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STEPHEN GRAY is a writer and law lecturer who has been living in Darwin since 1989. He teaches subjects in copyright law and indigenous peoples and the law, among others, and is involved in teaching Aboriginal students. Since 1991 he has published a number of articles about indigenous legal issues, including several about ways in which indigenous people can gain legal protection for their art and culture. His first novel, Lungfish, was published in 1999 and won the Jessie Litchfield Award for Literature.
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STEPHEN GRAY
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First published in 2001 Copyright © Stephen Gray 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email
[email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Gray, Stephen, 1966– . The artist is a thief. ISBN 1 86508 533 2. I. Title. A823.3 Set in 11.5pt Adobe Garamond by Asset Typesetting Pty Ltd Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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acknowledgments
Firstly, books and their characters have breathed life into ideas barely glimpsed. Especially this has been true of the following: Keith Cole, Fred Gray of Umbakumba; Ted Egan, Justice All Their Own: The Caledon Bay and Woodah Island Killings 1932–1933; Howard Morphy, Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge; Charles Mountford, Records of the American–Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land; John Pye MSC, The Port Keats Story; Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human; Michael Terry, Hidden Wealth and Hiding People; Donald Thomson, Donald Thomson in Arnhem Land; and Eric Venbrux, A Death in the Tiwi Islands. Even more, people’s lives, personalities and skills have painted a canvas of which this book can only be a pale imitation. I would like to thank Annette Barlow and Christa Munns at Allen & Unwin for their friendly and professional introduction to the publishing world; Jo Jarrah and Jude McGee for extraordinarily careful editing; Marian Devitt and
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Robyn Waite at the NT Writers’ Centre for knowledge and advice; Jenny Pausacker for her brilliant early suggestions and nifty spadework; John Joo For Lee and Alex Gradussov for inspiration and perceptions; Terri Janke for dedication and intellect; Leonie Norrington and especially Wolfgang Wirf for friendship stretched by reading multiple drafts; to Margaret Palmer, John Muk Muk Burke, Marcia Langton, Colin and Debbie Golvan, Michael Christie, Kathryn Wells and the people at the NTU Faculty of Law; and to my family, especially my parents Rod and Helen Gray, and most of all to Micheline Lee and Mark Weng Soong Lee-Gray.
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author’s note ‘Mission Hole’ is a fictitious Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory. Apart from the fact that it is near the coast, I have deliberately been vague as to its exact location. Similarly I have given the Aboriginal characters (for example, Valerian, Sally Galilee, Lazarus Johnson) names of nonAboriginal derivation. The exception is Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy. ‘Gandarrwuy’ is not a person’s name but a Yolngu word from north-east Arnhem Land which means ‘a place in between’—for example, a place on a river between the tidal mudflats or mangroves and the woodlands further upstream. So far as I can ascertain it is not of any sacred or secret significance.
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contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
The Night Before The Advertisement The Morning After the Night Before Melbourne Brother O’Gorman Parker Gandarrwuy Rainbow Guy The Club Petra Leonelli Gandarrwuy Silvertails Lazarus Johnson Aboriginal Diana The Beauty of Prime Numbers A Glimpse of Scars Mission Hole Gold The Naked Emperor Reptiles and Insects Fred Heisner Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy Epilogue
1 14 30 47 60 79 92 107 121 135 147 162 172 191 201 216 229 244 254 267
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‘We’ll run out of history, because kartiya [Europeans] fuck the law up and [they’re] knocking all the power out of this country.’ —Daly Pulkara, quoted in Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Aboriginal Australian Culture, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 234.
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chapter one
The Night Before
Outside the corrugated-iron shack that was Mission Hole Aboriginal Community Airport, Jean-Loup stood waiting for a lift. It was almost dark. He had put his suitcase down beside him in the red dirt. At the edge of his vision, flushed with the sun’s fading, flamingo-pink light, the face of Princess Diana on a photocopied poster flapped against tin. Memorial service for the anniversary of her death, it said. The service was to be followed by football, spear-throwing and the Norforce Military Band. The man he was waiting for was named Valerian. Apart from his name Jean-Loup knew very little else. A group of Aboriginal women were waiting also for a lift to the community. Piled beside the women were rolls of silkscreened cloth and canvas, and red, white and blue plastic carry-alls, the type you buy for two dollars at a market. By the look of it they were returning from some conference or 1
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workshop in Darwin. They studiously ignored Jean-Loup. Their children threw stones, surged suddenly and with ragged deadly intent after a frilled lizard that sidled up and around the trunk of a too-short paperbark tree in a desperate and futile attempt to avoid being shaken out. Jean-Loup, too, had been shaken out from the other suited white people who had been with him on the plane from Melbourne to Adelaide, and then on the longer haul to Darwin—cheated, somehow, by their winks and penguin suits until suddenly he was the only one left. Now he stood staring at a sign in black letters, officious and untranslated from the English: ‘You are now entering Aboriginal land.’ At dusk the mosquitoes descended like a blanket. JeanLoup’s stomach churned. He fought the envy he suddenly felt for the light plane’s pilot, who at least had a sure-fire ticket back—a ticket he was planning on using very soon, if that revving sound Jean-Loup could hear wasn’t the whine of some approaching super-insect, flying queen ant to all the rest. Stripped naked of any kind of role, he picked up his suitcase again, gripping its handle tightly, so that the knuckles stood out. At least once in their lives, he supposed, everybody must experience a feeling like this. Half an hour after dark, a man turned up driving a ute, its steel tray at the back converted into a cage. Through the blur of insects, through the dusty windscreen that reflected the airport’s single generator-powered fluorescent light, Jean-Loup could just make out the man’s face. It was puckered, determined. His bare arms and chest were covered with ridged scars, the edges of which had turned pale and knobbly as caterpillars against his matt-black skin. JeanLoup presumed they were the scars of an initiated man.
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‘Do you mind if I catch a ride?’ asked Jean-Loup. There was no response. The man stared. The women and children meanwhile had scrambled into the cage at the back, leaving Jean-Loup alone on the ground. Jean-Loup decided some further explanation was needed. ‘I’ve just arrived in the Territory from Melbourne, just this afternoon. I was told somebody was going to pick me up from the airport, but there doesn’t seem to be anybody about.’ ‘Darwin Buffaloes,’ said the man. Taking this for permission, Jean-Loup opened the passenger door and climbed in just as the driver executed a dust-spinning right-hand turn, slamming the door on JeanLoup’s foot. Jean-Loup caught sight at that moment of the plane taking off for Darwin. In the night sky it was a tiny, brightly lit insect, a last link to the long stretch back home. ‘What do you mean, Darwin Buffaloes?’ he asked. His voice was hoarser and harsher than he had intended. There was no reply. The driver wore nothing but a pair of navy blue football shorts, the gold stars down their sides momentarily visible in the interior light he flicked on to fumble for a cigarette. ‘Thanks a lot for picking me up,’ said Jean-Loup, more softly. ‘I don’t think I would have enjoyed spending the night out there. I’m Jean-Loup Wild, by the way.’ ‘My son play for Buffaloes,’ said the driver vehemently. ‘He’s playing the half-forward in Darwin now.’ ‘Oh. They’re a footy team, I presume.’ ‘You tell that woman,’ said the driver, leaning forward over the steering wheel, ‘she got to look after that boy.’ Jean-Loup looked closely at the driver. Rigid and intense, he gripped the steering wheel from underneath. Jean-Loup was reminded of the song about Abraham—or was it God?—
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holding the whole world in his hands: a song about God or a man with an almost messianic power locked like an internal wound within. ‘What woman?’ ‘That one where you’re from. That what-you-call-it— the big city. That Aboriginal one, Sally Galilee, keeps comin out here.’ Particles of dust hung suspended in the air in front of the windscreen. Jean-Loup could scarcely see ten metres ahead, and yet the driver swung the car recklessly around bends, skirting trees by centimetres. They ran rough-as-guts over creekbeds dry and deep with dust, lurched abominably to avoid trees that had fallen across the road. A tenuous thread linked Jean-Loup back to his memories of normality. In the cage the women and children who had come on the flight with him gasped as he gasped, and rode the bumps. ‘You know Sally Galilee? Are you Valerian, then? The one I was supposed to meet? You must know who I am.’ There was no response. Jean-Loup spoke quickly, automatically. ‘I was expecting somebody different, for some reason. As you probably know, I’m an accountant and independent financial consultant. I’ve come out here to look into the community art centre’s finances. I’ll be writing a report to pass back to Sally Galilee at the Aboriginal Artists’ Association, trying to work out how to satisfy the white people’s law.’ ‘What you think happen to your law,’ said Valerian, ‘if there was no God?’ Jean-Loup opened his window and stuck his head outside. Immediately his face and open mouth were coated in dust thrown up by the wheels. Seeking a place out of reach of the dust, he opened his eyes to a miraculously clear night sky. He
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gulped fresh air and stuck his head back in. They veered around a sharp bend, framing a wallaby for a moment in the headlights. With jerky, electric movements it bounded off into the bush. ‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘Your government send people up to walk on the moon. Next thing they’re going to try to colonise the stars. Who gives a fuck about the stars? We’ve got enough problems to worry about down here. Your law’s based on Christianity, isn’t it? That’s what I’m saying. What happens if there’s no God?’ ‘Well,’ Jean-Loup said finally, ‘I’m not really a committed religious person.’ Valerian turned to look at Jean-Loup. His face was urgent, shining in the moonlight. A tiny model Jesus swung like a shrunken udder from the rear-vision mirror between them. For a moment Valerian seemed overwhelmed by the intensity of his own vision, but he screwed himself up again for its pursuit. ‘Your law’s covered in blood. It washed its hands in blood. Them priest come in here, that Communion. They drink Jesus blood, they eat his body. That’s cannibal. That’s what I’m saying. I seen them do it. That’s cannibal.’ ‘It’s not cannibal.’ Jean-Loup found himself defending the church. ‘It’s just a symbol, that’s all. Everybody knows it’s not really Jesus’s blood. Or at least—’ and he hesitated, suddenly confused. ‘It is Jesus’s blood, and it’s not, at the same time. You’ve got to be a Catholic, you’ve got to believe to understand.’ ‘You believe, or you don’t believe?’ The car had slowed. Valerian had taken his foot off the accelerator. That film they had been watching, the reel of trees in the headlights, slowed down and took back their identity as individual trees, sharp and threatening. From the tray in the back there were cries. It was as though time had slowed, as
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though Valerian was in control of time. Somebody thumped loudly on the bars behind Valerian’s ear—the back window, Jean-Loup saw, had already been broken, probably by similar thumps. ‘You believe, or you don’t believe?’ ‘In my culture,’ said Jean-Loup slowly, ‘we don’t necessarily talk to people we don’t know very well about things like that.’ ‘I got to talk to strangers,’ said Valerian. ‘I got no choice.’ ‘Talk about what?’ ‘This sickness country.’ Valerian’s voice was a crackle of phlegm. Slowly the car regained speed, its headlights panning across more of the same landscape, which seemed baleful, sickly now. ‘I’m a Crocodile man,’ said Valerian. ‘Valerian Pride of the Crocodile clan. That’s my mother’s country, the other side of Goyder River, there. Rainbow snake country. All that was good hunting, before.’ ‘Before what?’ ‘You got to watch out,’ said Valerian. ‘Everything being destroyed. You come and see, you’ll know. Our culture’s the oldest unchanged culture in the world. That priest talk about terra nullius. Empty land. I tell you, it’s you that’s terra nullius, not us. You got terra nullius in your soul.’ ‘What did you want to talk to me about?’ ‘The artist,’ said Valerian, ‘is a thief.’ Jean-Loup sat on the bed in the dark. A full moon shone through the louvres, its light pale and cerebral. There was the sound of men’s voices arguing outside. On the way into Mission Hole Community Jean-Loup had seen squat, onestorey Besser-block houses, piles of broken-down machinery and scattered forms prone under one of the few working street
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lights. One man saw the car and jumped up, calling out something hostile that Jean-Loup could not catch. All the rest of the trip Valerian had been doggedly silent. If there was anything else he wanted to tell Jean-Loup—and Jean-Loup had the strong feeling that there was—he had clearly decided this was not the place. Jean-Loup reached for the light switch. At least in this room the light worked. In the kitchen and front room, with its ripped-up seventies linoleum floor, there weren’t even any globes. Having the light on attracted millions of insects, and left Jean-Loup feeling vulnerable, lit up. He sat back down on the bed. In front of him on the floor was a book and a tin of baked beans he had found in the cupboard, now half-eaten. The stove worked, but he couldn’t find any saucepans, and so he had heated the baked beans in the tin, label and all. Valerian will drop you at the contractors’ house, Sally Galilee had told him. That’s where the visiting tradesmen crash when they come out from Darwin on contract. Other than that Mission Hole has a police station, a primary school, a social club, the art centre, and a population—depending on season and ceremony—between one and four hundred people. You’ll find the place run-down, but comfortable enough. This place was more than run-down. There were termite trails running up the walls from floor to ceiling, and rusty water trails from ceiling to floor. It had the spare, neglected feel of a place where beer and not much else was consumed, a place inhabited by transient men. ‘The coastal area round Mission Hole …’ Jean-Loup began reading from the book in front of him: … was first discovered and explored by Captain Phillip Parker King in The Mermaid on 4th and 5th September, 1819. The great Explorer then went on to chart
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Bathurst and Melville Islands. Mission Hole lease is about one hundred and fifty-five square miles. It stretches from Red Mud Bay and Pearcy Point in the east across the vast Branigan Plain, to the rugged and unexplored Blackstone Ranges, with their famous escarpments. The present settlement of Mission Hole is situated on the inside of a sharp bend in the Goyder River, about five miles from the sea. It is protected and well-watered, with swampland to one side. On the other, towards the escarpment, the country rises steadily through pleasant eucalypt woodlands: ‘Plenty good hunting,’ the Aborigines say. It wasn’t a book, exactly. He had bought it in the Salvation Army bookshop in Darwin, during the few hours he had spare before catching his plane out here. The bookseller had been apologetic about it: the old man brings them here himself, she said, and I just can’t bear to refuse. It was about fifty A4 pages, photocopied and manually typed and bound with green cardboard. On the front the author, Bro. Thomas O’Gorman MSC, had drawn the cover himself: a pen-and-ink sketch of dancing, doll-like Aborigines, with nappies for loincloths, and spears. ‘When I first came here in the early 1930s,’ Brother O’Gorman had written: this was a dark and unpenetrated land. These people were spiritually bereft, the birds and animals being their spirit fathers and forming their totem groups. They had no concept of the Light, only of the Darkness. Their deity was the Rainbow Serpent, something closely connected with the Devil, and there was a pantheon of other devils to be feared. If children and women saw
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them, even accidentally, they could be killed instantly. Even the young men walked in terror. When I think of this place when I first saw it, and compare it with what I see today, where the people live in real houses, with sewerage (most important in combating disease), I am amazed at the changes our Lord has made. Jean-Loup put the book down. He had never read much that he didn’t have to. Against the heat of real life, these placid tones were no competition. There was too much noise outside. Across the street, at the other side of an oval, people were arguing. Jean-Loup had tried closing the louvres and the threadbare curtain that separated him from outside. But the sweat and the heat had become stifling, the smell of damp and insects too pungent, the chirruping of cicadas too loud to bear. He needed to take a walk. He stepped out into the street. Blue lights were flashing. A police car was cruising past where the argument was, and a policeman yelled something through a megaphone from the car window. There was a brief hiatus. When the car was gone the voices took up again, swaying back and forth, screaming red blood and blue murder against the night. They were silhouetted against a mango tree, the group of men, gathered in a kind of circle that was loosely centred around a carton of beer, a torch, a bundle that might have been somebody’s bed. A car drove by, arc-welding them momentarily in its headlights. People surged in and out of the main circle, caught up by the momentum of one argument, dropping out to add the full weight of their authority to another. Jean-Loup crossed the road. He stood under the single working streetlight for a minute, then turned and walked
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slowly along the side of the oval, fifty metres from the group. The expressions he saw were blank, mask-like, stripped raw. They screamed with visceral anger at each other, did not even notice him walking nearby. It was as though they were hermetically sealed, trapped, condemned to yowl and beat their fists against the cage. Leaving the oval, Jean-Loup walked down a slight hill for five minutes. He reached the last of half-a-dozen dusty side streets. Only one house in that last street had a light on. The light shone from the verandah onto a crescent-shaped section of street, illuminating red dirt. The street ran downhill more steeply than any of the others he had passed. From the darkness at the end of it there came a cool, fecund smell, and the faint sound of running water. Attracted by the scent of water, Jean-Loup turned right into that street. A man and woman were walking together, silently, out of the darkness at the end of the street. Twenty metres from Jean-Loup they stopped within the streetlight’s glow and began to fight. From a distance it seemed to be the woman who was angry, not the man. The woman was screaming with anger, the man trying to break her hold on him and walk away. Each time the man walked away the woman picked up stones from the street and threw them at him, daring him to come back. The second time the man came back Jean-Loup saw his hand flash out, saw the woman’s head rock back. Jean-Loup walked towards them. The woman had grabbed the man by the shirt. She was tearing at his hair and trying to strangle him at the same time, blood flowing down the side of her face. Shouting, they swayed together at the edge of the light. They went limp under his hands. It was astonishing how
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easily they parted, like cooked chicken flesh peeling off a bone. If they had been white people, Jean-Loup thought, they would undoubtedly have turned on him. ‘You’re a fucking coward,’ yelled the woman. ‘Why don’t you just fucking kill me, you fucking coward?’ ‘I’ll hit you again,’ said the man. He was younger than the woman, and shorter, almost childishly small. His face was craggy, folded in on itself, frightened, and his voice high, congested. ‘Fucking shut up or I’ll hit you.’ The woman broke free from Jean-Loup’s grip and went for the man, raining blows on his shoulders and back. The man twisted away and struck one, two swift punches. Their blows were feeble, like people much older than they were. Then, like exhausted boxers, they were holding on to each other again. Jean-Loup, white hands outstretched, searched blindly, eellike, for a way to separate them. He shepherded the man away. ‘Go that way,’ he ordered the man, pointing uphill. He turned to the woman and pointed down towards the water. ‘You go that way.’ His voice was commanding, boss-like, the voice of authority. He scarcely knew where it had come from, this assumption of his right to break up someone else’s fight. It must have been boxed, brought up from Melbourne. He seemed to be absent from the situation, lacking any sense of personal danger, as though he, too, were in some kind of hermetic seal. The man’s expression was unchanged. He seemed unable to respond. When the woman began slowly to move away he copied her movements, shoulders slumped. At a distance of twenty metres they turned and faced off again. ‘Go on! Go!’ Jean-Loup yelled. They ignored him. For a moment Jean-Loup thought of moving away, but as soon as he took a step away from the
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invisible line between them the pair began to move closer again. By shouting and waving his arms, Jean-Loup managed to make the young man back away, but at the same time the woman pursued him, so that Jean-Loup had to use his body to stop her rushing forward. He sidled between the pair, arms outstretched. He felt like a gaolkeeper, or the catcher in a child’s game of British bulldog. The woman had produced from somewhere an opened can of Coke. Finding it an impediment she pushed it at Jean-Loup, asking him quite politely to hold it for her. Jean-Loup took the can. The woman’s hands were now free. She began to strike at Jean-Loup’s arms —not with great force, but enough to cause Jean-Loup some pain, especially since the rules of politeness dictated that he must not let drop the can. When they reached the street corner Jean-Loup felt the snapping of an invisible rope. The man abruptly disappeared. The woman stood a moment recovering her breath. With an impatient gesture she wiped blood from her mouth. She turned and began to make her way back down the street, pausing every few metres, calling curses and threats back over her shoulder in the direction the man had gone. Jean-Loup began to walk back. He was out of breath. His left arm was throbbing. A bruise had appeared above his wrist where the woman had hit him. He realised he was still holding on to the woman’s half-finished can of Coke. He wasn’t sure how it had happened. He must have taken a different street, somehow, walked in a daze up one of the other side streets. Somehow he found himself out on the opposite side of the school oval, the one where the group of men had been fighting. Before he noticed anything else he felt an acrid sensation somewhere at the back of his throat. It was more
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than a smell. It was a stiffening of every sense, an involuntary reaction to fear. The sight seemed almost natural at first: stars, up in the direction of the sky, reminding him of the stars he had seen earlier when he looked out the window of Valerian’s car, the ones that had made him catch his breath. Except that these were gold stars on a pair of football shorts, and they were attached to the body of a man. At first Jean-Loup could see only the legs. They were about twenty metres away, hanging in a fork near the base of a mango tree, about shoulder-high from the ground. The man’s torso was obscured. As Jean-Loup approached he could see that the man was doubled over, draped like a piece of wet washing, so that both his legs and his arms and head hung down. He was wearing that same pair of navy blue football shorts that Jean-Loup had seen before. Individual drops of blood had run down his legs. One droplet had begun to congeal, translucent in the streetlight against his gleaming black skin. Jean-Loup felt no terror at first. The cicada noise had made his ears ring, and his eyes had been tricked by sudden shifts of scale and light. He thought first not of human death but of the droplets of blood, as though they were some termite or rhinoceros beetle trapped by calamity on the insect scale. Here, not half an hour earlier, people had been arguing, drinking, playing cards. There was no evidence of their presence now, not so much as a beer can left in the grass. He walked closer until he could see what remained of Valerian’s face.
