stone is right there on her bedside table. She leans to pick it up, scuffs her thumb over its sharp edges. It gleams silvery-grey in the muted light, and its smooth flat sides remind her.
She is eleven years old, riding up the valley in the summer heat. She has completed her chores and she’s been given the rest of the day off. She has milked the cows, checked the rabbit traps and chopped the wood. Her mother has packed her a picnic lunch of bread and cheese, and she has escaped, meandering along the trail on the old black mare.
Despite the heat, it is a beautiful morning. After good spring rains, the valley is thick with waving grasses, the soaks are still damp and full of racketing frogs, and there is green feed for the stock. Daphne checks more traps along the way, stopping among warrens to pull half-dead rabbits from the snapped-shut metal jaws of the traps. She breaks their necks by cracking their heads against a rock or a tree before hanging them from the back of her saddle.
In the open country her horse nods along, hooves picking out a rhythm on the track. The rabbits sway against her leg, flies humming around their bloodied fur. Daphne is at peace. She loves the way the horse moves beneath her, the way her body swings with the old mare’s gait. Alpine grasshoppers snap into the air, catapulting around her horse’s nose. The birds are quiet, subdued to lethargy by the mounting warmth. The horizon undulates with the familiar shapes of mountains.
The mare walks steadily, ears pricked, tail flicking flies from her flanks. Daphne sings songs she has learned from the stockmen: ‘Click Go the Shears’, ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’, ‘The Drover’s Dream’. After an hour or so she begins to look for shade to rest and have lunch. She turns the mare towards the woodland on the southern aspect of the valley where the trees thicken into taller forest reaching up-slope. Crimson rosellas rush from concealed branches as the mare treads into the dappled shadows. The old horse finds a track, maybe a wallaby trail, and picks her way along, threading among scrappy eucalypts and grassy clearings. Daphne lets the reins hang loose so the mare can choose her path. Even in the shade, the heat penetrates, and Daphne longs for a stream, somewhere to splash and cool off.
They round a patch of snow gums, and suddenly, out of the bush, the silhouettes of several large boulders loom: granite massifs like grey elephants hiding from the sun. Daphne guides the mare towards them, stopping when the rocks begin to rise more steeply. There she dismounts, lifts the reins over the mare’s head and drops them, knowing the mare won’t stray—her father has taught all his horses to ground-tie.
She unhooks the saddlebag and carries it round the first boulder, climbing a narrow cleft to access the rocks behind. The largest of them is underhung with a concave wall created by centuries of weathering. Daphne smells moisture and damp soil. Scrambling over a rock to reach the shade, she notices shapes painted on the rock face: outlines of animals, primitively drawn. In the cool darkness cast by the boulder, she crouches to study them, trying to work out what they are—mostly representations, rather two-dimensional, of native bush animals.
She recognises a poorly proportioned kangaroo painted in white pigment. It has stick-like front legs, ears almost as large as its legs. There is a tortoise and another kangaroo, smaller, maybe a wallaby or a joey. She sees lizards, possibly goannas or blue-tongues with their legs drawn too large. Other shapes are harder to identify. Some are long and thin, wraith-like figures as elusive as smoke. These might be humans, she thinks, but the arms and legs are too extended and they loop together in weird impossible ways. One of the shapes is unmistakably an emu, long-legged with three big toes. Often small groups of those eccentric yellow-eyed birds strut their way past the homestead, grazing with the cattle.
Daphne wonders who painted these pictures. They are childlike, very basic. She reaches a finger and touches the kangaroo, scratches at the pigment with a jagged fingernail. Nothing comes away. The paintings have about them a sense of timelessness, as if they have been there for centuries.
She ponders her father’s stories of arriving in an empty land. Perhaps there were people in this place before his family came; she’s heard talk of lanky-legged, black-skinned, dark-eyed people who roamed the bush like shadows. They were gone before she was born—except for Johnny Button, and he doesn’t count. He’s just a farmhand, and mostly he behaves like white people, despite his dark skin.
She sits beneath the rock and pulls out her lunch. Chewing on bread, she leans back, convinced that the paintings are the work of Johnny’s ancestors. They must have lived here. This rock overhang would have been a good place for shelter from rain and storms and heat. They would have painted the animals they hunted. It made sense.
After lunch she scrapes around in the shade and finds an area of soil that is stained black—perhaps from campfires long ago. She sifts dirt with her bare hands, digging her fingers in. Then she grasps something, a sharp piece of dark stone that she hooks out and nearly flings into the bush until she sees its fluted edges. The rock has been chipped to create a pointed blade. She turns it over, wondering what it is; a spearhead, perhaps?
She pokes around some more and finds another stone. This one is different, smooth and round and white, like an egg. She lies back on the ground, a stone in each hand, and holds them up, squinting against the light, feeling their shapes. They are tools, she thinks: one sharp, one smooth. Who was here? Who made them? Maybe her father can tell her. Perhaps he knows.
Excited, she emerges from the shade and clambers back over the boulders. Her horse is standing beneath the snow gums, patiently mouthing the bit. Daphne wraps the stones in pieces of old cloth she carries for wiping away dirt or mud or water or rain, and stores them in her saddlebag, then she takes a drink before beginning the ride home to share her findings.
The homestead is quiet when she reaches it. The air and the cattle and even the smoke from the chimney seem lethargic in the dreamy afternoon heat. Across the valley the bush shrills with cicadas, sound pulsing into the white sky. Daphne hitches her horse to the rail and steps onto the veranda, swinging open the door to find her father snoozing in his chair, her mother at the bench, skinning a rabbit for dinner.
Her mother turns, perspiration shining on her cheeks in the dim light cast through the small windows. ‘What is it, dear?’ her mother asks. ‘You look flustered. Is it the heat, or is something wrong?’
Daphne hesitates—somehow her mother always seems to know what is taking place beneath her skin. It is different with her father, however. He is quick to anger, has little time for foolishness. She watches him unfold reluctantly from his nap, the smell of sweat rising from his clothes. ‘I think someone must have lived here before us,’ she announces.
Her father stretches his long, booted legs and frowns, tugs absently at his beard. ‘What are you talking about?’ he says. ‘This land has always belonged to us.’
Daphne’s heart knocks anxiously. ‘But what about before that? Before our family came? Before it was ours?’
The frown settles deeper into the lines on her father’s face, like ploughed furrows. ‘It’s always been ours,’ he says. ‘The land was empty.’
Fumbling with one of the pieces of cloth, Daphne takes the sharp grey stone from her pocket and passes it to her father, waiting while he examines it. He glances at it briefly, then sniffs disdainfully and tosses it to the floor. He is casually unimpressed.
‘Just a weathering chip off a boulder,’ he says, dismissive. ‘There are bits of stone like this everywhere.’ He scoffs. ‘What did you think it was? A spearhead or something?’ He shakes his head. ‘What an imagination.’
