Chapter 13

“The land, you know, it’s our mother.” She poked another grub in between teeth worn with age, still creamy white and never once been cleaned. “This dead place, you know, it’s sacred to the people here about today,” she waved her hand towards the cemetery, “but the whole land, our land, holds our people from Dreamtime. You know, bloody long time! Their spirits are calling you. They part of the land now, gone back to our mother, the earth. They crying out for you. That’s the end of the story.”

“I’m a Christian. I don’t believe in the Dreaming.” Jeanie poked a stick into the ashes of the fire.

“Yes, that is your story. You have a story. Spirit still calling you all the same, calling you back to your people, where you belong.” Jeanie and Jaylene helped the old lady to her feet. “You and I, we’re ’lated, doesn’t matter what we believe. We still family.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

“My name is Nuala. In language here means ‘beautiful’.” She threw her head back in laughter. “Most people ’round here call me Auntie Peggy.”

“Who named you Margaret? The missionaries?”

“I don’t go to mission. Brought up on Barren Hills station. My mother, you know, she worked there for Mr Forrester. Plenny rich, that old bastard, I tell you. She buried here,” a nod indicating some place in the cemetery, “and I will join her soon ‘nough.”

“What about my father and mother.”

“Oh, they work for Forrester, too. Hard man, that fella. Big whyabla, that bastard.”

“Might just drive out to Barren Hills, kids. What do you say?”

“Sounds great Mamma. Anything but school.” Jaylene answered for the girls who were busily searing ants with sticks from the embers of the fire.

“You come out, too, Auntie?”

“First you take me back t’ town? My leg hurtin’ plenny.”

“I’d rather take you to the hospital. You need some antibiotics.”

“Maybe better I need bush med’cine. You get moddercar and take me t’ town, okay?”

“Alright, if that’s what you want?”

“Barren Hills is a sad place for our people. Very sad place. That’s all.” She hobbled along until she reached the fence. “More later, alright.”

They drove back into Leonora, the Landcruiser cloudy with the smell of dust and sweat and smoke and Jaylene later said that it was the smell of raw people. Jeanie remembered that smell from a long time ago, at a place, just up ahead.

It was a gravel road then, corrugated to the shithouse, and it slithered through the scrub all the way to Wiluna. Tommy and Mick were doing a run, the International half-full of grog and groceries and get it through no matter what. Leonora was behind them now, the one more for the road just a flat taste in their mouths. Jeez it was dry. Their heads were bubbly. Mick steered with one hand, swigged from a can of Coke held in the other.

“Stop! Stop! Holy shit!” Tommy cried out and Mick hit the skids. The big truck bumped across the ruts and rattled to a halt.

“Jesus Christ! Will’ya look at that. What a mess.” In the midst of the road was the wreckage of two vehicles crushed and screwed and torn up in a frightening few moments. The bulk of the remains sat silent and steaming like metal turds, twenty metres apart and not getting any closer. Brief broken pieces of automobile lay scattered about, spat out angrily along the gravel. Shattered glass glinted in the sunlight: a fairyland of death.

The men climbed out of the truck, moving slowly at first, leaden with shock, afraid for what they might see. All around was the smell of burnt oil, and the vaporous tang of spilt petrol: they would taste it for days. Later, Mick said there was nothing they could do. He left Tommy chuckin’ up his guts in the middle of the mess and walked back to the truck to radio the police. It was only then he saw the baby lying in the dirt, naked, not even cryin’, like it had been placed there by the hand of God, so help me.

********

It was 10.15 and Ben was still feeling pretty rough. He sat in the shade outside his workshop, sipping Coke and smoking, hoping that no-one would come by or phone up with work. It was that kind of day. Bush flies, drawn to his sweat and odour, hovered about him as one black, tenacious swarm that he endeavoured to kept out by swearing and fast hands. The sheer weight of numbers, however, overwhelmed his defences, and the manufactured personal repellent that he applied so liberally seemed only to drive those small winged insects on to greater persistence. He got up from the chair, swore, and walked back into his workshop. Ben hated flies. He hated lots of things. He hated himself but he didn’t know it.