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chapter two
The Advertisement
At school, Jean-Loup had been taught maths by a Mr Spelling. Mr Spelling was young, pale, red-haired. He was one of those passionate consumptives who cross the pages of nineteenthcentury novels. Mr Spelling’s consuming passion was mathematics. Mathematics, to him, had nothing to do with logic. It was a great voyage of discovery, a quest for the white whale, a triumph over the darkness by the human instinct to find truth. Once, Mr Spelling explained Bernoulli’s theorem to the class. ‘As a child Bernoulli was asked by his teachers at the Academy to add all the numbers between one and a hundred,’ he said. ‘He was ten years old. They set him half an hour to do the task. He began to write the numbers out in sequence, not bothering to add them as he went. He was a lazy child, and like any lazy person he wanted a short cut. And then—flash! It hit him. What if he wrote the sequence out twice, the 14
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second time under the first, and in reverse order? Like this— 100, 99, 98 and so on. Then he could add the 1 to the 100, the 2 to the 99, the 3 to the 98. Each time it made 101. In five minutes he had worked out the formula.’ Mr Spelling had paused, looked at the jabbings of his chalk. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he breathed. Sometimes now, at night, Jean-Loup would stare in sudden bewilderment at a column of figures. He stared so long that they seemed to collect themselves and rise shimmering from the page. The reality that they represented, so mundane that it could drive him to tears, seemed on the point of transforming itself into something inexpressibly beautiful. In symbols there was ecstasy, inspiration, the divine touch. God himself, if He existed, might be discovered and summoned up one day in a symbol doodled by just such an idealistic and terminally absent-minded dreamer as he. Accountancy was never meant to have been Jean-Loup’s profession. By upbringing, if environmental influences had been left to take their course, he would have been a naturopath, or a musician, or—if he had chosen to participate in the straight world at all—perhaps a psychologist or a social worker. Hippie-dom was in his blood and bones, in his parents’ background, in every natural taste and inclination he had ever had. When he closed his eyes he dreamt, sometimes, of what his mother might have become: an old snaggle-haired woman sitting on the beach where they used to live at Byron Bay, singing—as she had once said—a mourning song to the morning, and a wailing song to the whales. ‘The wolf is your spiritual guide,’ she had said to him, before she went back to France. ‘This is why I called you after the wolf, Jean-Loup. Ask him for help and he will guide you through the woods and wilds of this world.’
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The morning he’d seen the advertisement, Jean-Loup sat in his office and stared out of the window across Victoria Parade. There were four lanes of traffic to cross each way, two sets of lights before he could pick his way across to Spring Street, where the blue-ribbon set swanned and cocktail partied their way to a deal. That journey he made three or four times each day most of the time. An arriviste, as his almost-ex girlfriend Linda had once called him. Apparently those who had arrived could tell, as could those like Linda who had always been there. He was perpetually pushing, pushing, a commuter who would never actually arrive. ‘Financial manager required,’ said the advertisement in, of all papers, the Financial Review. ‘Mission Hole Aboriginal community seeks experienced accountant or equivalent to audit and restructure financial affairs under direction of Aboriginal traditional owners. Six-month contract with possibility of extension. Experience of community management, remote area conditions an advantage. Must be willing to camp out. Managerial experience, knowledge of art an advantage. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are encouraged to apply. Contact Aboriginal Artists’ Association, Melbourne.’ Disguise was Jean-Loup’s forte. It had been ever since he was fifteen, when an ambition born of desperation had taken root in him and he had run away from his father and the memory of his sister, Duchess. All through school and university he had kept up the disguise. He had cut his hair short, kept clean-shaven, bought himself a suit as soon as he could afford one. He became a workers compensation investigator (part-time, to support his studies), a financial advisor and consultant, and an accountant. Now he did all three. ‘Jean-Loup Wild. Accountant and Financial Consultant,’
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said the gold-lettered nameplate outside his office. He looked at himself in the narrow angled mirror mounted in the corner behind his desk. He was slim, dark-haired, just under six feet tall, with sharp cheekbones and nose but a small chin and a soft mouth. There was a kind of lightness about him. It was the air of somebody who never took work matters completely seriously—an air, paradoxically, which encouraged confidences in others, for he had for years studied the art of saying utterly conventional things. The suit looked his natural element, complementing the delicacy, the slight effeminacy of his features. Jean the Wolf, Linda had called him. You fucking arsehole fake. He sat and took it all from her, he deserved every piece of shit she could sling at him—not because of any real deceptions, but through a kind of emotional neglect, a maddening insouciance when she wanted strutting and shouting. He couldn’t help it. He had tried. As she had said to him once, he was the kind of person who could take a bath in pig swill and still come up looking clean. It was the last bit that got him. Knowledge of art required. If he took the job on, he could kiss goodbye to this life of his. It was a glorious May morning. The oak trees on Victoria Parade let through just enough sunlight to turn the grass a delightful, dappled green. Roses grew alongside the path he took to the station. Miraculously they remained unpicked among the bluestone buildings and the dark-suited men and women. He had made of his life an artistic creation, as different from his natural environment as these flowers were from the reality of the flower-child. It had taken him more than fifteen years to do it, but this was where he belonged now—among the European ornaments, the gentle middleclass, the philharmonic murmurings of the soul. In six months he could lose the lot.
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Jean-Loup had known it as soon as he saw the advertisement. It was the closest thing he had ever received to a message from the spirit world. Mission Hole was where Duchess was born. The woman’s voice was Aboriginal. He could tell that straight away, in its flatness, its blurring of the edges between consonants and vowels, its absolute rejection of the kind of speech he was used to. And she had him sussed out just as quickly. ‘Who did you say you were, again?’ ‘Jean-Loup. Jean-Loup Wild.’ To the private school types in the gold-plated citadels of business he usually had to spell his first name out. With this woman on the phone at the Aboriginal Artists’ Association in Fitzroy, he didn’t even consider the idea. ‘And you were ringing up about that consultancy?’ ‘The financial management consultancy. The one out at Mission Hole community. It was advertised in the Financial Review.’ ‘Yeah, right.’ The woman’s tone fell just short of sarcasm, but Jean-Loup was still left wondering where else it might have been advertised, whether he should have said he’d seen it in the Koori Mail, or a social security newsletter, or wherever. ‘And so I was wondering if you could give me some more information about the job, and your process.’ ‘We don’t have a process, as such,’ said the woman. ‘You let me know who you are, and I’ll let you know who I am. Then, if I think you might be the right person, you can have the job. We can tie up all that whitefella stuff later.’ ‘I see.’ ‘They’ve been putting the screws on out at Mission Hole recently,’ she said. ‘They want to make our mob look like a
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bunch of thieves, or worse. It’s the same old trick they’ve been doing for the last two hundred years. They make us look incapable and derelict, and then they can justify poisoning the flour, taking away our land, whatever. They don’t have to worry about feeling guilty.’ ‘Excuse me,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘But isn’t Mission Hole Community where that famous artist lives? Margaret Gandarrwuy?’ ‘You read the papers, then. Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy. Well, I’ll tell you what we want. We want somebody who’s got legitimacy in their world. Somebody who’ll satisfy all their notions of independence, accountability, authority. All that white man’s stuff. They’ve got to look good in a suit and tie. They can make recommendations, straighten out any irregularities and so on, and then when the heat’s off we can get on with doing what we already do. What field are you in?’ ‘I’m an accountant,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘I advise people on their financial affairs. I’ve also done a little bit of fraud investigation. Lately I’ve found it’s become uninteresting work, and I’m looking for a change. I’ve had my own consultancy in Melbourne for the last four years.’ ‘You’re an investigator? True?’ ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘In the financial area, anyway.’ ‘Have you heard of a man named Guy Randhawa? He’s the art centre manager at Mission Hole.’ ‘No,’ said Jean-Loup. There was a silence. For a moment he wondered whether he should have made something up. Then he heard the woman draw a deep breath. ‘Well. If you’re what you say you are, I want to talk to you. Send your details and your paperwork in here. I want somebody on a flight to Darwin in the next two weeks.’
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‘I’ll have a few things to organise first.’ The woman did not deign to reply. Jean-Loup had to ask. ‘And what did you say your name was again?’ ‘Sally Galilee,’ said the woman. Her voice came alive when she said it, trilling the l’s like a tiny burst of song. Jean-Loup left his office and began to walk down Spring Street towards Flinders Street. He could see the construction work going on in the Jolimont railyards. It was all part of new wave, millenial Melbourne: the freeway extensions, the new luxury apartment blocks, City Link. There was a man up on some wooden scaffolding. He was putting nails in every half second, wham wham wham, with a machine that made the hammer look like a Stone Age tool. They were a tricky problem for a financial advisor, these freeway extensions. By comparison the engineers’ side of it was a doddle, a mere matter of geometric curves and lines. At the cocktail parties and gatherings he had been to, as one of the younger stars in a galaxy of private financial consultants to the Department of Transport and Works, it was the engineers who tried to give the impression of sobriety and practicality. The accountants had perfected the art of getting wildly and happily drunk, while giving nothing away. How many cars would use the new, trans-city freeways? How high should the toll be set, so that enough people would use the freeway to make it pay for itself some far-off day, but not so many that the new e-tag system would collapse, creating queues longer than the old bottlenecks had ever been? Have another champagne, mate! We’re accountants, not clairvoyants, ha ha. The obvious solution was the one the government had already adopted. All the advisors could see it at a glance. The
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Los Angeles solution, somebody had called it. Simply close off all the alternative routes, or let them slide into dereliction, until nobody has any choice. It was the accountants, these days, who needed more imagination than the bridge builders. They were the courtiers, the artists, the dreamers and jokers of the post-modern world—even if their dreams were just signs, columns of figures on a computer-generated page. Like Jean-Loup, they were paid great sums of money not to tell a living soul the truth. Jean-Loup had turned away from the sandwich shops now. He was walking away from the city blocks and down Brunton Avenue. On his left, oak trees and freshly cut grass swept gently up towards the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Its metal light towers were crimped inwards, daintily displaying only their grey concrete flukes to the outside world. Inside, on off-match days, old men in blue and vermilion jackets gave guided tours of the Long Room and Pavilion, pointing out faded photos of the Aboriginal XI of 1868, or of Robbie Flower in 1980, reaching for a mark. Jean-Loup had known, better and earlier than anybody else of his age, how important the right suit and haircut could be. He knew how to stay sober when everybody else was getting drunk. He could fan the mood and then sit back, unobtrusively, while the passions played themselves out. He knew that nine times out of ten it was better to stay silent than to speak out, and that when you did you should say less than, or even the opposite to, what you thought. He knew that he was disliked, even hated by many of his contemporaries. Even his occasional social extravagances others sensed as artificial and controlled. But it didn’t matter. Those very same qualities made him absolutely indispensable as an advisor. He could invent, play with figures, shut off parts of reality at will.
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He had most certainly told lies. Not the lies that put you in gaol, of course, but the lies that put you in the way of new business. The points stretched, the discrepancies glossed over, the advice given in serene disregard for how it would be used. Truth and falsity for Jean-Loup were a fierce thing, glowing on the backburner of his soul—an ideal image, like the concept of romantic love, too pure and embarrassing to be often shown the light of day. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. He was a long way now from the sandwich shops. The traffic on the freeway was still crowded, far more so than usual because of the construction work. The temporary lights they had set up were on permanent ‘stop’. He could feel people’s eyes on him from inside their banked-up cars, feel the envy that brewed constantly just beneath the metal and concrete surfaces of this city. He turned and began walking across the grass. The skin on his feet prickled through the shoe leather. Some kids were playing footy in the park. Their cries, carried by the breeze, hit him like an electric shock with a sensation he had not felt since primary school, on a butterfly-laden, long-forgotten day. He stopped and peeled off his shoes and socks. With a violent flick of the wrist he flung them twenty yards ahead. Somebody honked from the queue of cars. Was it at him? He didn’t care. His soft soles tingled as he ran towards a tree, feet skating weightlessly across the moist, worm-ridden earth. From outside, Jean-Loup’s flat was much the same as the other twenty in the block. Carved from Victorian bluestone boarding houses, they squatted uncomfortably between the steel-and-glass yuppie citadels that now lined St Kilda Road. Outside there were tram tracks and oak trees, a lack of parking spots and a city council with no sympathy for the residents of
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second-class blocks like these, residents under pressure from building corporations of the type Jean-Loup advised. Inside, Jean-Loup sat in a white wool-covered armchair, a pile of books and a glass of red wine beside him, and looked at one of his secrets. It was a small charcoal drawing, no larger than an A4 sheet of paper. The paper was yellowed and creased carelessly from its years inside suitcases and the pages of books, before finally he had given it one of those cheap wooden frames you can buy in supermarkets or photography shops. The picture was of a man walking in the rain. It was not well executed, but, even so, the man with his downcast face and hair swept by the wind communicated a feeling of sadness, aimlessness. He was an old man, with the posture of someone used to shame. His father had given him the picture. Jean-Loup had visited him in the boarding house he lived in now, the place with the stench and the cigarette fug in the hallways and the old men’s coughing downstairs. It was one of the few things from the past his father had left. Jean-Loup had had to take it down himself, retrieve the picture from between the pages of the old-edition Larousse he kept in the top shelf of the wardrobe, safe from all but the tallest of his father’s imaginary thieves. ‘Between pages 300 and 301,’ said his father. He watched, proprietorial and suspicious, as Jean-Loup thumbed through the pages. Unlike the other old men, his father had put on weight these last few years and had taken to using a walking stick. Between pages 400 and 401 the drawing slid out, together with half a dozen twenty-dollar notes, which fluttered separately to the floor. ‘Haven’t you heard of banks?’ asked Jean-Loup, gathering up the notes from under his father’s feet. His father, however,
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received the money in an unbending silence, stuffing it into the left pocket of his shapeless grey pants. ‘I drew that in Bali,’ his father muttered. His voice had grown even lower and more wheezy, an old man’s complaint. ‘Very much under the influence of Gauguin. I read Bakunin and Rosa Luxembourg in the mornings, and in the afternoons I tried to paint like a bourgeois.’ ‘It doesn’t look like a Gauguin,’ said Jean-Loup. His father shuffled his feet impatiently. He was growing his beard again after the operation, but the grey and white bristles, sprouting from odd positions and angles, seemed only to be inflaming his already reddened eyes. He had been in Bali after the Second World War, finally fighting for communism after years of just dealing with words. ‘Doctor Reeves won’t see me,’ he said. ‘I rang to confirm my appointment but his secretary tried to claim I hadn’t made one. Then she had the gall to tell me he’s not available for the next two weeks.’ ‘Have you paid all your bills?’ ‘I’ve paid everything. Unless Australia Post has been losing my mail again. I want to file a complaint.’ ‘Why don’t you try to get yourself another doctor?’ ‘Because Dr Reeves is the only decent one!’ His father’s shoulders rose in expostulation, his hands lifted a moment from their clasp over his distended Buddha’s belly. ‘I’d get myself a lawyer, if there was somebody I trusted. I know there must be something in administrative law. Can you ring the hospital for me?’ ‘I told you,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘I’m not getting involved in things like that for you again.’ His father suddenly dropped his gaze. Jean-Loup looked around once again at the African Madonna, the Kandinsky
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print, the curling pictures of Charles Darwin and Sukarno and Queen Elizabeth I sticky-taped to the walls. They were all cheap things, lift-outs from Readers Digest or the Bulletin. In his old age his father had become an eclectic, a collector of junky relics of all the ideas he had once so passionately espoused. Now he had no ideas to sustain him, only his battles with officialdom. Of all his old books only the dictionaries and encyclopaedias were left, and soon he wouldn’t be able to read even those. ‘You’re right,’ said the old man. ‘It’s not like a Gauguin. All the other things I did were copies, but that one went against the tide. I used to dream of all the things you couldn’t get in Bali, like chocolates and lamb chops and being cold.’ In his armchair, Jean-Loup stared once again at the picture. In a corner of the room was a suitcase, open, and with several of his summer shirts already folded inside. Something about that picture summed up the end of his father’s life. JeanLoup was angry and afraid, and almost in tears. The book on top of the pile, one of a number which he had found in a cramped bookshop in Chapel Street, seemed to consist mostly of reviews of Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s work. One critic had written: I am about to make a prediction which no doubt will land me in more trouble than usual with those who make it their business to stir up such things. Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy will be ranked by posterity in the elect pantheon of truly great original—and not just Aboriginal—artists. Her style has captured the imagination of artists and art collectors worldwide, spawning a host of flattering imitations. True, she has just two overseas exhibitions and one national art award to her credit. True, the current wave of interest in her work has
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incurred the disdain of faddish, post-modern ideologues. Such people have tried to peddle the self-interested view that all art, including hers, is no different in reality to their own slavish, plastic imitations. In my view the work of Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy will outlast such adolescent disputes. In my view Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy is entitled to say to her detractors—as she herself would say—Bah. Humbug. When I was speaking to David Hockney at the Vienna Biennale … Humbug to what? thought Jean-Loup. Humbug to the postmodernists, or to the notoriously pompous critic Jeremy Tatnall? Jean-Loup had read enough of the arts pages in the papers to know that Tatnall was, as usual, using his supposed review of Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s work to launch a tirade against his pet hates: the Marxists, post-modernists, nihilists, grunge artists, Generation Xers and so forth. Over the page was another, supposedly less elevated review. Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy has developed a unique and disturbing style, a style which places her uncannily at the centre of current high art debate. She ‘fits in’ precisely because of her failure to fit; she defies successive artistic pigeonholes precisely because of her apparent failure to defy. In common with other genuinely original artists she rejects by accepting; takes part by remaining silent; contradicts by appearing to agree. Perhaps the oddest thing about the Gandarrwuy phenomenon is that this extraordinarily original artist disclaims all originality in her work. Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy has dragged Aboriginal art kicking and screaming into the late twentieth century—and from there into the twenty-first. Most of
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the kicking and screaming has come, naturally enough, from the self-styled keepers of ‘Aboriginal culture’, the vast majority of whom are non-Aboriginal. She has set Aboriginal art free from its unsteady ‘traditional’ moorings, with all their unsavoury redolences of discredited anthropological practice. Since Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy we can all say that Aboriginal art no longer belongs in the ‘primitive’ or ethnographic section of the museum. It is central to global concerns of nuclear warfare, land rights, Third World material poverty and its spiritual counterpart in the West. Aboriginal art has come of age … Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy is sixty-five. She is compact, even delicate, just five feet two. She is softly spoken but greets everybody with equal friendliness. For the past five years she has been living at an outstation not far from Mission Hole. It is a place that must seem luxurious to a woman brought up under missionary discipline, although to most of the rest of us, unused to life on a traditional Aboriginal community, the conditions would no doubt seem harsh. Her output and her dedication is prodigious, but she is learning to deal with the demands of fame. When she is tired she signals by raising one gnarled right hand. Her name, she says, has nothing to do with the notorious Englishwoman of that name. ‘My grandfather whitefella, name Thatcher,’ she points out with her enigmatic smile. ‘He bin stockman out Margaret River way. That maybe why them missionaries call me Margaret, I don’t know.’ She pauses, lets her words sink in. ‘That Balanda politician, she stole that name from me.’ Who is this woman, so unaffected, indeed even
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unaware of her worldwide fame? At the Mission Hole Art Centre, a modest building pieced together at a time when her works fetched little more than the price of canvas, her manager, Guy Randhawa, knows more than most. ‘She was brought in as a child out of the bush,’ he explains. ‘It was said that her mother, grandmother and aunties had been killed. She escaped by a miracle, and found her way through miles of waterless plain back to her own country, where she was picked up by a passing prospector. Even today she has astonishing bush skills. She has been known to spend months at a time out bush, talking—as she says—with the ancestral spirits of her country.’ Randhawa himself seems almost elfin. His curly hair, light movements and sneakers belie the determination needed to wrestle funding from bureaucracy and almost single-handedly convince the art world to take notice of this woman’s astonishing talent. ‘Forget the nonsense about Aboriginal artists getting it easy,’ he says. ‘If Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy was white, she’d be another Whiteley or a Nolan by now. Her work has that same scope, that same universal vision. Every day now for fifteen years she’s sat down with her canvas. Sometimes she goes for days without sleep … it’s as though she wants to map out every rock, every hue and blade of grass of her ancestral land. Like a patchwork quilt, almost. She says she’s doing it to save the land. And that’s what she’s doing, literally and metaphorically, she’s on a mission for future generations. She’s saving it from being destroyed …’ Jean-Loup examined a picture of Gandarrwuy’s simply called Crocodile Man. He was depicted in the ‘X-ray’ style which
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Jean-Loup had seen before in reproductions of Aboriginal art. He was angular to the point of starvation, with bones and internal organs showing, and holding a feather-shafted spear. But the background landscape was not quite like anything Jean-Loup had seen before. The whites and ochres of traditional rock art had been replaced by a vivid polymer. The colours used were literally the colours of the rainbow. Their general shape indicated the contours of a recognisably Arnhem Land-type escarpment, but faded from red to blue, then violet, then finally a sea of grey. The figure, spear upraised, seemed to be battling vague and elemental forces. Another painting was called The Sun Woman. This picture seemed to be purely abstract. There was a lighter central area, perhaps the sun, with slightly less light areas at either side. Again there were the rainbow colours, with the same gradations to a uniform grey at the edges. ‘The sun-woman carries a torch of flaming bark,’ said the script. ‘Each day she carries it across the sky. This painting depicts her daily journey across the horizon.’ Jean-Loup closed the book. There was something not quite right about it all. Of course, she probably didn’t speak good English. Even though she had spent time with the missionaries, she wouldn’t have been educated to bandy words with art critics. It was only natural that somebody like Guy Randhawa would be there to do it, a manager or agent she could trust. Even sophisticated European artists, people with university degrees in fine art, did that. Randhawa would be a vital link in the sale and promotion of the artist’s work. But the thing was, none of the words came from Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy herself.