The office phone rang. It may have a job: someone wanting his skills, his expertise, or maybe just a tyre. But it could have been a woman, wanting him for just who he was. Even Jeanie. Maybe. The phone rang out and once more the big shed was silent. He threw the empty can against the corrugated wall, hitting somewhere between the Pirelli calendar and a Marilyn Monroe poster. Ben felt like crap so he shut up shop and headed for the pub.

It was a short walk, just across the road and past the servo. He turned left onto Tower Street. A loitering of Aboriginals were catching the sunshine opposite, chewing the fat, thought Ben, of nondescript existences. Wasted lives, taxpayer’s money going down the drain and Jeanie’s four-wheel drive cruised past heading off to who knows where with some fat sambo in the front. Sheesh!

“You’re in here early, Ben.” The publican was a large man, ginger-haired with a broad, broken nose, perhaps an ex-boxer or rugby forward, or both. His hands shook and he drank light ale from a small glass.

“Just get me a beer, Squire.” His name was William Everton. Everyone called him Squire and no-one knew why. “Air-con still working?”

“Y’did a great job, mate.” Squire set a stubbie of VB on the bar-top, sans lid. “What they say is true, then?”

“What’s that?” A glare.

“That you can fix anything.”

“Bloody oath!”

“Ha!” Squire laughed a big laugh. “Keep an eye on the bar for me. I’ll go see if Chookie’s turned up.” Chookie, the cook: notoriously tardy. Squire kept him on because he was good, real good. Not like the old days. People want more than just snags and mash. Monday mornings had always been a problem.

Ben turned on his stool and looked out the windows onto a streetscape planted with the bare necessities of a small town. There was just so much to hate about this place. The big, barren walls of the desert held him in, imprisoned him, holding him in its scrubby hands, holding him by his very balls. But they also kept the others out, those that would want to find him. It was a precarious balance for Ben.

“You know I like my stubbie opened. Do it next time, alright. I don’t want to have to tell you again.” He took a swig and put it down on the table. She stood behind him, a little to the side, so he could see her out of the corner of his eye. “You can get your dinner and sit down, now.”

So she sat and a tiny tear ran through the flush of an emerging bruise that would only make her a better person.

“Get you another beer?” Squire walked through from the other bar.

“Yeah, that one didn’t touch the sides.” Ben put the empty on the counter. He pulled a tenner out of his wallet. The big publican placed a coldie on the bar slapped down the change. Chookie was in the kitchen, rattling pans and getting stuff from the fridge: opening, closing. Ben could almost hear the cell door shut behind him.

********

The Community sat on the edge of town on the road to Wiluna. In all the years she had lived in Leonora, Jeanie had never been in there. That little appendage of homes was a cluster of mystery and misgiving, its people walking the cusp between the traditional and the present, walking sometimes just too close, so some people said. She turned right up Nambi Rd and right again into another world.

“You take me to Popeye’s house.” Auntie Peggy pointed in the general direction of The Community, a broad-spectrum wave that took in a vast area of the state. Popeye’s house was in there, somewhere.

“Go left, Mamma!” Jaylene, from the back seat. “The place with the brown car.”

The place with the brown car was hunkered down behind a low stone wall. Like all the other houses it was Besser-blocked and tin-roofed. Jeanie wondered if it had been built with windows: there were none now, just square dark holes. The front door hung off the bottom hinge at a sad angle, never to close again. A stereo played loudly inside, some generic country and western song with a nasal twang and slow guitars. Jeanie swung into the driveway and pulled up beside the brown car which lay in the dust on the flat tyres of defeated hopes. She wondered if anyone cared.

Aunt Peggy stepped down from the ’cruiser with difficulty and hobbled towards the house. There was a lull in the music and she called out in language: “Tjurtu!” meaning older sister. A few moments passed and a grey-haired woman appeared at the doorway, taller than Auntie Peggy and thinner, and Jeanie was drawn to the woman’s bulging eyes.

“Don’t stare, Mamma!” Jaylene started to unbuckle Little Albert. “She’s a nice lady.”

“Hoy! We’re not getting out!” A pause, then: “How do you know her, Jaylene?”

“She’s Josie’s granny. We come here all the time.”

“What! You don’t know the people here…”

“…Whatever.” Jaylene walked around to the driver’s door, Little Albert on her hip. “These are our people, Mamma.”

Jeanie sat there. Georgie and Robyn were fighting in the back seat, Nadine was crying out that she was thirsty. In the front yard was a fire-pit. Thin wiffs of smoke and animal fat drifted into the cab. Jeanie tried to remember. The smell.