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chapter three
The Morning After the Night Before
When Jean-Loup got out of bed at Mission Hole Community he saw the sun rising across the wetlands. The contractors’ house backed right onto the edge of the swamp. Beyond a tiny patch of bare earth was a wire fence, and beyond that a thin line of dry grass. The wetlands were a vast swathe of green, dotted with waterlilies and with shallow, pale-blue pools that reflected the sky. At its far fringes were shimmering stands of paperbark. There seemed no movement at first. Then Jean-Loup’s eyes detected a kind of crawling, almost like insects, or a play of light and shadow. He looked again. Magpie geese, hundreds of them, were gathered in a pool in one of the furthest parts of the swamp, hooting and scrabbling, rising in blustering display at each other, belting their wings like sheets being shaken out to spring-clean. He could hear the honking of individual birds perfectly across the swamp, although the nearest goose was half a kilometre 30
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away. Beauty rose like a prize fighter from the canvas and hooked him in the throat. The whole scene clouded over for a moment, turned into Melbourne, a drizzling grey-blue film running down the insides of his eyes. He walked into the kitchen and drank a glass of metallic, faintly putrescent water. From the window he could see across the school oval, where he had walked the night before. The police had obviously come out from Darwin first thing. There was a photographer by the mango tree now, and two or three other white men in suits. An area had been cordoned off with red and white tape. A truck drove up, going fast. In its back, in the instant before she jumped off, Jean-Loup saw an Aboriginal woman wearing a bright dress. The dress caught his eye as the woman sailed off the truck, limp as a rag doll, and hit the earth, raising a little explosion of dust. The truck pulled up. A man jumped out and ran towards the woman, who was lying there motionless. She seemed paralysed, weeping, leaning heavily on the man as he pulled her up. Other people were there as well, but they kept well back, standing motionless behind trees or fences, watching events unfold in their own community from where, evidently, they felt most comfortable: on the fringes. Jean-Loup picked up the phone in the front room. He tried to ring Sally Galilee, but the line was dead. He walked outside. He had eaten just that tin of baked beans since yesterday lunchtime. The instant he met the sunshine it was astonishingly hot. The sports oval, green in his imagination the night before, revealed itself now as dry and brown. Jean-Loup walked on the far side of the road from the oval, meaning to stay as far away from the mango tree as possible. Despite himself he looked once in the direction of
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the tree, and saw that one of the suited detectives had just lifted the sheet covering the body. He did it in such a way that the onlookers could not see. Nevertheless the woman, who had reached the cordoned-off area by now, broke out at once into a heart-wrenching wail. On either side of the dirt road were the fibro and corrugated-iron huts Jean-Loup had seen by darkness the night before. Each had the same drooping seedlings at regular intervals in the front garden, each an identical steel-columned front verandah. One of the houses had been recently burnt out, its steel beams and iron sheets all twisted, its blackened shell still smelling faintly of ash. About halfway up a slight hill was an area where, at some point, somebody had been growing fruit and vegetables. There were just ratty banana palms there now, tilted drunkenly into each other, the detritus of their leaves strewn thickly about. At the top of the hill was an enclosure surrounded by a high wire fence. Coils of barbed wire ran along the top of the fence, some new, wicked-looking variety, spears and hooks and triangles, glinting silvery as technological warfare in the sun. ‘Mission Hole Sports and Social Club,’ said the sign. ‘Opening hours 12–2 pm, 5–8 pm. Closed on Sundays. Outside these premises Mission Hole is a dry community. Strictly no alcohol to be taken on to Aboriginal land.’ The concrete verandah of the police station was strewn with palm leaves, as it had been the night before. Sergeant Jack showed him into the interview room. This time there were no blue lights flashing outside, and no drunken man thumping on the other side of the plasterboard wall. Instead, another policeman sat behind the table. ‘Thanks for coming in,’ said Sergeant Jack to Jean-Loup.
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‘This is Detective Green from the CIB, just flown out from Darwin this morning.’ There were no thanks in Sergeant Jack’s tone. He exuded an air of extraordinary tension. It was as though, everywhere around him, he saw things that infuriated him, things he would once have stopped in an imperious instant but was now powerless to restrain. He was baleful, dangerous, trapped out of his time. In his bristling nostril hairs, in his red-rimmed eyes Jean-Loup saw a man constantly searching for an excuse. Detective Green said nothing. Muscular and athletic and extraordinarily young, the detective looked like he belonged more on the footy field or basketball court than in this stifling room. ‘That’s fine.’ Sergeant Jack stubbed down the ‘play’ button on a battered tape recorder. ‘You understand, of course, that you don’t have to speak to us. You’re here of your own free will, voluntarily assisting us with our inquiries.’ Jean-Loup glanced at the spools, which were turning as reluctantly as the fan overhead. They seemed scarcely capable of picking up sound, let alone subtleties of tone. ‘Your name and address? Your occupation?’ Jean-Loup told him once again. ‘At 22.05 last night,’ said Sergeant Jack, ‘you were brought into the Mission Hole Police Station. In the end it turned out that you had information about a suspected criminal offence.’ ‘It wasn’t a suspected criminal offence. It was a murder. I’d just discovered Valerian Pride’s body at the Mission Hole Sports Oval, hanging in a tree.’ ‘An Aboriginal male, deceased.’ Sergeant Jack’s voice was patronising, censorious. A lazy pattern of veins flooded his cheeks and nose. ‘Tell me again how you identified him.’
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‘By his shorts, at first. He’d met me at the airport just that evening, in the same pair of football shorts.’ ‘His football shorts.’ Jean-Loup watched the spools turning on the recorder. Sergeant Jack and the detective watched Jean-Loup. Sergeant Jack’s thinly veiled politeness seemed at any moment about to erupt. ‘You’ve not been to Mission Hole before, then, have you?’ asked Sergeant Jack. ‘I have not. I’m here working for the Aboriginal Artists’ Association, funded through ATSIC. I’m a financial investigator, on a six-month consultancy.’ ‘A consultancy,’ said Sergeant Jack. And then in a low growl, too low for the recording to pick up: ‘With ATSIC. Arseholes Talking Shit in Canberra.’ Jean-Loup smiled, an expression he had polished and made infuriatingly bland. ‘That’s right.’ ‘And did you know the deceased before you landed this job?’ ‘No. I was told he was somebody I should speak to, that was all. Sally Galilee in Melbourne said she’d arranged for him to meet me when I arrived.’ Sergeant Jack’s bulldog shoulders rose, his eyes narrowed. There was no doubt he had heard Sally Galilee’s name before. ‘What time did your plane arrive?’ ‘About six-thirty. Nightfall.’ ‘And what were your first impressions of the deceased?’ Jean-Loup searched for a word. ‘He was angry about something. Angry, and at the same time frightened. He was talking about all kinds of things: religion, the Catholic Church, his clan and country. He rambled on a bit.’ ‘Rambled? What’s that supposed to mean, rambled? Did he maintain control of the vehicle?’
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‘Yes. He drove fast, but he knew the road.’ Sergeant Jack rubbed at an angry red mark on the side of his neck. He stared out of the barred window behind JeanLoup. ‘Where did he take you?’ ‘Straight back to the community. He dropped me off at the house where I’m staying. It was empty when I got there. I stayed for an hour or so, got settled and then went for a walk.’ ‘What time was that?’ ‘Nine o’clock. I looked at my watch. I remember clearly, because I wanted to see how late it was going to go on. They were arguing on the oval, you see, right across from the house. That’s why I went out.’ ‘Nine o’clock,’ repeated the sergeant. Sideways, dismissively, he muttered to Detective Green: ‘Pension night.’ ‘There were probably ten or twelve people. I don’t know what it was all about. There was a lot of yelling. But then later, when I came back, there was nobody there. Can you imagine that? Half an hour later a murder’s taken place, not fifty metres from where they were. And there’s nobody in sight.’ Sergeant Jack’s hands were thick, and clenched, like two ugly paperweights hedging in the secrets of the desk. ‘And so what happened when you went out?’ ‘I walked away from the main road. The opposite direction to the way I had come in. I wanted some peace and quiet, but I didn’t want to get too far away. I stuck to a dirt road, with houses on one side, going slightly downhill. I must have been walking on the edge of the community, on the edge of that swamp I can see from my back door. I walked for about ten minutes. Maybe half a kilometre or so. Down where I stopped I could hear what sounded like the river. There was also a track. It must have led to a boat landing or something.’
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Sergeant Jack was looking bored. ‘Which way did you go back?’ he said. ‘I ended up on that far side of the oval. It was the same side where the people had been fighting before. It did strike me as strange that there was nobody about. But I was in a hurry to get back. I wouldn’t even have noticed anything if it hadn’t been for the moonlight catching …’ On his footy shorts, Jean-Loup almost said, once again. ‘Just tell us what you saw.’ ‘He’d been hoisted into the fork of a tree, bent over at the waist. I saw his legs at first. They were hanging down. There was blood running down his leg. As soon as I came near I could see he was dead. There was blood on his head and face, and blood dripping. I could see that he’d been hit on the back of the head with something heavy. I thought of trying to get him down but he was too heavy to carry myself. I called out for help.’ Jean-Loup stopped short. There was no point trying to describe what happened next: the silence, the lights out on verandahs and houses, the night electric with fear. He had touched the dead man then, held his still-warm hand, felt as though he, too, were calling out for help from some land beyond human hearing. When, ten minutes later, the first people began to appear, Jean-Loup had been by turns shouting, abusive, then ashamed. The paddywagon when it arrived was a vacuum, a return to the white man’s world in a padded cell. ‘All right,’ said Sergeant Jack. ‘Let’s go back. Did you notice anything else about Valerian, before he died?’ ‘What would you expect?’ Sergeant Jack’s voice was full of contempt. ‘We’ve got six witnesses saying Valerian was drinking in the club all lunchtime. Did you smell any alcohol on his breath?’ ‘Not that I noticed.’
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‘Not that you noticed. He’s been drinking at lunchtime, he’s gone back to the club as soon as he’s finished driving back from the airstrip. The club closes, and he comes out for a game of cards. That much we know for sure. After that there’s two possibilities. Either he got belted there and then, over the cards, and got carried to the mango tree. Or he walked to the tree himself and was killed there. The first seems more likely because we think he was too drunk to walk.’ And then, once again, sotto voce: ‘Jesus Christ, you reckon you’re an investigator.’ ‘I told you, he seemed perfectly sober when I saw him. And anyway, why is that so important? Aren’t you looking for somebody who actually saw him being killed?’ ‘Right now, they’re probably trying to work out which way the wind’s blowing. Give them time. And besides, I’m a witness myself. When I came by in the patrol car, at five past nine, he was certainly drunk.’ ‘Did you get out of your car? Or did you just cruise by with a megaphone, like the police car I saw?’ Sergeant Jack jabbed a stubby finger at the ‘pause’ button. ‘Listen. I get a trifle fucking sick of southern fucking blow-ins. Who the fuck do you think you are? Dick Tracy? I’ve been here ten years, you know that? You fucking office types are all the same. You don’t know shit from a bar of soap, and you reckon the sun shines out of your arse. Now, did you see any other drunks that weren’t drunk, or fights that weren’t fights, or any other useless fucking stuff to waste my time?’ Without waiting for an answer Sergeant Jack started the tape running again. ‘Thank you for your information. You’ll have to give evidence at a coroner’s inquest, most likely. I’d anticipate that should be in two or three months’ time. Possibly you’ll be required again at a committal and a trial.
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You’ll be advised by mail. We’ll be interviewing other possible witnesses here over the next few days. If we need you again you’ll be advised.’ ‘There was one other thing,’ he said. Afterwards, JeanLoup wondered what had made him say it: whether it was a random, destructive impulse, or whether he had underestimated Sergeant Jack. ‘What’s that?’ ‘I did see another fight. Down near the river, in that side street I mentioned. A man and a woman.’ Suddenly, Sergeant Jack was alert. Detective Green was leaning forward as well. ‘The woman was hitting the man, calling him a coward. I went in and broke it up.’ ‘What did they look like?’ ‘The man was quite young, small and skinny, and with a half-grown beard. He didn’t seem to know exactly what was going on. The woman was older than him, skinny as well. She had protruding teeth, and a very broad nose, as though it had maybe recently been broken, and a cut lip. But they came from the other direction, they couldn’t have been part of that group on the oval.’ ‘Which direction did they go?’ ‘The man went uphill. In the direction I ended up walking. I didn’t see exactly where. The woman went the other way, down towards the water.’ ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’ ‘Because I didn’t even think of it again until now. And, frankly, I don’t see how it could have been relevant. They seemed so bound up in their own affairs, I don’t think either of them could have seen anything. And unlike Valerian, I’d say these two were drunk.’
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But Sergeant Jack had stopped listening. ‘That’ll be all for now,’ he breathed. Detective Green, however, was less discreet. ‘Lazarus,’ Jean-Loup heard him say at the same time, thickly and involuntarily and half under his breath. All along the dirt road back from the police station he saw banana trees in their dozens, shrivelled and yellowing, rusting bulldozers, and cars abandoned for no other apparent reason than a flat tyre. He found the Mission Hole General Store and went in and bought some tinned corn and carrots and peas from a middle-aged couple, the man in a starched white shirt. Jean-Loup wanted to get started. Guy Randhawa at the art centre was the obvious place to go, and so he asked for directions. The man and woman conferred in churchmouse whispers, then sketched in the dust on the counter a set of spidery lines and squares. At the far edge of the community the art centre scarcely stood out from the corrugated-iron or Besser-block buildings around. Its roof was slightly higher, its verandah, with its pine posts sitting in jam tins half-full of oil, slightly wider than the rest. In the front garden was a twisted ironwood tree under whose half-shade a couple of old men sat in silence. Taped to one wall was another poster of Princess Diana. The dead princess’s gaze looked out across the savannah to a red-rock escarpment from which the smoke of a dry season bushfire was slowly rising, grey-blue as the princess’s eyes. Just inside the front door of the art centre a young blonde woman sat at a wooden desk. She was staring with intense concentration at a laptop computer screen. ‘Good morning,’ said Jean-Loup. The woman held up a smooth, fine-boned hand in a
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gesture of silence. On her thumb and little finger she wore Gothic iron rings. Down the centre of her forehead ran a single deep furrow. ‘I’ve forgotten the password,’ she said. Jean-Loup looked around the room. All around its hot plasterboard walls were papier-mâché painted balloons, woven grass baskets, and paintings in the traditional colours, ochres and yellows and white. Cardboard boxes sat on the floor, piled full with T-shirts. There was a single filing cabinet with rusty metal handles, and a thin black line around the entire room. Below that line, there was black mould everywhere on the walls. In one corner, next to a dustpan and broomstick, stood two feather-ringed burial poles, over two metres high. ‘I don’t know what’s happening,’ said the woman. ‘I went to Darwin two weeks ago, then forgot my PIN number and lost my card in the Autobank. Then last week I put the wrong kind of petrol in my car and conked out down the road. It’s like there’s this voice whispering in my head, telling me to forget everything, everything I know. Maybe it’s a spirit. A message.’ The woman looked up and peered closely at Jean-Loup. Her gaze was fearful, guileless, full of disjunctive conviction. She had startling Siamese-blue eyes. ‘Are you an art dealer?’ she asked anxiously. ‘No. My name is Jean-Loup Wild, and I’m an accountant. I give financial advice. I’m looking for a man named Guy Randhawa. Sally Galilee in Melbourne told me he’s the manager here.’ ‘I’m Monica,’ she said. ‘Rainbow Guy’s not here.’ Just then a young Aboriginal man walked in. He wore thongs and flared jeans, had long tangled hair, and carried a painting rolled up under one arm. Monica’s tone grew
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suddenly breathless, intense. She launched into a monologue on the artistic merits of the completed canvas, giving the artist instructions on what subjects he should paint, what types of traditional stories, what colours and what size canvas would sell. Jean-Loup was astonished at how domineering she became. For fifteen minutes she grew pale, translucent, her voice full of suppressed passion, as though this man was some kind of picture himself, sprung to life from out of the pages of a book, and to whom she was briefly given the opportunity to talk. ‘You seem to know a lot about Aboriginal art,’ said JeanLoup when the man had gone. ‘There’s no such thing as Aboriginal art, as such. That’s just an imposed bourgeois Western concept. You can’t separate art from life. These people live their art. Their whole lives are works of art, until the Western colonialist system thing comes in, turning their culture into cash.’ ‘How come you’re working here, then?’ ‘I’m a student. I’m not here to impose my belief paradigm on them. I’m here to learn.’ ‘What are you studying?’ ‘If you have to ask that, you won’t understand.’ There was another wooden chair at the desk. Jean-Loup sat down. Monica had pulled her legs up under her, so that now she was sitting, cotton-draped thighs resting on her heels. From where Jean-Loup sat he could also see Monica’s computer screen. The screen display was of a sleeping Native American, a Geronimo figure, with little prairie buffalo coursing across the top. ‘How,’ said Jean-Loup carefully, ‘does a student like yourself go about trying to understand?’ ‘You have to feel it. You have to forget about your dollars
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and cents. What did you say you were, an accountant? Good God. You have to live out here, be with the people. Go out hunting with them, although you don’t have to kill. Spend time making baskets and fishing. They don’t think of money like you do. For them, the most important thing is the sacred connection with the earth, the spirit, the soul.’ ‘Is that what Rainbow Guy says?’ ‘It’s what the Earth is telling us, if we want to survive.’ Jean-Loup was silent. He picked up the painting closest to him. It had a price, four hundred dollars, and the bottom half of the canvas was brown and rotting away. ‘Flood damage,’ said Monica abruptly. ‘The river rose fourteen metres last wet season. In January. Rainbow Guy stacked all the paintings on top of filing cabinets, then climbed onto the roof. Still, the water came up to there.’ She pointed to the black tide mark, high up on the wall. ‘Where were you? Were you helping?’ ‘No.’ Her voice became remote, enraptured, almost singsong. ‘I did not even know of this place. In only four weeks I have learnt so much, but soon my time here is finished, and I have to go back. Already I am beginning to think: how will I maintain the secrets I have been told? How will I keep them safe?’ ‘Well, I’ve only been here one night,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘And already I’ve run across some secrets.’ ‘Such as what?’ Monica’s eyes grew wider and bluer than ever. ‘Well, for example, about the death of a man named Valerian.’ Monica stared at him. Her eyes had suddenly frozen. ‘It’s forbidden,’ she said. ‘Don’t you know the law?’ ‘What’s forbidden?’