An old Landrover motored up the road and stopped behind the truck. A middle-aged man got out of the driver’s seat. He had salt-and-pepper hair and a freckled complexion brushed red on the cheekbones and nose from too much recent sun. Last night he had rubbed a sliced tomato on the burns to take away the sting. It hadn’t worked.

Two policemen were talking to the truckies, taking notes. Another was busy photographing the ugliness of it all in colour and black and white, snapping away indifferently, for he had seen it all and done it all before: stilled life images, for posterity. He waved to the freckly man who most people knew simply as Pastor.

“They tell me a baby survived. Is that right?”

“Yeah, it’s over there with the Abos.”

“You don’t like those people, do you Artie?”

“I’m just doin’ my job, Pastor. Maybe you don’t understand much about policing.”

The man they called Pastor turned and walked slowly towards a group of Aboriginal women standing in a clutch at the side of the road where the sergeant had told them to stay. Those blacks were just a nuisance at times like these, all that crying and weeping. Too full of emotion, still too full of tradition.

“Oh, Pastor, it’s Albert and Ginny. They bin lyin’ in dat moddercar all dead, Pastor.” The pastor’s eyes moved to the baby, still naked, asleep in the crook of a dark arm. “Oh, Pastor, you can’t take dat baby! She’s kin, dat baby! No, Pastor!”

But the pastor took the baby. His wife understood. She knew it was for the best. He told her to start packing for they were heading back to Perth. That night he slept fitfully, for his mind was awash with the sounds of wailing and gnashing of teeth, and he wondered if he had really done the right thing.

Part 2

Chapter 11

The boom years between 1896 and 1920 had been kind to Leonora, and to its co-joined twin, Gwalia. Together they rode the gilded wave of the gold rush until, finally, it washed up upon the beach of desert dirt and saltbush and petered out to a mere trickle, its resource mostly spent. Mining continued at a reduced capacity, sustaining both towns at subsistence level as if nature and economics were engaged in some cruel, sadistic game; down in the pits as the years wore on the unseen hands of Destiny slowly choked the life out of the golden seam till Gwalia breathed no more.

While Gwalia dwindled to the status of ghost town, Leonora continued to survive, feeding off a few hardy pastoralists, well acquainted with lean times, and the growing demand for nickel. The skeletal remains of Gwalia, with its dusty streets and empty shanties, lie unburied. Occasionally a tourist stirs the mouldering of memories, kicking up the spirit of better days, but with each passing footfall the tenuous connection to the past diminishes a little further. They look at Hoover’s house, sentinel upon the hill, and in nearby yards the rusted cogs and shafts and engines that once were the pumping heart of the Gwalia mine. They look into the yawning maw of the pit where men from here and foreign places dug out their lives in sweat and toil, and sometimes more. Then the tourists drive away in their cars and caravans, symbols of a more modern and materialist world, and leave Gwalia to its abandonment.

Across the highway, down at the end of Memorial Drive, is the cemetery. Like so many others just rows of shallow pits full of soulless, sightless, silent corpses. Sometimes when the wind whips up and passes through the stands of spare gums it sings Nature’s sad requiem to the dead. Most tourists, however, will drive on and leave the past behind.

********

Jeanie Bayona had a strange dream. There was a desert in the suburbs somewhere, maybe Cottesloe, and a man lay on the ground, still. A woman stood nearby and she was afraid. Dingoes circled around, baying and growling, moving closer, and all the time a gentle rhythmic singing calling out her name. And the woman became Jeanie Bayona.

********

She woke early: Little Albert had made sure of that. Now he lay there beside her, his head tucked between her breast and upper arm, sleeping peacefully. As she looked down at him she wondered at the miracle of re-creation, how he had once been inside her. From conception to birth and now nearly eighteen months old: every day brought change as he moved along his lifespan into the unknown. Her nostrils twitched. Little Albert’s nappy needed changing: food in, crap out, the cycle of life. That much she was certain of.

The sun shot in through the bedroom window at a low trajectory. Jeanie heard Jaylene in the kitchen, already making tea on six hours sleep, firing on all eight cylinders, running on the smell of an oily rag. From the lounge room came the low murmur of the television, probably one of the morning shows with presenters smiling no matter what the hour or circumstance. Smooth operators all, those presenters, glib-tongued with a shiny veneer as thin as a television screen, a manicured manipulation of trust clothed in an oily sincerity: a Mr O’Leary smile. Maybe a Ben Poulson smile, as well.

Jaylene brought in a mug of tea and some raisin toast on a tray. She was a slender girl, fine bones wound with dark copper wire skin, fair hair like her father. There the comparison ended. Jeanie thought her eldest daughter had some nous. Clever girl, that. Maybe a little conniving, too.

“You’re up early, daughter. Didn’t you sleep well?”

“Tossed and turned, Mamma, and I don’t feel well. Maybe I’m comin’ down with something.”

“Maybe you are. I’ve decided to take a few days off work to think things over. You know what I mean, don’t you?”

“You mean about Dad? Why is it his fault?”

“I didn’t say that. I just need to try and work things out. Your Dad and I need to, um, resolve a few issues.”

“What about Ben?”

“He’s a friend. And he listens to me. He pays attention to me in ways you wouldn’t understand. There are things I need.”

“Sex?” Jaylene made a face as she spoke.

“God no, daughter! Where’s your mind?

“Well, what things?”

“Just things, girl, just things. Most of all I need to work myself out. You know, find out who I am and why I’m here. You said that yourself. I thought that you could help.”

“Do I have to go to school?”

“No, I really do want your help. Okay?”

“Okay. Where do we start.”

“The cemetery, I suppose. It’s always a good place to think and reflect.”

Noises from the kitchen. Nadine dragging a chair over to the counter: breakfast or bust. “Hang on, Nadine, I’ll do it!” And then Jaylene was gone, thin legs skittering across the lino, moving as only the young can. Rastus wandered about in her wake, hopeful of food or a good scratch. He lifted his black head skyward and let out a brief, gravelly howl. Jaylene threw him a crust from her toast and thus satisfied Rastus waddled off outside into the sunshine, farting as he went.

“Mamma! Nadine spilt the milk. It’s everywhere!”

“Didn’t, liar!”

“Can you clean it up, Jaylene? Please. Get a towel from the dirty washing.”

“Mamma, Rastus smells.” Georgina was awake. Robyn wouldn’t be too far behind.

“It’s ‘cause he’s old. You’ll get old one day and smell like that.” Jaylene was fiercely defensive of the dog, her companion since she could remember.

“Mamma, Jaylene says I’ll smell.”

“You do smell, Georgina! Already!” Jaylene stirred the pot.

“Aw, Mamma, she said…”

“Can someone bring me a nappy and the wipes?” Jeanie spoke over the sounds of kids in the kitchen who were devouring their kill and starting on each other. “Please!”

“I’ll do it. Anyway, Georgie, I’m not goin’ to school.” Jaylene’s tongue darted in and out, lizard-like.

“Aw, Mamma, that’s not fair!” She folded her arms across her chest, pouted and stamped her feet. “Jaylene always gets to stay home. I ‘ate her and I ‘ate school and I’m not goin’!”

“Listen, all of you. No-one is going to school today, okay.”

“Aw, Mamma, you said I was goin’ to help you.” Jaylene’s disappointment was palpable.

“You’re all going to help, even Nadine. So stop fighting and get dressed.”

There was an excited dispersal of kids. Milk dripped off the kitchen counter and pooled on the floor. The people of the morning show had kept talking through the mayhem, still smiling unperturbed.

Jeanie changed Little Albert and took the nappy to the bin. She sat back on the bed. The tea and toast were cold.

********

There is no small amount of illusion attached to the outback. It is, for people throughout the world, and indeed for many Australians, a place of mystique built up by skilful pens and brushes into images of myth and legend. Crooked Mick, of the Speewah, the gun shearer, ate a sheep for breakfast. Clancy won hearts drifting from station to station. A young rider, called simply ‘the Man’, galloped headlong down a mountain in a fearless pursuit to get the job done. And Ben Poulson sat in his underwear on his tiny back porch, feeling seedy and rolling a cigarette with some difficulty.