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‘You can’t say the name of someone who’s died. It’s banned for at least seven years.’ ‘I didn’t know that. Nor did the police, as far as my memory goes.’ ‘What’s your connection to the police?’ ‘I don’t have any connection. They’ve been interviewing me, that’s all. I was wondering if you could tell me who Lazarus is.’ ‘Lazarus?’ Monica’s lips were moist, and slightly open, as if in further protest. ‘Lazarus means no harm. He’s been here quite often. Such a small, meek man.’ ‘What makes you say he’s meek?’ Jean-Loup tried another tack. ‘Is he an artist?’ But Monica had belatedly realised she had said too much. ‘His name’s Lazarus. That’s all.’ ‘Would Lazarus have had anything to do with Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy?’ ‘Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy,’ said Monica in a nearwhisper, ‘is practically a saint.’ Monica was staring out past the computer and the folded papers on the desk, past the painting on the wall behind JeanLoup, past a group of little kids who came rushing through the door at that moment, picking at the T-shirts in the boxes, picking up a canvas, bouncing a tennis ball off one bare spot on the wall, then disappearing out the back. ‘I’d like to meet Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy,’ JeanLoup said. ‘You can’t just go and meet her. You have to be invited.’ ‘How far away does she live?’ ‘Out in the big house. She’s miles away from here. The barge goes by there. There’s power, fridges, everything she needs. Too much bad energy down here.’
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‘What sort of bad energy?’ Monica didn’t reply. An old woman entered the room. She, too, had a roll of small canvasses wrapped in her arms. Monica began to hector her in that same brittle, breathless tone. Paint your mother’s country, not your father’s. Paint the seasons and waterholes, and don’t forget to include the story. You’ve got to have the story, or the painting won’t sell. Don’t paint the stolen generation pictures. People don’t like it. It makes them uncomfortable. Medium-size canvases, traditional stories, and don’t overprice your works. People want paintings they can take away in their suitcases, or in hand luggage on planes. Talking in this vein Monica grew pale, suffused with an almost religious energy, suddenly more alive. ‘I’ll be going now,’ called out Jean-Loup. ‘Can you tell Guy Randhawa, that is, Rainbow Guy, I dropped by?’ Monica did not pause. Her arms were waving furiously. The old woman seemed stony, uncomprehending. Monica reminded Jean-Loup momentarily of an eight-armed Hindu goddess. ‘He’s out on retreat,’ called out Monica as Jean-Loup reached the door. ‘He won’t be back for at least three days.’ Just as Jean-Loup turned to acknowledge her a frog jumped out from behind one of the paintings stacked against the wall. Clearly a leftover from the January flood, it was suffering now. Its body and webbed, collagenous feet were sticky and covered in dust. Jean-Loup walked back towards the contractors’ house. He was beginning already to mark off the landmarks along these roads: the art centre, the Mission Hole General Store, the sports and social club, the police station. They were like suburban railway stations, pieces of civilisation marked out with the surveyor’s tape—or with knife cuts—across the land,
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which had clotted and bled in places, like the tree where he had found Valerian, now with its red and white police tape and its tarpaulins, its white men in suits and its Aboriginal police aides standing guard. But Valerian’s body had gone. There was nobody there now, just the tape trailing across the ground. He went and stood on the boundary it marked out, staring in. His imagination kept trying to jump in before bouncing off the hard surface of reality. It was like trying to reach for something behind a mirror. Even the blood had been scraped up or scrubbed away. He walked back across the oval. Sweat dripped off him in the midday sun. In the dazzling light he wanted to try to reconstruct the events of the night before. It couldn’t be all that difficult to remember. He had just to click onto that deeper, night-time reality, navigate through his memories, through dreams that were other people’s nightmares, things other people had lived with all their lives. He had just to walk back down towards the river. During earlier times, Brother O’Gorman’s book had said, the river had been the only means of contact between the community and the white people’s world—the source of civilisation’s conveniences, or the source, as Valerian had claimed, of contagion. Now there was also the dry-season road, leading out past the airstrip and eventually back to the Stuart Highway and to Darwin. There was also the airstrip itself, eight kilometres away. Even now, as he watched, Jean-Loup saw the white chalk mark of a distant light plane trailing through the blue sky, no doubt the plane carrying Valerian’s body back to the coroner in Darwin. The white man’s a cannibal, Valerian had accused. If he called a priest a cannibal, what would he have said about a coroner’s knife?
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Jean-Loup was walking down the road he must have taken last night. Once again he reached the last in the matrix of dusty streets. From there a track led downhill through thick green bush. At the bottom was the river, while to his left the road led slightly uphill again, back among the houses. It must have been here, surely, that he had seen the man called Lazarus and the woman having their fight. He looked at his watch. It had taken him fifteen minutes to walk down here from the contractors’ house. Could it be done? He supposed, physically, that it could. It would have been hard work, though, to run back and see or do anything by the sports oval in that time. He himself last night had walked back briskly, not wanting to stay out any longer. Perhaps there was even less than fifteen minutes gap between when he saw Lazarus and when he returned. ‘You’re a fucking coward,’ the woman had said. ‘Why don’t you just fucking kill me, you fucking coward?’ And then, when Jean-Loup approached, they had peeled away from each other without resistance. In the half-shade of a stringybark, Jean-Loup stood still. It was his breathing he was trying to control. Get that noise out of his ears, and he could listen better to what was going on around him, understand a little of the life that was coursing through this place, oblivious to his own concerns. What did Valerian have to say to him that had been so finally cut off? And who was Lazarus, anyway? Somewhere near the bottom of that deeper, night-time reality, his sister’s past lurked as well. There was Valerian’s fear. Lazarus’s fear. The fear of those people who, after whatever it was that had happened, had disappeared. If it was fear, then what had made them afraid?
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chapter four
Melbourne
When Jean-Loup had wanted to find out more about Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy he asked Linda. Linda had once sold cigarettes for the W D & H O Wills Company. She’d worn a blue short-skirted uniform and worked at sporting events and such. Reputedly she had worked several months one summer with Meisterlinck, the international art dealers, and she had also half-finished a business and marketing degree. She worked as a door-bitch at an exclusive inner-city nightclub, which seemed to pay her in alcohol and speed and in opportunities to meet rich arseholes who took her to places that got more and more exclusive, until at the end of the night she would emerge at the arse-end of the city and return to Jean-Loup. ‘Who are these blokes, anyway, that you keep on disappearing with?’ he had asked her once. He meant the ones she hailed in nightclubs at three and 47
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four in the morning. The ones with leather jackets that jangled keys from one arm while they dangled Linda, drunk but still expansively strutting, from the other. She would never even turn to wave him goodbye. ‘Just friends.’ ‘How do you know them?’ ‘Which one?’ ‘Say, for example, that dark-haired bloke you left with on Saturday night.’ ‘Oh. That’s a guy from work.’ ‘What work?’ ‘What business is that of yours?’ They were in bed. Linda turned on her side to challenge him, her bleached blond hair trailing over the pillow. ‘It ought to be my business. I ought to be out there fighting, getting bashed up trying to stop that bloke dragging you off. Except I know that’s what you’re trying to make me do.’ ‘Why don’t you do it anyway?’ ‘Because you want to see me bleed. Then you could turn the tables on me and leave.’ Linda’s voice was harsh. ‘I wouldn’t leave you, if I thought you’d care.’ Linda was the kind of person teachers and police officers hate. She couldn’t read a book or keep an ordinary job, but she was a genius at certain kinds of human relationships. In her night clubs Linda became a goddess. One winter’s evening he had seen her, dressed in black, checking the light outside her front door. Her body was tense, her face pale behind the sunglasses she wore at the slightest sign of daylight. When Jean-Loup touched her skin he could actually feel the chemicals they exchanged. They were the very same ones he could smell and taste on himself when, at eighteen, he had
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wandered the randy streets. The whiteness of her flesh was astonishing. She had a snake and cross tattoo on the back of her left shoulder, and a rose and thorn tattoo on the inside of her thigh. Her cunt was delicate and as bitter as her words. If he rang her wanting to talk she would piss him off. She was only ever receptive if he rang her with some ulterior motive, and the more crassly he was using her the more she seemed to want it, the more subtly it would assert the rawness of her wound. ‘I haven’t been reading the papers,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘Can you tell me what’s been happening with Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy?’ ‘It started last January in Darwin,’ she said. ‘At the opening of the annual Johann Meisterlinck Aboriginal Art Award. Everybody was there. All the southern dignitaries and the Northern Territory politicians, and Meisterlinck and the other international art buyers as well. Can you imagine it? It was going to mark a new stage in Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s career. Officially it’s the showpiece for the work of all the best Aboriginal artists, but unofficially it’s Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy everyone wants to buy. ‘There was an extra reason for being there this year. All Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s most recent work had narrowly escaped being destroyed in a flood. They’d just had the Goyder River rise fourteen metres out at Mission Hole the week before. Guy Randhawa, the art centre manager, had to stack all the paintings up on the roof. The marketing people had a ball about the whole thing. Noah’s Art, they were calling it. Gandarrwuy and the whale.’ Linda paused theatrically. He heard the click of her cigarette lighter, the sharp gasp of her elegantly smoke-scuffed lungs. She could blow smoke rings and scratch her calf with her
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little fingernail until he grew desperate. It was said Linda exaggerated vastly the warmth of her relationship with Meisterlinck and the other international art dealers, but Jean-Loup knew better. The Meisterlinck were old family friends of her mother’s. As a teenage bombshell always ready to explode, she had quite likely slept with Johann himself. She had more personal knowledge of the art world than anybody else he knew. ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘They had a new painting of hers they were unveiling at the opening. It was said to be a big one, freshly painted and flown in that day. They were out on the lawn, with their champagne glasses and the reporters’ cameras, looking out over Fannie Bay. It was Guy Randhawa himself who did the honours, stepped forward to pull away the specially imported Italian velvet cloth. Foolishly they tried to stop the photographers printing their pictures, but that just made it certain they ended up on the front page.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘The painting had been vandalised. One knife slash straight down the middle, and one horizontal, just like a cross. And then above the cross was sprayed a slogan in red paint. It must have taken a good ten or fifteen minutes alone to do all that.’ ‘What was the slogan?’ ‘The artist is a thief.’ ‘The artist is a thief?’ ‘Well, that’s what most people thought it looked like. The writing was pretty crude, and obviously done in a hurry. It’s a reference to a well-known post-modernist idea, you see. It means something like there’s no such thing as original work anymore. Everything’s been stolen from somewhere else. Or maybe it was racist. Some people said the vertical and
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horizontal slashes were meant to be a swastika, or even a cross. Or it could have been someone quite different, and the words were just a blind.’ ‘What happened then?’ ‘Randhawa’s behaviour was extraordinary. It was quite an impressive performance. He tried to tell everybody it was Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s own writing. He’d been talking to her about post-modernism lately and she must have done this as a joke. Some of the art reviews took up the thread, but in general he didn’t quite pull it off. He was smooth all right. His face didn’t crack for a moment, I’m told. But all the same it left a bad aftertaste, and soon the rumours started to flow.’ ‘What sort of rumours?’ ‘That she doesn’t paint real traditional work. That the stories she paints aren’t from her country. That she flogs off inferior work, or gets other artists to do the hard work for her. Her prices started to drop, and it began to affect the market for all Aboriginal art.’ ‘What about the police? Didn’t they get involved?’ ‘They didn’t pursue it. Randhawa refused to admit there was anything wrong, and nobody else at Mission Hole would talk. And, anyway, they had other things to worry about down there, what with the flood.’ ‘When do you think the painting could have been slashed?’ ‘According to the papers, the painting was loosely wrapped in plastic, both before and after being transported to Darwin. The person who unwrapped and hung it was an exhibition hanging contractor. He saw the slashes but assumed it was part of the picture. The police should have been interviewing people who were at the opening, or out at Mission Hole at the time, anybody who might have seen anything. Anybody who
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might have had ten or fifteen minutes alone with that painting, before or after it left Mission Hole. I think it’s probably too late to know.’ ‘Do you have any other ideas?’ ‘You’re very interested in art all of a sudden.’ Jean-Loup had been waiting for this. It meant he had to explain, cajole, pay in emotional coin for the information he had so easily extracted. ‘I’m thinking of taking on a job up there. It’s a financial manager at Mission Hole community, trying to get their affairs back on track.’ ‘I wish you good luck,’ she said. Her voice was silken, threatening. ‘Although I think, to tell you the truth, that they might need a lawyer more than an auditor, and a doctor most of all. Gandarrwuy hasn’t painted since, they say. Nobody’s seen her, she’s made no public appearances, done no interviews, not that she did too many before. People say she hardly eats, she’s starving herself to death. You’re probably taking on a lot of trouble, going up there.’ ‘All the same, I’d like to go. What’s this Guy Randhawa like?’ ‘Who knows? Not many people know how he got where he is at Mission Hole. It’s not so easily done, going out without any art qualifications and staying there ten years. He’d have strong relationships. They say he ran his own commune in Kashmir for two years, before he got kicked out by the Indian government. He started off as a stockbroker before he got into art.’ ‘Is he honest?’ ‘He’s a kingpin. People say he’s a bigger talker than Jeff Koons. There’s more censorship in the art world than anywhere else, did you know that? Everybody wants a favour
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from everybody else, and they’re all too scared to step out of line.’ ‘It’s not exactly fear,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘It’s a little more complex, I think. I can understand what it might be.’ ‘That’s because you’re exactly the same,’ said Linda in disgust. ‘I tell you one thing, though. I can’t imagine you going up to Darwin. It’s hot up there, you know. Have you ever actually experienced the heat? Apart from getting hot under the collar during a tricky stage in negotiations, that is. It’s not nice. You start to sweat, even more than at Implosion on a summer Saturday night, and there simply isn’t a restroom handy where you can freshen up.’ ‘I’ve been north of Sydney before. In fact, if you really want to know, I was born in Byron Bay.’ ‘It’s not just hot. It’s insane. The heat does something to your brain. They’ve done research on it. You get violent, and all the walls up there are paper-thin. From your front room you can look out at night through the jungle palms and the fruitbats and see the fights going on in other people’s front rooms. Then next morning the survivors wake up to the winking lights of the ambulances and they can’t remember a thing. How are you going to survive up there, Jean-Loup? The closest thing you’ve seen to a fight was the crush at the Stock Exchange, the last time the Dow-Jones Index dropped ten points.’ ‘If there’s any fighting I’ll probably just run away.’ Jean-Loup’s interview with Sally Galilee was in her office on the second floor of an old Brunswick Street terrace house. He climbed a flight of wooden stairs and was shown through, then told to sit and wait by a stocky young white woman in blue jeans. To Jean-Loup the place was anodyne and down-at-heel.