It was 8:15 and for Ben the morning was half gone, swallowed up somehow into the vacuum of spent time, never to be seen again. He sipped black tea from an enamel mug for no other reason than he thought it was expected of him. Image: it was nearly everything. God had shaped his face with the use of a small hatchet, or so he told people. His ruggedness epitomised a collective ideal, however this morning the features of his cragginess sagged a little and the pores ran with sweat, his essence wrapped in the folds of a raging hangover. Bile kept rising in his throat, bringing with it no good thing.

He could take today off but sure as eggs someone would want tyres or need something fixed. That’s the problem with the world: it always needed fixing. Planet Earth hurtling through space with bits and pieces flinging off everywhere; a puncture here, a crack there. Thank the Lord for Ben Poulson. Christ, he could just about fix anything.

“‘Cept this hangover. Jeez, it’s a beaut.” Ben tossed the dregs of his tea out into the untidiness of his backyard, an unfenced sea of red dirt and grass tufts all the way to the shunting yards. He looked up into the shroud of a pale blue summer sky getting hotter by the minute and driving the flies to a greater intimacy. Ben stubbed out his cigarette. Even before the last of the smoke had cleared his lungs he hawked up an oystery wad of phlegm and cursed the day he started smoking.

He cursed women, too. He cursed their brokenness, their stubbornness, their stupidness. Inside the house the telephone rang. Ben Poulson was an important man in this town. He could fix anything.

********

“Is it alright if I pay you on Thursday?”

“What? He’s left you with no money, again?”

“No! I just didn’t expect the battery to die on me.” Jeanie watched on while Ben fitted the strap over the battery and tightened the leads to the terminals. “But I can pay you now if you want.”

“Thursday will be fine. You know that, Jeanie, don’t you?” He pulled the bonnet down with a clunk. “Well, see if it starts. Then you lot can be off to school.”

“We’re not going to school!” Georgina, arms folded as usual, happy and victorious.

“Oh, so where are you going?”

“It’s secret women’s business.” Jaylene appeared with Little Albert in tow, nappyless, free.

Ben just gave her a glare, his eyes like tiny, greasy cauldrons. Bubble, bubble... “Start her up, Jeanie!”

The motor cranked over but wouldn’t start. She tried again and again, hoping it would kick to life, hoping it wouldn’t. Providence was her mistress.

Ben shook his head. “Could be the injectors. Get a cuppa on and I’ll take a look. Shouldn’t take me much more…”

“Try again, Mamma. It’ll start this time.” Jaylene spoke, eyes closed, face skyward. The other four children clustered around her in a group of anxious uncertainty.

“Go on, Jeanie, give it a go, but I can almost guarantee it…”

It bucked, and coughed, and chugged to life. Burnt diesel shot out the exhaust in toxic black clouds and the kids raced around excitedly. Jaylene pumped the air and performed a little victory dance. She looked at Ben and smiled.

“Well, have a nice day, Jeanie. Let me know if you get into any trouble, okay? I’ve got my mobile with me all the time.”

“Thanks, Ben. I really appreciate your trouble.”

“No trouble at all.” He walked towards his ute and stopped to pat Nadine’s head. “I’m really takin’ a shine to these kids.”

Nadine made a face: “You smell like beer.”

Softly: “And you… Never mind.”

Ben drove away and thought it had been a shitty start to the day.

********

The aging Landcruiser drove up Memorial Drive and came to a halt beside the cemetery gates, their sculptured elegance misplaced in this part of the country. Jeanie Bayona had spent the three kilometre journey briefly lecturing her children on graveyard etiquette, the dos and don’ts of respect for the sleeping dead. Now that they were there she wondered if the dead really gave a damn at all, whatever the kids might do or say. The occupants were certainly dead and their spirits more than likely took flight to other places shortly after their demise. That left just a body, a spent shell, buried six feet under the earth for reasons purely olfactory: wild animals would not smell the scent of a rotting corpse at that depth. Neither would a human. Jeanie was relieved by that, for she had been told by her foster father that nothing smells worse than a dead person.

“Ee-ew! What stinks!” Georgina led the four older children through the cemetery gates. It was an unmistakable odour, as much a part of the bush as living itself.

“You, Georgie!”

“Shut up, Jaylene!”

Jeanie was taking Little Albert from his car-seat. “Don’t start here in the cemetery, girls. Have some respect.”

“Something’s dead, Mamma. We’re gonna have a look.” They raced off, carefully skirting the obvious graves in a series of zig-zagging manoeuvres and athletic hurdles. As they approached the northern corner of the graveyard several crows flew off, their breakfast disturbed for the time being.

Jeanie followed them in, pushing Little Albert in a stroller up the avenue of red flowering gums. On either side, past the trees, were rows of graves unmarked save for the cast-iron plot numbers, the occupants now just names in a register: not even a memory. She walked between the plots of those long gone to who-knows-where. Perhaps, before they passed, they’d heard that glorious rumour preached with a reverential sincerity, that hope of eternity, one way or the other. The dead, though, say nothing: not one says a word.

A movement in the scrub on the other side of the southern boundary fence caught Jeanie’s eye. An old Aboriginal woman was busy pulling away at the branches of a stunted acacia and placing objects in a calico bag that was slung about her neck. She didn’t seem to notice as Jeanie approached the wire, and moved on to another bush, engrossed in her toil. It was clear to Jeanie this woman wore the stains of a different existence, all dust and sweat and smell from the past somewhere. And from somewhere else, far off, kids laughed and squealed, making play with death, storing up the intangibles of life.

The old woman momentarily stopped her work and looked across at the sound of the children. She was startled to see Jeanie staring at her from behind the fence and she stared back, black eyes anchored in yellow seas, rimmed with red around the shorelines. Hers was a face of too many yesterdays, not enough tomorrows.

“Hello, Auntie. I didn’t mean to scare you. What are you doing?” The woman bent down again to resume her work. “I’m Jeanie Bayona. Maybe you knew my father?” Jeanie cupped her hand to her mouth, wondering if the woman had heard her. “Auntie! Maybe you could help me? Do you speak English?”

“’Course I speak English! What you thinking? You speak English an’ you as black as me!” She began crossing a tract of raked soil separating the cemetery from the scrub. Jeanie could see now that the old woman hobbled slightly as she walked, favouring her left leg. “I don’t hear too good these days.”

“What’s wrong with your leg? Foot looks pretty swollen.”

“It’s plenny sore, that one. But don’ worry,” she said, tapping her good leg, “I got ‘nother.” Laughter squeezed out of a hard existence and caused her to jiggle about. “B’sides, don’t like ‘ospitals. You call me Auntie, alright?”

“Okay, Auntie, I’m Jeanie Bayona. You may have…”

“I knew that man. He was my cousin. He went to t’mission, that man.”

“Can you tell me about him? About my mother?”

“First we have breakfast. Get your kids, hey.”

“Oh, we’ve already eaten, this morning.”

“This is ngirriki.” She showed Jeanie the contents of her bag. A mass of witchetty grubs struggled around like severed white fingers. “A…what’s that word?”

“A delicacy?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Let’s get a fire goin’.”

“You’re going to cook them?”

“Or you can eat’em raw.”

“You can’t expect us to eat them?”

“Why not?”

“They’re grubs!” Jeanie made a face.

“’Course they grubs! They blackfella tucker, you know! Taste like chicken.”

The old woman picked up a heap of small sticks and brushwood, enough for a fire, layer upon layer, generation upon generation. Jaylene and the girls had finished their macabre pleasures and watched from their mother’s side.

“Wotshee doin’, Mamma?” Robyn, who still believed mothers across the world held all knowledge.

“Making a fire. She’s going to roast witchetty grubs.”

“Oh…eew!” The younger girls made noises of disgust.

“Is she goin’ to eat them?” Robyn, again.

“I think she wants us to eat them, too. Says they taste like chicken.” Jeanie answered in a lowered voice. She didn’t want to offend the old woman who had now lit the fire and was busy avoiding the smoke.

“You listen to me. It don’t matter if you eat witchetty or not. Some whitefella eat witchetty but they still a whitefella. It’s not gunna change your colour.” She waited for the fire to die down and threw the grubs onto the coals. “Your spirit, inside you. You got to listen to it.” The grubs sizzled and shrieked. She looked at Jeanie. “Maybe you always gunna be a white girl with a black face, I don’t know.”

“How do you know…?”

“I know you seeking your spirit. The Dreaming is callin’ you.” She flicked a grub from the fire with a stick, picked it up and blew on it through dark lips. “All the people talk about you. Our people, you know. We know you, from a little baby. We always remember you. You just don’t remember us.”

One gulp and it was gone.