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There was an untidy desk and a crammed bookshelf whose overflow was stacked in two neat piles on the floor. He had expected an Aboriginal flag, at the very least prints of works of Aboriginal art, but there was nothing. Except for a World Wildlife Fund calendar still turned to last month, the walls were bare. Beside the desk was a computer with dust on the screen. In one corner was a discoloured pot plant. A nameplate said: ‘Dr Sally Galilee, PhD’. Then Sally Galilee entered. The surroundings of the office became immediately the merest background. She was JeanLoup’s height, with broad shoulders which nevertheless seemed scarcely capable of bearing the mass of her head. Everything about her face was heavy and leonine, her skin a dark, coffee-rich brown. Staring into her limpid eyes, JeanLoup could feel the onset of the paralysis which he was sure must overcome so many in her presence: an almost pleasurable slackness under the weight of her conviction and intelligence, but with the added premonition of an electric shock. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’ve made a few calls. People seem to know you, if that’s any recommendation.’ She put out her hand and shook his automatically. She gave him no indication whether what she had heard was good or bad. ‘I take it,’ she added, ‘that you’ve found out a little more about us since I spoke to you on the phone?’ ‘About the Aboriginal Artists’ Association?’ Jean-Loup’s voice was almost exaggeratedly calm. ‘You distribute and promote the work of Aboriginal artists around Australia. You sell works internationally and help organise exhibitions, including the Johann Meisterlinck Aboriginal Art Award. You’re nominally part of ATSIC, which still partly funds you, but increasingly your income’s on a commission basis from the sale
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of artists’ work. Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s probably a significant source of that type of income. In practice, you operate more or less independently of ATSIC and of government. Your funding’s on the basis that, eventually, you become self-supporting. Sales of Aboriginal art have decreased since the start of this year, not just for Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy, but for other Aboriginal artists whose credibility has been questioned. I’d hazard a guess, then,’—and Jean-Loup took a small gamble—‘that you’ve struck some financial and political difficulties since the recent furore.’ Galilee waved her hand irritably. ‘But what do you think is the truth about Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy?’ ‘I have no idea. I don’t profess to be an expert on the quality of artwork. If people say her standard’s dropped, well perhaps it has. Even Picasso’s artwork was of pretty patchy quality as he got older, and nobody put his work under the microscope. As for the authenticity allegations, without prejudging, I find them difficult to believe. Surely nobody could be doing that on a small community without someone in authority finding out.’ ‘Do you know what Picasso said when he first saw works by Aboriginal artists?’ Galilee’s manner was imperious, like a headmistress in an oral examination. ‘No. I don’t.’ ‘He said it was astonishing. He said it was the kind of thing he’d been trying to produce for the last fifty years. Your account’s a little naive, with respect.’ She had borrowed the lawyer’s phrase, with its implication, of course, that there was no respect required. ‘Have you ever visited an indigenous community before?’ ‘No. Not personally.’ ‘Well, personally or otherwise, conditions there aren’t
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quite the same as those in your white eastern suburbs. No running water, say, or if there is the drains are blocked because a child’s flushed a shirt down the toilet. No plumber available, no water for three weeks. What are you going to do, get the kid to fix it up? The fault’s not at the local level. It’s higher up. It’s the old politician’s story. Get a committee to prepare a report. You don’t have to answer any questions then, you’re just waiting for the report.’ ‘And you want me to write that report?’ ‘Yes, but I also want you to find out about the history of the place. I want you to find out about the massacres, the mission, the mine. Read your books, chew over your anthropologists and your culture cannibals that have sucked our communities dry. You’ve got to understand what Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy means to a place like Mission Hole Community.’ Jean-Loup sat back. ‘All right. But how do you think all this history should affect my investigation into an allegation of fraud?’ ‘Who said anything about fraud? We’re not talking about fraud. We’re talking about a way ahead for the community. Aboriginal art’s been stolen and reproduced on carpets and T-shirts and teatowels and placemats. I’m surprised there’s no dunny paper with Aboriginal designs. White artists get applauded for pinching our sacred images. At every roadside stall in northern Australia you can see mass-produced didgeridoos made by Swedish hippies who think they’re doing us a favour, promoting our culture. Meanwhile your so-called high art critics are still debating about whether our work is art or craft, whether we belong in an art gallery or the ethnological section of the museum, whether we’re eligible for a prize in the abstract art section of a European festival where
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half the entrants are ‘inspired’ by our designs. Our best artists are selling their works for forty dollars to scrounge up money for a meal. And we’re the ones who get accused of fraud!’ ‘I’m still not sure what you’d like me to do. If I’m not investigating a fraud, why do you want to send an accountant like me out there?’ Sally Galilee smiled. It was an odd movement, a tight curl which sliced into without otherwise disturbing the general downward trend of her face. ‘Because we’re under the hammer. People are saying it’s all blackfella mismanagement once again. We’ve got to be able to say we’re doing something. Not just sending in one blackfella to bat for another. You’ve got legitimacy in the white man’s world. Your world.’ ‘So you want to send me up to divert attention, then? Just like the politicians?’ ‘I wouldn’t call it diverting attention. It’s a step towards sophistication. Our people are part of the global agenda now. Our sacred knowledge is being encoded on internet sites, with passwords for the initiated. And when you step out into cyberspace you’ve got to wear the right type of armour.’ Galilee grimaced. Jean-Loup was impressed at the skilful way she had tossed aside his objection. ‘Is there something more to this?’ he asked. ‘Like what?’ ‘What do you really expect from me? Do you think something’s going on up there or not? All this talk about internet sites and cyberspace just sounds a little bit academic to me.’ Galilee sat back in her seat and closed her eyes. For a moment Jean-Loup thought she had decided to ignore his incautious comment. Then, to his astonishment, he saw a human explosion take place. With a noise that grew in her
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throat into a snarl of rage she rose and stood above him, shaking her head at him like a Rottweiler, her cheeks thwacking against her teeth. ‘I’ll give you academic. This is real life, not a fucking university. Don’t you talk that shit to me.’ And then, just as abruptly, she sat back down. She took a deep breath. The heat dropped out of her face, and she looked at him more or less as she had before. ‘Where were we?’ she said. Jean-Loup was dumbfounded. He thought of getting up and walking out. He thought of telling her the interview was over, that he didn’t want the job. But he found, to his surprise, that he didn’t feel like that at all. Whether it was curiosity, or masochism, or sympathy, he found suddenly that he wanted to know more. ‘You were telling me what you actually want me to do,’ he said. ‘Look behind the surface of things. Work out where the power in the community really lies. Beware your white advisors and your do-gooders. There are people that fasten themselves onto indigenous communities and bleed those communities dry. That’s why I want somebody like you. You look like one of them but I’ve got no doubt I can see where you’re really coming from.’ Despite himself, Jean-Loup was stung that she seemed to think she could sum him up so quickly. He sat back. She was like a lawyer in cross-examination. She had deflected every inquiry of his, and then when he had given up hope, she had melodramatically revealed her hand. ‘I’ve taken it through ATSIC and the Mission Hole Community Council,’ she said. ‘Officially you would be going out there to do an independent audit of the art centre, and to
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give us any recommendations you can about reorganising Mission Hole Community’s financial affairs, especially in regard to the centre. You’re also to have regular meetings with the Mission Hole Arts Advisory Committee in Darwin. They assist us in marketing Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s work. All your permits and everything will be fast-tracked. I’ve got accommodation arranged. I want you to find out what’s going on out there, if anything. Whether there’s any truth in the allegations about Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s work. A man named Valerian Pride will meet you at the airport. Don’t tell anybody else what you find. I want you to report back to me.’ Jean-Loup nodded, and smiled. ‘An indigenous community’s like an indigenous painting,’ Sally Galilee said. ‘There are different layers of meaning, surface and deep. You’ve got to peel them all off one by one. Our culture’s full of secrets. Yours lost its secrets two hundred years ago.’ The formal interview was over. Just then the blue-jeaned secretary finally reappeared, carrying two cups of coffee. ‘You see what I mean about this country?’ said Sally Galilee. ‘Two PhDs, and the only job she can get is serving coffee.’
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chapter five
Brother O’Gorman
In the front room back at the contractors’ house, Jean-Loup tried again to reach Sally Galilee. This time the phone was working, but Sally Galilee was not there. She’s in a meeting, said the secretary with the PhD. You know, she’s got meetings on over three hundred days of the year. It was late afternoon. The room was still baking in the full force of the sun. Jean-Loup already felt as if the heat was getting to him. He sought shelter in the bedroom. It smelt rich and cloying, the smell of dead insects, damp and neglect. On a tiny bedside table was Brother O’Gorman’s book, abandoned where he had left it the night before. He needed something to take his mind off Valerian and Lazarus. He hadn’t even tried to think any more about his own investigation. It was almost thirty years since Brother O’Gorman had left this place. The Brothers had chosen the site for Mission Hole, surveyed the land, built the first buildings themselves. 60
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In the early days they had radio contact with Darwin, and the barge came by in theory once every two months. Otherwise, they were on their own. They had leased the land from the government, at a peppercorn rental, to spread civilisation and the law among the natives—and, of course, to spread the word of God. Jean-Loup read: For the Aborigines Mission Hole was and still is like the Garden of Eden. They can live off the land with great ease. Everywhere there are magpie geese, emu, brolga, jabiru, scrub turkeys and pelicans by the flock, while in the sea there are fish and turtle of all kinds. Their spears and nets are primitive, but the animals are abundant, and in truth you could cast almost anywhere, and still bring in a good catch. In the earlier days the men would spend the greater part of each day lying about in a state of great indolence. They would paint, dance, or talk amongst themselves: the women too. Now, of course, we have begun to teach them habits of industry. The only guardians of the White Man’s Law were the policemen at King River and at Red Mud Bay. At King River was Constable Dixon, and at Red Mud Bay was Constable Freon, then later Sergeant Parry. Contrary to some rumours I have heard all were steady, conscientious men. They each had good trackers, and were skilled at locating reprobates and war mongers, of which the Mission had its fair share. When I first came to Mission Hole I was a little older than most of the new Brothers. I had been passed over twice for missionary service. Once was for lack of schoolroom skills, and once because I was thought not sufficiently robust. At the barge landing there was no
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white person to meet me, Father McCleery being out cutting wood. Instead I was greeted by a large Aboriginal who appeared silently out of the woods, stark naked and painted and carrying a spear. I had no choice. It was now or never. Swallowing my fear I marched up to him, carrying the toy squeaker I had brought with me, thinking by its use to amuse the people. ‘You gibbit spear, I gibbit whistle,’ I said, in my best pidgin English. I pointed first at his weapon, then my squeaker, which I blew several times for effect. The warrior broke into laughter. After a moment’s hesitation I joined him, and soon we were both falling about. This man we later called Jumbo and (until killed— see later) he became one of the more dependable Christians among the older men, judging by his attendance at church. Jean-Loup put the book down and walked outside. The sun was just above the horizon. Dust hung on the road, a thin miasma, a reminder of the constant presence here of wheels. Columns of smoke rose from the escarpment into the cobaltblue sky. It was the time of night when shadows grew long over the road: tree trunks, ghosts of the past, things caught and wedged in forks of time. He began walking up the hill towards where the lights in the club should soon be going on. Once, before the club, there had been the Church. He could imagine the lights on in the church they had built in the early days: a small wooden construction, according to O’Gorman’s book, fire-ravaged and termite-eaten and, for ten years now, subsided into the grass. Behind every shadow was the ghost of a missionary, his freshly soaped, milk-white hands clasped behind his back. And there
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somewhere, among the dark and downturned faces of the congregation, was the ghost of his sister, Duchess. There was still nobody about. Jean-Loup turned right at the last street before the club. An old man was sitting under a tree, his downturned face almost hidden under the peak of a bright-orange baseball cap. To his surprise the old man cleared his throat and spoke. ‘No rain tonight. Good night for hunting or camping out. Except not where you are.’ The old man gave a wheezy laugh. ‘That’s good death adder country, through there.’ ‘Great,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘What sort of country is good death adder country, then?’ ‘He likes the stony country. The hillsides, just up from the creek. Or near swamp. He lies under rocks. Dangerous. He doesn’t move when he feels you coming. He just waits there. And then you step on him, and—snap! He’s got you.’ The old man’s hand lashed out, snapping in front of JeanLoup’s face. He was dangling a packet of White Ox tobacco from fingers whose top joints were missing, their stubs white and leprous and chunky. ‘Roll me a smoke, eh?’ he said. ‘Me eyes ain’t too good.’ When Jean-Loup reached a corner a couple of streets away, he stopped and looked around. The old man was still sitting, gaze to the ground, under the tree. He was on a different street now, one he had never walked on before. Here, there were coconut palms and mango trees, old signposts in a heap, lumps of concrete still attached, empty Hills hoists. At the back of the community council office was a metal scrapyard of some kind. There were more vehicles than he had thought possible, fridges and kettles and twisted metal chairs and sheets of iron. Next to that was a green, overgrown area. There had once been large vegetable gardens around
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here, Brother O’Gorman had written. When the missionaries stopped running the place they had obviously been allowed to go to ruin. Jean-Loup walked on down the slope. He was now heading for the police station. Towards the bottom of the hill, under a single streetlight fifty metres away, he saw a dog. Even from this distance it was evidently ripped and covered with scabs. With its eyes fixed on the ground, it limped indifferently along, to all intents one of those community dogs Jean-Loup had seen earlier in the day: coming from nowhere, going nowhere, its life without affection or comfort, always on the move. When it reached the edge of the light it stopped. Suddenly it swung its head sideways and looked straight in Jean-Loup’s direction. Its muzzle was pointed at him, sniffing the air. Jean-Loup stiffened. He felt unable to breathe. He felt the distinct sensation of a presence that was at that moment seeking him out. When Jean-Loup walked inside the police station he found Sergeant Jack sitting at his desk drinking from a VB stubbie. This time, he didn’t bother to conceal it. ‘What is it now?’ ‘I wanted to talk to you about this man Lazarus.’ Sergeant Jack laughed. ‘We’ve got three detectives out here from CIB. We’ve got forty-four people to interview in the next five days. I’ve just had a preliminary report from the coroner.’ He slapped a file that was sitting on his scruffy vinyl-topped desk. ‘They’re flying Valerian back from the pathologist first thing Thursday morning, all nicely stitched up. Lazarus Johnson’s all stitched up, too. The funeral’s on next week. What’s it to you?’ ‘You mean you’ve arrested Lazarus?’ ‘That’s right.’
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‘Where is he now?’ ‘In the cells right here. By tomorrow night he’ll be at Berrimah gaol in Darwin, in a cell by himself.’ ‘By himself?’ ‘To protect him from Valerian’s people, of course. The Red Mud Bay mob. Half of them are in gaol.’ Jean-Loup took a deep breath. ‘I don’t think he’s got anything to do with it.’ Sergeant Jack reddened. He was like a bush pig, Jean-Loup thought, with those rusty yellow hairs glinting from his nose and ears, and his bloodshot eyes. ‘We’ve got a signed confession. How do you like that, eh? He even showed us the weapon, where he’d buried it in his backyard. A real sneak-attack killing. Just like the old days.’ ‘What weapon?’ ‘A wheel brace. One of those real heavy bastards, with a thick bar on one end.’ ‘He never had a wheel brace when I saw him.’ ‘That’s right. He picked it up on his way back from the river. His joint’s right on the way.’ ‘He wouldn’t have had time. I walked straight back that way, and I didn’t see anything.’ ‘Of course you didn’t. And besides, these bush blackfellas can move fast.’ Sergeant Jack’s face had a certain shrewd pugnacity, animated by hot gusts of prejudice. Clearly Lazarus Johnson was at the mercy of one of those gusts. ‘If it’s all so simple, why did everybody disappear?’ Sergeant Jack shrugged. ‘It’s not unusual. Fits perfectly. Revenge killing. Countryman justice. Then, it’s out of their hands. Problem for whitefella law, not for them.’ ‘I still think you’ve got it wrong.’ Jean-Loup had to call on all his faith in instinct. ‘Where is this funeral, anyway?’
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‘Out of Mission Hole. At the old Catholic cemetery. Valerian’s family blame the Mission Hole mob for not stopping it. We’ve got a planeload of coppers coming out from Darwin, as well as police aides, to stop them spearing each other. I wouldn’t advise you to try to attend.’ Back at the house, Jean-Loup dialled the ‘last unanswered call’ number and found that Sally Galilee had still not called back. He took Brother O’Gorman’s book out onto the verandah, where a slight breeze had cooled things down a little. Sally Galilee had told him to read up on the history of the place. And, in any case, he had become hooked on Brother O’Gorman’s book: its clumsiness, its dated turns of phrases evoked for him the flavours of a hidden world, brought him back into that land of ghosts. From where he sat he could look out across the street and the school oval where he had walked the night before. He halfexpected, without really believing, that he might see the night revellers begin to gather again. But the place was blasted, in complete darkness. Even the police had gone. Jean-Loup read: I first arrived at Mission Hole in July or August 1931. Father McCleery had been there less than twelve months at this time (my memory has faded on this, the exact dates would be with the Diocese, or with Mr Robertson at Native Affairs in Darwin). He had already cleared and planted several acres of land, and constructed solid wooden living quarters for the missionaries, and a native hut. In the first year we found the soil was poor. Several times our modest crops were destroyed by pests. For the first years we often reluctantly had to supplement our
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diet with fish and native foods, which fortunately were not lacking. Also the barge came in once every two months with flour, candles & co. The work was hard, but invigorating. We would rise at five, then prayers. At six o’clock, breakfast (oat and pumpkin mash) then out to work. The early hours of the day were best for manual labour, as after that the sun was too fierce. After lunch I would try to instruct the young warriors in gardening, carpentry and other useful trades, or continue my efforts to learn the native dialect. Father McCleery, meanwhile, was occupied with the school, or with tending to the sick, or with sorting out the various native disputes which came to his attention. I never saw him resting during daylight hours. This gives a very peaceful impression of life at Mission Hole. It wasn’t. The various tribes were very warlike and constantly in a state of hostility. In addition there was trouble caused by ‘medicine men’, and fighting over brides. One night in the early hours of the morning Fr McCleery put his head in the door of my bark hut. ‘Come up to the main camp, there is a spear fight on,’ he said to me. ‘We will go and break the spears and break it up.’ When we got there we found Jumbo dead. He had caught a spear in the nape of the neck and then in a panic had run headlong into a tree. Local rumour had it that Fr McCleery was ‘husband to fifty wives’. This was not true! The truth was Father McCleery had hit on a novel idea. One of the main obstacles to our mission was the barbaric system of arranged marriages, whereby girls as young as ten are betrothed, often to very old men. With some notable exceptions (Pongo was one) the older men
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were not prepared to renounce their heathen ways. Father McCleery undertook to purchase as many of these young girls as possible from their prospective husbands. In this way he gained a ‘stable’ of as many as fifty young girls who he could then give as wives to suitable young men, once they had begun their instruction in Christian ways. This policy had many beneficial effects. One of these was to attract strong young men (as well as women) to the settlement, who might otherwise have been lost. Of course, not even all the young men could see immediately ‘the light’. Once, Fr McCleery was returning from visiting a sick woman who could not be brought in immediately, as she was too old and frail. Suddenly a young native rose from behind a bush, covered in paint and waving threateningly a spear. Evidently he was challenging Fr McCleery to a fight. ‘If you want to fight, put down that spear,’ said Fr McCleery. ‘Put up your fists and fight like a man.’ The bushman did so, and the doughty Scotsman laid him out with a right cross straight to the jaw. Another victory for muscular Christianity! Needless to say I was not always in agreement with Fr McCleery’s robust approach to resolving disputes. To me the savage world was ‘an eye for an eye’ and it was up to us to show them a different example. Many of them had had previous unfortunate experiences with degenerate Europeans. These untamed climes unfortunately attract all kinds of drifters, some of them all too willing to take advantage of the morally untutored black. I am sorry to say that, with the shortage of labour, this even happened on the Mission itself. Such
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behaviour could not be tolerated. Offenders were immediately sent away. The natives of the area suffered terribly from scabies & co, as well as introduced diseases, especially children and young women. Some of these ailments are of course quite easily curable by simple remedies such as tincture of ammonia. Brother O’Donovan, who had a good knowledge of these matters, wisely obtained a supply of medicines from the barge. You can imagine the joy when a young woman whose face and eyes had become quite disfigured from yaws announced herself completely cured! This incident probably did more than any other to convince the natives to give up their ‘medicine men’. Father McCleery was emphatic from the earliest times that the children had to be taught the three ‘Rs’. After 1937 the Sisters took the little girls to live in the Convent with them. Sister Jacinta cleaned them up, fed and cared for them, showing them a kindness not known before. The black world was not then or now a woman’s or a girl’s world. The floors, walls, in fact everything, were spotlessly clean—a pleasure to see such efficiency and cleanliness so far from other civilisation, tucked away in the wilderness. All the children were disciplined, healthy and happy. The same was done for the boys, and now, forty years later, some of the grandchildren of those children are still being trained at the new school. Much is said now about these policies. Some of it all is beyond me now, except to say that Governments and lawyers have always got to have their say. Compare the Mission thirty years after it started with the situation
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before—and then compare again with today. Many of the people now are caught between two worlds. Selfdetermination now is the stated policy. Let us hope it works and does not destroy all previous efforts by becoming self-extermination. Insects were coming out. Jean-Loup tried Sally Galilee again, but this time got only an answering machine. He decided instead to ring Linda. Her voice on the other end of the phone was sleepy, don’tgive-a-fuck. ‘Hi, Linda. It’s Jean-Loup.’ ‘Jean Who?’ Jean-Loup was not discouraged. She had always answered the phone like this, even when they were going out. She had always had the professional insouciance of the Hollywood starlet. Back then, Jean-Loup would have emulated her every gesture if he had been a woman and thought it possible. ‘You know who. You’re never as stoned as you sound.’ ‘Jean-Loup, darling. Why haven’t you called? I’m sorry, I haven’t been very sociable lately, I’ve had such a dreadful cold in the nose. In the nez.’ This was another favourite trick of hers, to repeat herself in bad French. ‘Excuse me, I’ll just go and fetch my cigarettes.’ Jean-Loup listened to her put the phone down, then a moment later raise her voice to somebody in another room. There was a crash, a door being slammed, dishes being clattered about, then a moment later again, laughter. ‘Fundamentally unserious, darling,’ he heard a voice exclaim—Linda, or perhaps her sister, with whom she sometimes shared her flat. For three or four minutes he listened to snatches of Linda’s side of the conversation. He had almost given up hope, thinking
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Linda must have entirely forgotten him, when abruptly she picked up the phone. ‘Jean-Loup, I’m so sorry. Everything’s just so much of a shambles here at the moment.’ ‘I’m sorry. I can call back later. There was something specific I wanted to talk to you about.’ Abruptly and disconcertingly, Linda dropped her partygirl manner. ‘Well, what is it, then?’ ‘I was hoping you might give me some advice. I’ve arrived at Mission Hole Community.’ ‘How thrilling.’ ‘It hasn’t been that thrilling. Do you know anything about a man named Valerian Pride?’ ‘Valerian? That’s a type of tea, isn’t it? I knew a Vincenti, and a Dorian who was positively adorable.’ ‘Yes. Well, he was killed last night.’ ‘You don’t say.’ ‘He was the one who met me at the airport when I arrived.’ ‘How terrible, darling. Well, you’d better come straight back. You won’t be able to do anything out there now.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘You’re not close to your family, are you? That’s your problem. Now the Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy clan, for example, that’s a big family. The head of the community council’s a clan member. Parker Gandarrwuy, I think was his name. They’ve got people on the community council, in the land council, even in ATSIC, I understand.’ ‘Would Valerian be related to the Gandarrwuy clan, do you think?’ She didn’t bother to answer his question. ‘You thought you could just go out there and call a meeting, didn’t you? Get
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your tribal elders together in a boardroom, call them principal stakeholders or something, do the conference thing and give them all name tags, maybe.’ ‘What about a bloke named Lazarus Johnson? Do you know anything about him?’ ‘Look, I’ve got to go. My beeper thing’s flashing. Why don’t you ring me when you get back? We’ll have tea and tiffin or something. I’m sure I could squeeze that in.’ Back at the top of the hill, the three-metre-high cyclone-mesh gates out the front of the club were padlocked shut. The ‘Aboriginal land’ sign had been covered over with a hastily hand-scrawled note, ‘Closed until further notice’, written in texta on an egg-shell-thin piece of yellow butcher’s paper. Suddenly Jean-Loup’s eye caught the sullen orange glow of a cigarette, about twenty metres away. A group of men were sitting in silence under the shade of a large tree. Walking over, Jean-Loup felt air-thin, transparent, almost a ghost himself. He scuffed his feet loudly over the rough red dirt, underlining that he had no intention of sneaking around. ‘I was hoping to buy a beer,’ he said. The men stared silently at each other, or rather, at the centre of the small circle they had formed on a darker patch of earth under the tree, as though contemplating an invisible presence, a summation of ideas. ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you. My name’s Jean-Loup. I only got here last night.’ ‘Last night,’ repeated a very scarred man with a gecko-like, almost toothless mouth. ‘Yeah. Look. I’m sorry about what happened. I was there, you know. He picked me up from the airport. Was he a friend of yours?’
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The instant he said this, he realised he had made a mistake. In apologising, he was admitting some responsibility for what had happened to Valerian, accepting the reproach behind the scarred man’s quick, hostile glance. ‘Club closed,’ said the scarred man. Jean-Loup became aware of a glow. A four-wheel drive was approaching from behind, Hella lamps blaring, following the dirt track that ran around the square, meshed-off enclosure of the club. The vehicle was white, nearly new. ‘Mission Hole Community Night Patrol’ was emblazoned on the outside. ‘Yo,’ said a voice from inside. For an instant Jean-Loup thought there was nobody at the wheel. Then he realised that he was staring straight into the darkness of the man’s body. He took a step back, until he could distinguish arms, a head, a huge presence that seemed to have been squeezed bodily into the car. ‘Hello,’ he said. There was a slight sheen of sweat on the man’s cheeks and upper lip. Something about him reminded Jean-Loup of a water buffalo about to charge. ‘Anything the matter?’ said the huge man. The others on the ground had fallen silent, deferential. ‘Nothing at all. I just came over this way, hoping for a drink.’ ‘No grog. Community council’s closed the club until further notice.’ ‘Are you from the council?’ The man stared at Jean-Loup a moment, then heavily, with bovine reluctance, swung his attention back to the men on the ground. Even the scarred man shifted nervously. ‘You go home.’ Sheepishly the men gathered themselves to their feet.
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Jean-Loup introduced himself. The passenger window was closing fast. ‘I’ve heard all about you, already,’ said the man. ‘I’m Parker Gandarrwuy, since you want to know.’ The window shut and the car moved off, engine revving, sending an angry white signature coasting over the weld-mesh fence. It was nearly midnight. Jean-Loup had just about given up on sleep. He had picked up and put down his book several times, gone and cooked himself a dinner of tinned tuna, tinned corn and carrot in a billy he had found at the back of the house, then lain down in the bedroom for an hour or so afterwards in a vain attempt to get some rest. Insects, attracted by the light, crawled all over him. He was so tired by now he could scarcely read at all. In the end he found himself sitting back from the book and staring into the darkness. The place was a shadow, a ghost of the night before. Total silence reigned. No lights shone in the houses, there were no campfires outside, no signs of life at all but the occasional unsmashed streetlights, their doleful yellow gleam only accentuating the thickness of the night. Sally Galilee hadn’t rung back. His thoughts flitted from one thing to another, one person to another, past and present, no longer able to tell one world from another. He was not meant to be able to tell. He found himself identifying with the flying insects, blindly caught between kitchen and verandah light. He opened the book again. Brother O’Gorman’s words flowed past him, soothing in their meaninglessness, their assertion of the ephemeral nature of feelings, personalities, wit, their casual evocation of a vanished world. He read again the passage about the white ‘offenders’, the diggers and prospectors who had taken advantage of the women. His father
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must have been one of those. It would have been all the more shameful for the missionaries that the offender, this time, was one of their own. No wonder his father had been banished. No wonder Duchess, the product of the offence, had also been sent away. He could try to find out her mother’s name, but she would almost certainly be dead. Few people at Mission Hole were over fifty, and she would have to be at least sixty-five. It was one of those things which must never be spoken of. Lock it in and throw away the key. As a teenager he had learnt how to do it—and since then it had always been his survival mechanism, this ability of his to forget. He was fifteen years old, and it must have been mid-morning. The sun hadn’t penetrated the bushfire haze. The trees on his father’s bush block had become ghosts, witches, beggars in a mediaeval wilderness. Only the front section down by the road was left. You couldn’t see the blaze anymore, but you could hear it down in the valley, cracking trees like knucklebones. ‘You can’t let them scare you,’ said his father. ‘They’ll do anything to fuck you over, they’ll even break their own laws.’ His father’s face was broken and blackened. His elbows stuck out, his fingers twitched, his clothes had overnight become rags. His latest girlfriend sat beside him. Her thin fingers pick-picked at another joint, which she lit and stuck straight between her lips. Her asthmatic four-year-old child lay beside her, his pink face twisted with the effort to breathe. It had all happened; everything had fallen apart this last week since Duchess had gone. ‘But the fire started on this block,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘Don’t you believe it. Don’t you fucking well believe it.’
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Jean-Loup stood up. He began to pick up beer cans, cigarette papers and wrappers from last night. His father ignored him, the girlfriend followed his movements with her eyes. They were supposed to have been out of here months ago but they had stayed on, his father proclaiming all the time the power of protest, the power of nature against bureaucracy, the people against the printed word. It was the final irony. For seven years, in the name of deep ecology, his father had kept the fire out of this place: now, in one more drunken night, an untended campfire had ended it. ‘I thought this place was supposed to be aesthetic,’ JeanLoup said. ‘We’ve got to stay together,’ his father said. ‘Now of all times.’ Jean-Loup walked out of the house, this time for good. His father’s ears must have been sharper than his own. Maybe, last night, he had hoped the fire would keep them all occupied, their bulldozers chomping out firebreaks in the scrub at the edge of the farming lands. But in the morning the wind had changed. There was no mistaking it now. They were coming back from the valley, rounding the last bend in the winding road, tired and in the mood for revenge. Finally, the hippies were going to get theirs. He could see the yellow machines clearly through the blackened trees. At five o’clock the next morning Sally Galilee rang. Jean-Loup was lying sleepless, sweating into his sheet. Three or four times already he had nearly lost consciousness, then had been startled fully awake by the image of Valerian’s face. Each time he had sat bolt upright, twisting in panic towards the window, searching for a way to escape. The phone’s ringing, by contrast, was dry, hot, banal.
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‘Jean-Loup here.’ ‘Jean-Loup Wild.’ Sally did not announce herself. ‘I wanted to catch you early, before you could do any more damage.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘You’re making a name for yourself, aren’t you? Only been there thirty-six hours, but already you’ve caused more trouble than a bitch on heat.’ ‘What?’ Jean-Loup had been caught off guard. He had no time to gather his thoughts before the storm. ‘First you go wandering around at night, sticking your nose into other people’s business. Who do you think you are, the Chief Protector? I’m sick to death of your type, with your namby-pamby faith in the system. Don’t you know what assumptions you people make?’ ‘What are you talking about? I thought you wanted me to find things out.’ ‘I asked you to keep your eyes and ears open. That’s what you’re there for. Not to go blowing your arse off to police. What on earth did you say to them? I don’t know how you expect anybody to talk to you now.’ ‘What do you mean, blowing my arse off? I didn’t tell that copper anything. He was just looking for somebody to arrest.’ But Sally Galilee was on a roll. Her voice rose until she was almost shouting into the phone. ‘You understand one thing about living up there. You’re not living in Hawthorn or Ivanhoe or whichever lily-leaved piece of suburbia you call your own. You’re on Aboriginal land. The coppers are the front line of two hundred years of oppression. You see what’s happened now? One word out of place and you can blow this whole thing.’ ‘You’ve got it all wrong. There were no words out of place.
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The police interviewed me about Valerian’s death, that was all. And since you’re on the phone, is there anything about Valerian you’ve neglected to tell me? Has his murder got anything to do with this so-called investigation I’m doing?’ There was just buzzing on the end of the line. She had already hung up.
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chapter six
Parker Gandarrwuy
The phone call had snapped something in him. After it he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, and he woke up at eight with his mind unusually clear. Today he would do something real. Practical details, he thought, are like the endorphins the body produces to muffle pain. They blanket the mind temporarily against the effect of major change. Jean-Loup had a lot to organise. He had a letter to draft to the chair of the Mission Hole Community Council, requesting permission to look at the Council’s budget details for the art centre. He wanted to hold an open forum on funding in, say, five days’ time. There were other letters to draft to all the galleries in Darwin, Katherine and Alice Springs, requesting price details for all recent stock from Mission Hole. He considered writing to the Mission Hole Land Council asking for genealogical details of traditional owners, so that he could have a clear picture of who was related to whom. In the end he decided the 79
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softly softly approach, drinks at the club and a few quiet questions, were more likely to get the land council on side. For much of his working life Jean-Loup had been working in the world of fantasy. He had helped to organise deals for non-existent conglomerates, create tenders and submissions for bankrupt businessmen, write profit-and-loss projections that were disbelieved even by the funding bodies that supported them. He had become inured to that type of unreality, even revelled in it. But this was different. Mission Hole Community was unreal in a sense, but it was also physical, personal. He realised that in the last ten years he had never been out of the Sydney–Melbourne–Adelaide triangle. Even within each city he had stuck to taxis from the airport to his hotel, and to the restaurants, pubs and cafes within five kilometres of the CBD. He felt for a moment like a child inching its way along a limb of a tall tree, fighting that automatic locking and gripping of muscles that is the body’s reaction to fear. It was the same feeling he had had at fifteen when he had moved into the city—that feeling of the unutterable strangeness of things. He sat on the verandah, typing up a list of things to do on his PC. Already he felt as if he was starting to get used to the heat. There was a power surge. The kitchen light, which he had left on, glowed white heat, then blew. His screen was showing an error message. He shut it down, tried to start Windows again, but his keyboard would not respond. He would have to try again later. In the meantime he’d try to talk to Parker Gandarrwuy, and see whether Guy Randhawa was back. It was after midday. The day’s heat had set in. Jean-Loup headed down the street in the direction of the community council office. Outside a two-storey house, on the single green
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lawn on his side of the street, where the white people all seemed to live, a sprinkler started up. It was on too high for the lawn and its gentle, diaphanous spray settled instead onto the bonnet of a four-wheel-drive that was locked behind a metal grille under the house. On the Aboriginal side of the street, a rusting and unwatered Falcon sat on Besser-blocks, metre-high weeds thrusting through the bonnet and roof. The community council office was closed for lunch. Out the back of the building, in a profusion of soft-drink cans, cigarette butts and footy jumpers, a group of men sat playing cards. Jean-Loup stopped and waited in a thin line of shade. From here he could see both the card players and the police station down the road, where obviously the police were conducting the murder investigation at this moment. A uniformed officer was doing sentry duty next to an Aboriginal man, presumably a witness, who was waiting to be summoned inside. Both men sat on a sun-bleached wooden bench. Both were smoking: the copper’s cigarette irrelevant, fortuitously lodged in his face, the Aboriginal man’s cradled daintily in the palm of his hand. As Jean-Loup watched, another Aboriginal man emerged from inside the police station. He looked unsteady, almost tottering, as though he had been uncomfortable for a long time. Stumbling on a step, he gathered himself and set off down the road in the opposite direction to the council office. Soon he was hidden by a distant bush. The sentry stopped watching him. He fumbled for another cigarette, then turned and offered one to the new Aboriginal man sitting on the bench beside him. Ten minutes later, Jean-Loup caught sight of the witness once again. He seemed to have changed course. He had skirted around, always out of the sentry’s line of sight, and was now, to Jean-Loup’s surprise, considerably closer to the card-playing
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group. He was moving quietly, circuitously. Jean-Loup saw bushes move several times, saw him once crawling along a fence line before disappearing again into long grass. Soon afterwards, the bushes parted. The card players turned in unison. The witness emerged to cheers, shouts of congratulation, an intense period of questioning. Several minutes later the next card player dusted himself off and peeled away to join the sentry on the verandah bench. Jean-Loup walked towards the card-playing group. When he got within thirty metres, however, all conversation stopped. They shifted seamlessly into their alternate identity as card players. It was a game, Jean-Loup realised. Or at least, a type of game. The witnesses must have been given orders by the police not to confer while the interrogation was going on. This elaborate charade was designed to keep the police ignorant of the card-playing conference going on just around the corner from the station, a discussion in which, no doubt, answers and tactics were planned as intensely as the police were planning their own. Jean-Loup wondered how the police investigation was going in that hot plasterboard room with its tape recorder and its dust-encrusted fan. At two o’clock sharp Jean-Loup saw a thin white woman, well over sixty, shuffle painfully across an expanse of bare dirt towards the community council office. She was bleached, sun-dried, threadbare. Jean-Loup had a sudden impression of staring at a photographic negative—or, perhaps, at one of those faded black-and-white photos from Brother O’Gorman’s book, of people whose features were bone-white and rendered inscrutable by time. The old woman fumbled with a set of keys she seemed
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unable properly to see. Then she opened the office door and disappeared through it. Jean-Loup followed. Inside it was musty and surprisingly cool, almost with the atmosphere of a large country store, like something you’d find in one of the pioneer towns out back of Byron Bay. From floor to ceiling it was lined with dusty shelves that seemed to have been originally designed for tins of food but which were now piled high with files. ‘Good afternoon,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘I’ve been waiting outside. The men out the back were playing cards and I didn’t want to disturb them.’ ‘Gambling.’ The old woman’s voice was not much above a whisper, but she moved her lips with a snap. ‘That’s not allowed. That’s why they’re issued with plastic tokens, Mission Hole dollars, redeemable back at the store. The rascals use them for gambling instead.’ ‘They’re not allowed to gamble? Who says?’ ‘Orders.’ ‘Orders from where?’ ‘From council, of course.’ She said it as though the orders came straight from the Governor-General. ‘I’m looking for the community council president. Parker Gandarrwuy, I think is his name.’ ‘Parker Gandarrwuy’s not here.’ ‘When does he get back?’ ‘He doesn’t get back any time. He comes in when he needs to. As a matter of fact, most of the time he just stays in his car. He just toots the horn and I come out and give him what he needs.’ Jean-Loup tried unsuccessfully to discern the expression in the old woman’s watery, pale blue eyes. ‘I’m sorry to bother you. I’m actually coming to see if I can
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help out with the community’s financial situation. I’m an accountant. I’ve been engaged by the Aboriginal Artists’ Association. I’d like to look at the Mission Hole Art Centre’s financial records, if you don’t mind.’ ‘We’re nothing to do with the Mission Hole Art Centre.’ ‘I thought the council set up the art centre.’ ‘If we did, we’re nothing to do with it now. And we don’t need an accountant. We’ve got no trouble here.’ ‘Who said anything about trouble?’ ‘We’ve been here twenty-eight years. We’re going to retire in Toowoomba next year. My husband manages the store. I don’t know what’s going to happen when that gets taken over as well.’ She was standing now, hands clasped in front of her, beside a desk towards the back of the room, one that was badly in need of a light. One of the yellowed dockets which poked at all angles from the heaps of files came loose at that moment and fluttered airily to the floor. ‘Have you known Parker Gandarrwuy all that time?’ ‘Since he was a boy. He’s on kidney dialysis, you know. His heart’s twice as large as it should be. Without him, they’d have to ask the church back, which wouldn’t be a bad thing in my opinion, or close the place down. The alcohol problems. Parker’s one of the few people around who can control things.’ ‘That’s all very interesting. I only arrived here the other night. A man was murdered, playing cards.’ ‘That,’ said the old woman firmly, ‘is a matter for the police.’ In the art centre, Monica was kneeling on the floor, trying in vain to reef a frayed edge of canvas, cut too small, around
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the underside of a frame. ‘Do you want some help?’ asked Jean-Loup from the door. She looked up, face sweating, in her eyes a brittle mistrust. ‘Too much to do. It’s too much trouble. I’ve got a hundred cushions to stuff, two dozen papier-mâché fruit bowls to finish off. And I keep getting interrupted all the time.’ She broke off, scratching furiously at an insect bite on her left leg. She was ungainly, almost child-like. Even Jean-Loup could see that the two or three badly stretched canvasses leaning on the wall beside her would have to be redone. ‘I was just over at the community council,’ said JeanLoup. ‘Looking for Parker Gandarrwuy. He’s the community council president, I think. Apparently he only turns up there to give orders from his four-wheel-drive.’ Monica’s voice grew low, excited. ‘Rainbow Guy won’t have anything to do with him. He claims he’s trying to control the drinking, but really he runs the club. He wants to sell more alcohol, not less.’ ‘Where is Rainbow Guy?’ ‘I told you. He’s out on retreat. He’ll come back when he’s ready, when the vibes are better, when he knows the time is right.’ Monica was, Jean-Loup realised, an uncomfortable combination—frenetic and yet languorous, helpless but with the control freak’s authoritarian personality. ‘Tell me,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘Do you keep such a thing as financial records hereabouts?’ ‘I’ve won a prize,’ said Monica. ‘What sort of prize?’ ‘Five thousand dollars.’ She jumped up, full of inconsequential energy, and returned with a piece of folded white paper from another room.
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‘It’s for my music,’ she said. ‘It’s an encouragement award. All I have to do is fill out the form and send it away.’ Jean-Loup opened the paper, which Monica had placed in his hand. It was a piece of junk mail, sent by some kind of lottery outfit in the United States, with an entry fee of two hundred and fifty dollars. It promised that everyone who entered would win some sort of prize. After three days of interviews the detectives left. There was no fanfare, no announcement of their leaving. Jean-Loup simply noticed one morning that the officer on the concrete verandah had gone, and then, not long afterwards, he saw the police aircraft taking off from the direction of the airstrip, a white tail of smoke drifting off into the limitless blue. He wondered whether he had really blown his chances, that very first night. Or perhaps things were always like this. Linda had been right, of course. Consciously, in coming here, he had told himself to be prepared for anything. Unconsciously he had expected to be able to organise something: a meeting, at the very least, of all the people with an interest in the art centre. It didn’t work like that. There was no reliable way of passing on information, to begin with. There were no e-mails, few private telephones that worked, no community noticeboard which people would actually read. People came and went for their own opaque reasons, operated according to their own internal and totally foreign priorities and timetable, and there was no point trying to force them to operate according to his. In Melbourne or Adelaide he could have had an investigation like this over within two weeks. Out here it could easily take months. For the last few days, Jean-Loup had been trying to approach people. At the community store, buying his lunch or
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the tins of vegetables and Irish stew that were all he could buy for tea, he spoke to the young woman with her baby. On the way back he smiled at the young boys with their Essendon jumpers and their footy, stopped and tried to pass the time of day with the old men sitting under a tree. He could not say that there was no response, exactly. They grunted in response to his questions, pointed fingers in the right direction when he asked the whereabouts of places he already knew. They looked, when he asked if they thought it would rain, with a polite show of interest up at the sky. Yes, they said. Yes, although it was the middle of the dry season, and Jean-Loup knew they knew it wouldn’t rain. They might have meant: yes, we understand your question, or yes, we know you know it’s not going to rain. He had gone back to the community council office, asked to speak to the secretary, to the treasurer, to anybody responsible. In their absence, and when they failed to return numerous calls, he had made appointment times and turned up at the offices to find them locked, or empty, the only movement that of geckos or ceiling fans. He had even made up posters himself, drawing on old sheets of A4, advising community members of a public forum he wished to hold on the future of the art centre. At the appointed time he had turned up under an old frangipani tree near the community council office and sat there for an hour until it was obvious nobody would turn up. On the third afternoon Jean-Loup arrived back at the contractors’ house and found that Ulrich had moved in. Ulrich was German. Gangly and stalk-dry as speargrass, he was tapping disdainfully at a portable computer on the kitchen table. Ulrich ignored Jean-Loup until he had finished typing a lengthy phrase.
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‘I’ve been clearing up around the place,’ said Ulrich, somnolently looking up. ‘If you’re going to teach the Aborigines how to live you’ve got to keep your own place clean.’ Jean-Loup sidled around the table to the tatty armchair— his armchair, as he had almost begun to consider it, the one that looked out onto the verandah and the school oval—and turned it until it was half facing Ulrich. The German continued typing. His fingers were long like a grasshopper’s legs, hitting each key with a metronomic precision. ‘How did you get here?’ asked Jean-Loup. ‘I have already been on the reservation for ten days. I have just been asked to move house. It was suggested that I move in here.’ ‘It’s not a reservation, you know. It’s Aboriginal land.’ Ulrich stopped typing. He folded his hands on the table and scrutinised Jean-Loup. His brow was deep, high-minded. There was a surprising delicacy to the curlicues of reddishblond hair above his pink, shell-like ears. ‘It is all political, you know. The traditional Aborigines, they had no problem with me. It is the urban Aborigines that have made trouble. They have influenced the others with their—you know, rhetoric. The white Aborigines and their white advisors. And now nobody will talk to me.’ ‘What have you been doing here, exactly?’ ‘I’m an anthropologist. I ask questions.’ ‘What questions?’ ‘I ask the traditional Aborigines what they think of the urban Aborigines. I ask the urban Aborigines what they think of the traditional Aborigines. I want to help define, you know—who is a real Aboriginal, these days.’ ‘And what are your conclusions?’ ‘This is the complicated question. I think the traditional
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people here hate the urban people. Under the kinship system, if you marry somebody outside you are excommunicated. I hear the people here still using the old terms—you know, half-caste, quarter-caste and so on. The traditional Aboriginal people think they are the only real Aborigines, and the urban Aborigines think they are the real Aborigines, too.’ ‘Who do you think are the real Aborigines?’ Ulrich’s lips formed a clinical half-smile. ‘My findings are all in here,’ he said. ‘Where?’ Ulrich pointed to his computer. ‘Here. But you will have to wait for publication of my results. “Urban Aboriginal Identity —An Empirical Investigation of a Remote Aboriginal Community” it is called. I expect it to be published in German next year.’ ‘How have you been investigating, if nobody will talk to you?’ ‘They do not understand,’ said Ulrich. ‘I cannot afford to slow down and sit by the river or go fishing for three or ten days. I have a tight schedule. In less than three weeks I have to be back in Dusseldorf. Then I do not return until October.’ There was a pause. Ulrich gave a languid flick of the hand. ‘The flies are terrible here. Just one fly can torment you for ten days. And there is no fresh food. Has nobody told you how you get fresh food?’ ‘I assume that if there was any, they’d sell it at the store.’ ‘No. The store is just for emergencies, and for the Aborigines to spend their money. The store managers keep the welfare cheques and just hand out rations, like in the mission days. The white people order their fresh food in from Darwin, on the barge.’ • • •
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Just after sunset Jean-Loup went outside. He began to walk up the hill. All his plans and approaches had come to nothing so far. Guy Randhawa and Parker Gandarrwuy were gone. Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy was still no more than a name. It was as though everyone he had spoken to, even Valerian and Sally Galilee, were conspiring to shield a deeper reality from him—as though the place was a painting and he was being shown only the surface meaning, the made-fortourists tag. Something was going on here. He could sense it but his conscious mind could not take it in. At the top of the hill, he could see, the club was still closed, its barbed wire fence encircling it like a rough bandage round a weeping sore. He turned right. He began to walk round the far side of the school oval, in the direction of the barge landing. All the houses were shut, silent. It reminded him of a movie he had once seen about the effects of a neutron bomb. There was one house on with a light. It was near the bottom of the hill, one of the two-storey houses where the whitefellas lived: a similar design to the one that had caught his eye the other morning, with the sprinkler watering the four-wheel-drive. The light was on in the living room on the second storey. An open door gave out onto a verandah. Inside there were voices, and a moment later two men walked out from the kitchen onto the verandah. There was laughing, clinking glasses. The largest of the men Jean-Loup recognised the instant he saw his silhouette. It was Parker Gandarrwuy. The second, Jean-Loup realised a moment later, was Sergeant Jack. Jean-Loup moved slightly to his left and behind a tree. Parker and Sergeant Jack stood on the verandah a few moments, peering out into the darkness. Sergeant Jack turned, muttered
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something in a low voice to Parker. The big man laughed. They both turned to go inside, Sergeant Jack holding the door wide open for his guest, then closing it behind them both. But it wasn’t the men Jean-Loup was looking at. It was the painting clearly visible on Sergeant Jack’s living-room wall. It was a large Aboriginal landscape, probably over two metres wide. It was painted in bright, slashing colours, quite different from the scrupulous detail he had seen in so much traditional art, and different, too, from any of the work he had seen in the art centre. This one was bold, quickly done. It reminded Jean-Loup inexorably of the reproductions he had been looking at only a couple of weeks before, the ones in the coffee-table book about the famous artist’s work. The painting on Sergeant Jack’s wall was a Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy. Of that Jean-Loup had no doubt.
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chapter seven
Rainbow Guy
On his sixth morning at Mission Hole, as he approached the art centre Jean-Loup heard the sound of singing. It was the soft wail of one male and one female voice, accompanied by a flute and a muffled drum. The music came from inside the art centre. Its noise floated outside past where Ruby, one of the community employment program workers, was as usual sweeping the concrete verandah free of leaves. Unsettling, disjunctive, it broke off for a while and then, at exactly the moment when somehow the trees, the stray dogs, the mid-morning breeze from across the woodlands seemed to return to their former rhythms, it started again. Jean-Loup stepped inside. Four people were sitting crosslegged in a circle on the floor. There was a boy in a dirty cotton T-shirt playing a pair of small, African-style drums, and three young women, one of them the flute player, her long blond hair half-covering her downcast face. Between them was 92
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a hessian sack on which were spread three sets of moccasins, cotton diapers and a pair of tin mugs with a tortoiseshell lacquer of the red, black and yellow Aboriginal flag. A moment later Jean-Loup realised that the woman with the long blond hair and the flute was Monica. He had not recognised her at first, sitting on the floor like that and with her hair let down. ‘It’s the min-min,’ said the boy with the drums, turning on Jean-Loup a pair of anxiously trusting, chestnutcoloured eyes. ‘The what?’ ‘The min-min. We saw it again this morning. Up in the stars. Last night it was yellow. Today it was red and blue.’ ‘I saw green,’ said one of the women. ‘I walked out onto the plain,’ said another. ‘One of them was moving down, and another one to the right.’ ‘It’s the twenty-first century now,’ said the boy. ‘We’ve got the internet and all that. It stands to reason there’s something out in the stars.’ ‘What did Rainbow Guy say?’ ‘I’ll have to ask him again. I can’t remember.’ ‘Something about babies.’ ‘Something about water. Coming out of the water.’ ‘Maybe this place is a magnetic pole.’ ‘No. The centre’s in Western Australia. Out west of Western Australia. The first rock that came out of the sea.’ ‘Anyway,’ said the boy decidedly. ‘We’ve got to drum it. This is what it’s for. It’s a drumming in praise of the min-min, since the moon is now in Leo, and the twenty-first century here. My name is Boab. I’m a drummer.’ Monica, who until that point had not spoken, let out a long sharp note.
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‘It’s a min-min, and you’re a drummer,’ confirmed Jean-Loup. ‘Yes. Ebony’s a fire eater, and Skye here’s a singer and a clown.’ ‘Beware,’ said Ebony. Her voice also was sharp. She had black dreadlocks and brittle, distracted eyes. ‘I’m Jean-Loup,’ said Jean-Loup mildly. ‘An accountant.’ ‘An accountant?’ said the boy, with a bewildered air. ‘And financial advisor,’ added Jean-Loup. ‘Beware the approach of the enemy,’ said Ebony. ‘We must in solitude examine the circadian rhythms of our lives.’ Obediently the boy turned back to his drums. He had exceptionally hairy legs covered with a scabrous rash. Ebony had almost non-existent nails. Skye, the young woman beside Monica, hummed almost inaudibly to herself, twisting reverently at a necklace made from the backbone of a snake. ‘When did you arrive?’ said Jean-Loup. ‘We can’t be bothered,’ said Ebony, ‘with your foolish conventional games.’ Jean-Loup looked away. Skye’s singing took up again, joined by the quavering notes of Monica’s flute, and by Ebony, who broke in and out with a thin, cat-like wail. Everything was untouched from his last visit: the T-shirts still in their boxes, the armbands and the papier-mâché sculptures still on their second-hand wooden shelf, flood-damaged and eaten by termites. When one tune finished another began straight away. Only their music was different now. It was soft, almost soporific. It was as though these four earnest musicians were trying to drown out the notes of their own previous music, hastily neutralise their own disjunctive force. There was somebody in Monica’s office. Jean-Loup had missed it at first. His eyes, scanning the doorway, had been
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preoccupied with the new arrivals, half-expecting still to see Monica’s tanned, blond figure crouched over the portable computer, as she had been most days that Jean-Loup had seen her. The figure had his back turned. He wore a white shirt whose colour blended with the morning sunlight streaming through the one window placed high in the wall at the far end of the room. His back was straight, his hair long and wavy and black. His gaze was directed apparently straight at the wall a metre in front of him. Jean-Loup knew immediately who he was. Jean-Loup stepped towards the doorway. Randhawa did not turn. Jean-Loup was about to enter the room when, with a drum roll and a shriek from the flute, the music abruptly stopped. ‘What are you doing, man?’ said the boy. ‘He’s not a friend,’ said Ebony. Her voice had gone harsh and gravelly. ‘I told you this morning. The mischievous spirits still stalk the earth.’ Guy Randhawa slowly swivelled round to face Jean-Loup. For several seconds the eyes remained closed, and so JeanLoup had that rare thing, the uninterrupted opportunity to study a face. Randhawa’s was exceptionally pale, almost plasterwhite. He had high, pronounced cheekbones, and a bony forehead. His nose and lips were thick, aquiline. Only his eyelids belied the impression of a certain coarseness in the face. They were delicate, blue-veined, their lashes long and dark like a young girl. He was not Indian, Jean-Loup thought; or, if he was, he was from some isolated northern place where the ancient invaders had never interbred with the locals, for his features were completely European. Randhawa blinked once, and opened his eyes, fixing immediately upon Jean-Loup. His gaze was clear, pellucid, without curiosity.
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‘Good morning,’ said Randhawa. ‘One of those fine, cool dry-season mornings that you get at this time of year.’ He smiled, showing even white teeth. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘I’ve just been speaking to your friends. I’m Jean-Loup Wild, by the way. The Aboriginal Artists’ Association sent me.’ Randhawa swung his legs out from under him and stood up smoothly, holding out a surprisingly small hand for JeanLoup to shake. His gestures were nimble, well-rehearsed, an almost too perfect version of business manners. ‘Guy Randhawa,’ he said. ‘I must apologise. Their reception probably wasn’t everything you might have hoped for. They’re a little ragged around the edges, I’m afraid. They forget their good manners, living the feral life, although they’re mostly from good middle-class backgrounds, as you might expect. They arrived the very same day that you did, and for their own good I immediately had to whisk them away.’ ‘Where have you been all this time?’ ‘Let’s not talk about that just yet,’ said Randhawa. He shepherded Jean-Loup out of the small office and back into the gallery, where the ferals now stared silently up at the pair. They seemed uncertain now, anxious at having misread the situation. ‘I’m sure my young friend Monica’s apprised you of the situation at Mission Hole,’ Randhawa said. ‘Financial record keeping’s possibly not uppermost on our minds at present, what with the extraordinary number of new artworks coming in. Everybody wants to be an artist at Mission Hole these days, and, like my friends here, they’re not all hung up on the bourgeois Western concept of talent. Oh, I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced you.’ ‘It’s all right,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘I’ve introduced myself.’
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Nevertheless, Jean-Loup once again did the rounds of Boab, Ebony and Skye. The two women merely nodded unsmiling at Jean-Loup, but Boab jumped up, his smile revealing a set of broken, blackened teeth, and shook hands enthusiastically. ‘I’m going to play the didgeridoo,’ said Boab. ‘From the old men. A special opportunity, eh? I’m going to teach them some Druidic sounds.’ Jean-Loup turned to Randhawa for some elaboration, but Randhawa, apparently not having heard, was heading into the tiny tea room out the back, where he began to boil water for coffee. ‘When I first came up here,’ said Randhawa, ‘the artists used to go all the way to Darwin or Katherine to try to sell their works. Or else they’d hang around on the fringes of the mining camps, or at the airstrips, hoping for some sympathetic tourist to come by. Of course, it wasn’t real traditional work they were selling. All the tjuringas and the spears and the really authentic things were collected by the anthropologists twenty years before that. Didn’t you know that? The largest collection of authentic, pre-contact Mission Hole artwork’s in the Donald Tomlinson collection at the University of Melbourne.’ ‘How long have you been here, exactly?’ ‘Just over fifteen years.’ Randhawa smiled: his teeth were very white. ‘Of course, I’m talking about authenticity in its crassest, most general sense. Nobody’s willing to say what it is anymore. It’s a tainted term, like half-caste and pure-blood, but you just have to sit in a commercial gallery for half an hour and you’ll realise it’s what everybody’s searching for.’ ‘Everybody?’ ‘Everybody in your culture. Almost without exception.’
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‘Does that include you?’ In place of a reply, Randhawa poured boiling water over coffee and brought the plunger back into his office. His energy was jumpy, spidery, expecting all things to be within his grasp. He switched on a hidden air conditioner, flooding Jean-Loup with the numbing relief of cool air. They talked for a while about Melbourne, about how Jean-Loup had got the job. Randhawa showed only a mild curiosity about why Jean-Loup was out here. He accepted the story about the independent audit without question, although Jean-Loup was careful not to mention Sally Galilee. Jean-Loup had to fight to keep track of what he was here for. Out here, he realised, the subtle ruses of power—the provisions of small comforts, his first cup of good coffee in a week—had so much more powerful effects. And then, suddenly, it came: anticipated, even prepared for, but because of Randhawa’s superior home-ground strategy and delivery, it had the effect of an unexpected blow. ‘Tell me about the other night,’ said Randhawa. ‘As I’m sure you know, I was interviewed by the police about a murder.’ ‘A murder?’ Randhawa’s eagerness, like his ignorance, was obviously assumed. ‘Beside the school oval. Under the mango tree.’ ‘How awful. And you found the body, I heard.’ ‘Yes.’ There was a silence. Jean-Loup considered whether to say more. There was no reason not to tell Randhawa what he most certainly knew already. ‘It was my first night. I went for a bit of a wander around the community. I got involved trying to break up a fight.’ ‘Where was this?’ ‘Down near Goyder River, I think. The barge landing.
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I just walked past the school oval and kept going to the last side street down the end. A man and a woman were fighting.’ ‘Lazarus Johnson and Nancy,’ said Randhawa, unhesitating. ‘How do you know that?’ ‘The whole community knows about it. He goes to Darwin and drinks and gambles. Sometimes he comes back by plane. If he’s got no money it’s on the barge. She gets left back here. When he comes back, they fight. Nothing stays hidden in a place this size.’ ‘After that I must have got a bit lost. I went uphill and around a corner, and started heading back. When I found my way back it was from the other direction. The strange thing was, when I set out there were at least ten or twelve people on the oval. When I got back they’d disappeared.’ ‘You saw nobody?’ ‘Not a soul. Except the victim, of course.’ ‘Who you’d already met.’ Jean-Loup took a deep breath. If Randhawa knew about Valerian meeting him at the airport, he most likely also knew about Sally Galilee. He might know the whole story, in fact, about what Jean-Loup was really doing out here. ‘You’re quite right,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘He’d met me at the airport, just that afternoon.’ ‘And that very night he was dead.’ ‘You think there’s a connection?’ Randhawa’s gaze was limpid. Something about him at that moment reminded Jean-Loup oddly of a school headmaster, on an edge between warmth and annoyance. His voice this time became academic, far away. ‘How do you explain how it is to an outsider? You don’t. You can’t. Each word in the language gets polluted as soon as
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you say it, because you all put your own interpretations on it. You can’t help seeing savages, primitives, even when you’re being kind. It’s tribal, it’s the clan. Valerian’s father did bad things forty years ago, Valerian does bad things today. When somebody dies of lung cancer here, it’s not because they smoke and drink too much, or their diet. It’s because somebody’s put a curse on them, or their older brother offended somebody, or their sister looked at her mother-in-law. Every effect has a cosmic cause.’ ‘What bad things did Valerian’s father do?’ ‘Killed somebody. One of Lazarus Johnson’s uncles, I believe. Classificatory uncles. It was all in retaliation for something one of the March Fly clan—that’s Lazarus’s clan— did to him. But it was excessive. It went too far. None of that may have been clear at the time, but it’s clear now, forty years later, when most of the people are dead, and some of them have lost their power, and others have gained in power, and people sit talking about why Valerian behaved as he did …’ ‘You’re suggesting it’s all a family feud?’ ‘It’s not like that. These people have lived together for thousands of years. They’ve had relative plenty, they’ve learnt to live with the environment as Europeans never have. They’ve had leisure time, too, such as most Europeans have never had. They’ve developed these incredibly complex kinship rules, and the reason they’re so complex is they’re constantly changing. Only the elders have got the knowledge as to how they change, and they all deny there’s any change at all. That’s the Aboriginal philosophy, don’t you see? Valerian’s clan and Lazarus Johnson’s clan are the same. Aboriginal philosophy is wide enough to encompass these alternative realities, the only cosmic truth being that everything is in a constant state of change. They’re competing versions of history, don’t you see?
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For the Mission Hole people Captain Cook never took over this land.’ ‘So people can be both dead and not dead. Murdered or dead of natural causes, at the same time.’ ‘In a sense. But not in the sense you mean.’ ‘You talk as though I was some kind of alien.’ ‘Listen.’ Randhawa’s pupils were tight, faraway pinpricks. ‘It all comes down to negotiation in the end. The consensus of opinion was, Valerian was strange. He did odd things. He stepped outside the boundaries of what’s acceptable in the community. Perhaps he lacked the political power to manoeuvre himself back into acceptability. There’s quite a bit of money that’s come in from outside. From mining royalties, from the club. You can’t pit yourself against forces like that. Of course, there’s other people who have affairs, it’s the same everywhere. If you’re going to survive you count up your allegiances first. You don’t do what you can to alienate people and then start an affair, in public, with the very person who’s going to cause you most trouble.’ ‘Valerian had an affair? Who with?’ ‘Can’t you guess? Nancy Johnson. Lazarus Johnson’s wife, who you saw the other night.’ Of course, the explanation was perfect. There was abundant motive, and opportunity. There was an explanation, even, for why the rest of the community had stayed away. It was the eternal triangle, the wronged husband. It was just as powerful on a remote Aboriginal community as anywhere else. Revenge killing. Countryman justice. It was just as Sergeant Jack had said. And yet, at the same time, Jean-Loup thought of how it had been Nancy and not Lazarus, the other night, who had seemed most angry. He thought how easily he had prised the
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two apart. The explanation was perfect, but it had the perfection of a mathematical model. And then there was the evidence of his own eyes. ‘Do you think the police know all this?’ ‘Of course they do. Sergeant Jack’s been here ten years.’ Randhawa smiled thinly. ‘The long nose of the law sniffs out many dark secrets, even if it’s burst a few blood vessels of late.’ ‘But have they sniffed out the right person?’ ‘As I told you, right and wrong, black and white aren’t as simple as you seem to think. You’ve seen the police. You’ve seen the gamblers talking outside the council office. The solution’s going to be a negotiated thing.’ ‘A negotiated thing, but possibly one that bears no relation to what actually happened.’ Randhawa tipped down the last of his coffee. The Adam’s apple in his suddenly exposed throat bobbed up and down. Randhawa slipped seamlessly, and for his own inscrutable reasons, between one set of beliefs and the other. For him truth seemed to be negotiable, contingent, all the things postmodernists are supposed to believe. And yet he had left that intriguing word, ‘authenticity’, hanging in the air. ‘Think about it,’ Randhawa added. ‘Valerian’s got a grudge against people with power. He hears you’re coming out here to help with the works of Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy. He hears about the Aboriginal Artists’ Association, he hears about Sally Galilee, he hears my name. Naturally he assumes you’re here to help Thatcher Gandarrwuy and her clan. You tell him you’re independent of all the powers that be but he doesn’t listen—knowing, as he does, that there is no such thing in the human world as objectivity. He gets angry and jealous. He’s feeling desperate about his position in the community. And what do we know
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about his character already? He’s the sort of person who tilts at windmills, trusts no one, who starts battles he knows he’s never going to win. He big-notes himself to Sally Galilee, who actually knows very little about what happens on this community, and then he tries to do the same to you.’ So Randhawa did know about Sally Galilee. It seemed as though half the community also knew. He also seemed to know all about Jean-Loup, who more and more was feeling like the proverbial mushroom, kept in the dark in a world where everybody else seemed to know the rules. Randhawa had told him more about Valerian than anyone else had. He’d given him perfect reasons why Lazarus should be the murderer, and then in the next breath suggested that he wasn’t. The truth would be negotiated, he’d said. There was community truth, police truth, white and blackfella truth—and none of it need bear any relation to what had actually happened that night. ‘Why are you telling me this? Are you suggesting Valerian gave me information? He told me nothing, I can assure you.’ Randhawa did not reply. Jean-Loup wondered where Randhawa had come from, how he had achieved such a central position on the community. Even the police gave him information; and if the police, why not Parker Gandarrwuy, who was there in Sergeant Jack’s house the other night; why not Valerian himself? ‘Because if you are, it makes me wonder whether there’s some connection between the forgery allegations and his death.’ ‘That’s ridiculous.’ For an instant, Randhawa was furious. ‘I told you, Valerian wouldn’t have had a clue. He’s not an artist and has no idea about the art world. He hasn’t even seen Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy for more than two years.’ ‘Why not?’
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‘Because, for one thing, she doesn’t live on the community anymore. She’s at an outstation twenty-five kilometres from here.’ ‘Why does she live there? Why doesn’t she see anybody anymore? Not even her own family, or so I’ve been told.’ Randhawa had regained his composure. His smile now was silky. ‘She does,’ he said. ‘She sees me.’ Jean-Loup realised the subject was closed. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘whether I might start looking through your records. I need to gather information, make sure everything’s properly accounted for. So if you’ve got lists of materials purchased, amounts paid to artists, amounts received from artists, administration costs and so on, I’d like to see all that. I’ll need to do some kind of a stocktake, too, if that’s possible.’ Randhawa gave a sigh. He stretched his palms out, the perfect image of so many other business people Jean-Loup had seen, the honest ones, disconcerted, with nothing to hide. The dishonest ones were always eager to help. They practically shoved their faked-up accounts under your nose. ‘You want to start right now?’ ‘Why not? If you’re ready. I can wait here while you get your files out. I’d like to cross-check your information with the artists as well. How could I go about borrowing a car? I understand some of the other artists also live at outstations that are much too far to walk. Sally Galilee’s influence doesn’t seem to stretch to a vehicle. If you could find someone to act as a go-between, introduce them to me and so forth, I’d much appreciate that as well.’ ‘Of course.’ Randhawa pulled a piece of paper out of the top drawer of his desk and scribbled down a note. ‘I’ll turn my mind to that. In fact, I think I’ve got somebody who could help. Is there anything else you’d like?’
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‘Not right now. Perhaps if you could supply me with your files.’ Jean-Loup pushed his chair back and stood up. ‘Thanks very much for all your information today. It’s been very valuable. You know, you needn’t think of any of this auditing stuff as against your interests. It’s just something we all have to do.’ ‘Of course.’ Randhawa mouthed, rather than voiced the words. ‘There was one other thing. Who are those people, Boab and Ebony and Skye? And why did you leave the community with them, on the very same day I arrived?’ Randhawa smiled, in command. ‘It’s just a sideline of mine. It’s a kind of meditation retreat I run for lost children. You don’t need to worry. I’ve got the full permission of the community council. I’ve got a bit of a reputation, you see, among the new age travellers of Nimbin and Byron Bay. Quite a few of them find their way up here during the dry.’ On his way to the store at lunchtime, Jean-Loup tried to sort through his impressions of Randhawa: or, rather, to let the conflicting impressions embed themselves, so that some overriding pattern might be seen. That word ‘authenticity’ kept coming back to him—and yet, beyond its obvious connection with Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy, he couldn’t work out why it seemed so important a clue to Randhawa’s character. It was something about the way Randhawa used the word. He let it drop. It was very hot. An old woman was sitting in the dirt. She was skinny faced and malnourished, one of the few people over fifty he had seen in this place. ‘Have I met you before?’ he asked her. He thought that, perhaps, she was one of the artists he had seen coming into the art centre.
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She did not reply. It surprised him, always, that the old people were not looked after here. He had heard about traditional culture’s respect for the elders. Here, the few old people lived on their concrete verandahs or dirt front yards, existing, apparently, on the food of their own thoughts, for they seemed to get precious little else. ‘I’ve just started work here at the community art centre. Do you go there very often yourself? I’m here trying to help out with some of that money stuff to do with Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy.’ ‘You from the government?’ Her voice was older than her face, the flicker of a desert lizard’s tongue swiftly withdrawn. She half-turned towards him. Her face was sensual, almost dreamy. Her filmy eyes seemed to travel from a long distance away. Jean-Loup realised that she was almost blind. ‘No.’ ‘You got money. We got to have money here, you know. You tell the government we need more money. My name Maisie. You tell that Queen Elizabeth from me, she got to print some more.’ Queen Elizabeth. Princess Diana. Margaret Thatcher. Alternative realities, Randhawa had said. Competing versions of history, the Aboriginal one with as much claim to truth as the other. That was the funny thing about Randhawa. He was a white man, and yet he spoke to Jean-Loup as though to an alien—as though he, Randhawa, spoke from the Aboriginal side. Valerian’s not an artist, Randhawa had said. He’s got no idea about the art world. Could it be pure coincidence, then, that final comment he had made to Jean-Loup: the artist is a thief?
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chapter eight
The Club
Piles of paper intimidate most people. To Jean-Loup they were like symbols at the door of an Aladdin’s cave. He approached them as an artist does, like clues to a deeper underlying reality, like tea leaves, or the germs of truth in rumour, or like doodles of batshit on a windscreen that might one day reveal the cure for AIDS or the secret name of God. Jean-Loup spent the best part of the next two days looking at the art centre’s financial affairs. Many businesses kept their piles of paper in a mess. The accounts departments of many a tycoon were piled high with undated receipts, unsigned letters, bills to unnamed or unknown buyers. That was all standard practice. Here, however, the receipts weren’t even in dollars, and they were to people like Sydney Harbour, Princess Grace and Mr Jones. Received, from Princess Grace, one W Sisters painting. From John Wayne, one sunset on HQ Holden door. He had started, of course, by trying to separate incoming 107
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from outgoing, expenditure from receipts. After a time he had found it impossible even to do that. Was ‘undated canvas, seventy-five dollars’ an expense or a receipt? What about ‘Silly Willy, the usual’? It seemed that he was going to have to rely on Randhawa for explanations—although even that he doubted, since there were at least four or five different people’s handwriting on the art centre’s paper. In addition, of course, there was the flood damage. Some of the papers were falling apart, others had gone mouldy and black or the ink had run. Sweat soaked Jean-Loup’s shirt. Where his hand touched his notepaper, sweat ran and soaked the page. The smell of his own body rose and mingled with the smell of mouldy drying paper, with cut grass on the dry season breeze, with the sweat of the two old men sitting painting on the verandah just outside. He was fighting a new feeling that was growing in him, a feeling that he was slowing down. He had noticed in himself a languid pleasure in taking his own time to carry out the trivial necessities of life—a pleasure which he had first observed in others here, and put down to torpor or depression. But things were getting urgent now. He had to have a breakthrough—or sink into his own mind-numbing rountine, as many of the other Europeans here seemed to do, deluding themselves that they were becoming part of the canvas of community life. People wandered in and out. The artists, Jean-Loup realised, often stayed squatting on the verandah or in the dirt in the shade of the ironbark at the front, obviously preferring to paint there or perhaps having nowhere else to paint. He watched them mixing their colours, applying each dot or mark with a painstaking, tiny brush. He grew to marvel at the concentration the older men showed, at the detail and depth of
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the designs that flowed onto the canvas. They never sketched beforehand, never asked for anything but the canvas and paints, and sometimes to have marked for them the centre of the canvas. They seemed to know already exactly what they wanted, and the painting process itself was just the meticulous execution of something that already existed fully inside their heads. He started watching faces. The young man with flared jeans who had spoken with Monica on the first day came back. He was aggressive this time, demanding to know why he had to pay twenty-five per cent commission to the centre, when the other artists or other galleries were only taking twenty. Randhawa soon smoothed him down. An old woman tottered in, toothless, her dress torn, clutching a tiny piece of canvas like something salvaged from a fight. More children romped through, demanding chocolates, ransacking the T-shirt box, leaving tinny trails of laughter on their short-cut to the basketball court out the back. It was not true to say, as occurred to Jean-Loup, that people left their troubles on the dirt road outside. They brought them in with them—but they were transmuted, marked on their faces, the way people are at a church or a ceremony, in a subtle transformation of life into art. The centre, he was beginning to realise, was a refuge for the people here from the pressures of life outside. It was an oasis of calm, a place where they could paint their traditional culture, or even just catch up on sleep. On the morning of the second day Randhawa had disappeared. Jean-Loup was left alone with Monica, who sat in Randhawa’s office to the side, folding papers for prints, stuffing cushions, fashioning chicken wire for a new type of sculpture that some of the artists were going to paint. She seemed happier now that Randhawa was back. She dealt
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almost efficiently with the few artists who came by. She even made chatty comments to Jean-Loup now and again, told him about the Open Day they had had a few weeks before, about collecting waterlily roots with the women, or her tomato plants down in Nimbin, out back of Byron Bay. At five o’clock on the same day Randhawa returned in a cloud of red dust thrown up by the wheels of a white, nearly new four-wheel-drive. ‘How was your day with the books, then?’ he asked. The top button of his shirt was undone and a thin glistening trail of black hair was visible. Jean-Loup felt frustrated and no nearer to any solution. ‘I’ve been surprised. I hadn’t realised things were quite this disorganised.’ ‘Oh?’ ‘I can’t find a reference to a sale here anywhere. And yet one of your major sources of revenue is sales of Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s work.’ ‘Who told you that?’ ‘Well, it’s common knowledge, isn’t it? You can look up her exhibition catalogues or ask her dealers down south.’ ‘What’s common knowledge in Adelaide or Melbourne’s not necessarily known up here. Sure, she’s a successful artist. But that doesn’t translate to money here on the ground. I’ve got arrangements with at least twelve major galleries around the country and overseas. Sometimes they send their buyers out here. You wouldn’t believe how many scruffy-looking hippies turn out to be art dealers with fat chequebooks. Other times I send work out on consignment. If it’s sold, they take a commission, the dealers take a commission, the council takes a commission, and the rest goes to Thatcher Gandarrwuy and her family. There’s usually precious little left for the centre.’
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‘That makes no difference. You should have the records.’ ‘Of course.’ Randhawa’s smile was blinding. The setting sun’s rays were just beginning to come directly through the door. ‘Where will I find them, then?’ Randhawa stepped swiftly into the building. ‘There are my personal notes of cash advances I make to the artists. Usually they’re out of my own wages, since there’s no money anywhere else. You can see those, if you like. Sometimes there are receipts as well, sometimes not. Then you can look at bank statements for the Mission Hole Art Centre account since February this year. The older ones were destroyed in the flood, but you can probably get copies from the bank. Sometimes, as well, we get paid in cash. You can look at all that, if you like. The accounts are all in the red.’ ‘Certainly I’d like to. And I’d also like to cross-check it with the artists, as I said the other day. Particularly with Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy.’ ‘You could ask her.’ Randhawa’s gesture was graceful: he had extraordinarily expressive hands. ‘But I don’t think you’d get much of a reply. She knows all the waterholes, strings of them for hundreds of miles. But numbers aren’t necessary in her world. Besides, she’s sixty-five years old. Do you think she’s going to comb through a pile of paperwork every second day of the week?’ ‘She must be literate, at least. She signs her work. She even writes post-modernist slogans on it, if that was her at the museum earlier this year.’ ‘Certainly it was.’ Randhawa was unflappable. ‘She can read and write. I never said otherwise. The missionaries taught her.’ ‘There’s something I don’t understand. You say she never
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leaves the outstation. In that case, how can she have slashed and written on her own painting? It must have happened either at Mission Hole or in Darwin, before the exhibition. It can’t have been at the outstation, or surely you would have seen it. And yet people say you were as surprised as anybody when the painting was unveiled.’ ‘What are you suggesting?’ ‘Well, there’s three obvious possibilities. The first is that you did know about the slashed painting, and the whole thing was a stunt. But then, why would you drag your own best artist into the mud? The second is that Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy does come to Mission Hole, and she slashed the painting here. The third is that somebody else slashed her painting.’ ‘You want to know why she doesn’t live here?’ The smile now had ceased to have any relation to anything going on around it. ‘It’s because of her son. He went to Darwin and got corrupted by the white people’s ways. He was an alcoholic, and he died in a town camp. Now, with the club and so forth, she sees exactly the same thing happening out here. What makes it worse is the people who run the club are her own relations, Parker Gandarrwuy and the others on the community council. She can’t understand how people can get involved in something that causes so much suffering and death. She doesn’t drink herself, of course. She says it’s the white man’s poison. Now can you understand why she doesn’t like outsiders coming in?’ ‘I’m not here to persecute you, you know. I’m here to write an independent report. That’s why I need to speak to Margaret herself.’ ‘Independence.’ Randhawa waved his head from side to side in the Indian fashion. Jean-Loup remembered what Linda
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had said about Randhawa’s two years in Kashmir. ‘You are independent of what, may I ask? You lack the Third World perspective: when you live in an Aboriginal community no person can be truly independent. You can’t just walk into a place like Mission Hole and start asking questions. Apart from anything else, no traditional woman’s ever going to answer questions from a man.’ Jean-Loup tried to gauge Randhawa’s expression. The warning, if that was what it was, was hidden behind a solicitous smile. ‘Well, I’m here to do a job. If I can’t talk to anybody, I can’t get the job done. I’m also trying to get in touch with Parker Gandarrwuy. Where’s he been hiding since the club’s been closed down?’ ‘Parker’s a politician. He’ll be wherever the power is. Darwin or Canberra or out on ceremony ground.’ ‘Or with his auntie? Is that what she is, Parker’s auntie? Margaret Thatcher?’ But Randhawa refused to be drawn. ‘I’m not his keeper. Now, I think you’ve got two choices.’ Randhawa’s voice was at its most equable. ‘The first is to keep checking through all those invoices and receipts. There’s plenty there to occupy you, and with the bank statements and so on I think you’ll find enough to confirm in your report that it’s all above board. Where you’re not clear, I can answer your questions.’ ‘If I took your word for it, I’d just have you dictate my report for me.’ ‘The second option,’ continued Randhawa, ‘is to get somebody to help, as we discussed the other day.’ ‘Yes, and you were going to put your mind to it and suggest someone.’ ‘She’d have to be from Mission Hole,’ said Randhawa
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softly. ‘And she’d be preferably a woman, since otherwise none of the women will speak to you. And she’d need to be someone who knows something about accounting. Someone who has an education, in other words, in the whitefella way.’ Jean-Loup followed Randhawa’s gaze out to the Landcruiser on the road. For the first time he noticed, through the darkened windscreen, that there was somebody waiting in the passenger seat. Randhawa led him out to the middle of the road. The woman had wound her window two-thirds of the way down. She was young, and Aboriginal. Her ochre and yellow dress still seemed clean and freshly ironed. Her face had just a slight sheen of sweat, one that seemed more consistent with a game of squash in the air conditioning than a day of tropical heat and dirt roads, and on it she wore a permanent, extraordinarily open, almost disembodied smile. ‘Petra Leonelli Gandarrwuy,’ said Randhawa behind JeanLoup’s ear. ‘Works as a field officer for the Mission Hole Land Council, when she’s not helping run things out here. I’ve just picked her up from the airport this afternoon.’ ‘Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,’ said Petra. ‘How do you like working for the land council?’ ‘Plenty of excitement,’ said Petra. ‘You can say that much for it. You don’t get bored.’ Her voice was cultivated, slightly hoarse. Jean-Loup was suddenly intensely aware of his surroundings. Coming down from the escarpment, an early evening breeze was blowing off the dust, bringing with it the smell of cooling, dry grass. It brought something else with it as well: the faint, acrid smell of fire. ‘What do you do,’ asked Jean-Loup, ‘if you do get bored?’ ‘You go to the club,’ said Petra. ‘It’s opening again tonight, you know. Night before the funeral.’
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‘I might meet you there.’ ‘Might be,’ said Petra. She slid over to the driver’s seat, and in one lithe motion, started the car. The instant he entered the club, Jean-Loup could feel it. Music. In the dim, brick-walled room, with a pool table in the centre, it rose like cigarette smoke and filled the space. Blue and soul-tickling, it floated between and through the packed, sweating crowd, lent an anarchic tint to the gestures of the young men playing pool. It reached the tin roof and it hung there, all things to all people, trembling, lowering, an incipient storm. The Wurupi Band, the local community band, were playing. Jean-Loup spoke in turn to men whose tongues were loosened, Aboriginal men who suddenly knew all about him although they had not spoken a word to him for the past week, who seemed suddenly willing to talk. He met Gandarrwuys by the dozen: Jerome Gandarrwuy, all bristling hog’s breath, who told him about the football-playing champions of the Gandarrwuy clan; his cousin Nelson, who was a Dire Straits fanatic, and his cousin’s brother Jake. Just back from Darwin, where he had been on a gambling spree, was his brother Moses, who talked about how to win at blackjack and laughed at him with a lizard-like, toothless mouth. Only Parker was not there. Jean-Loup was passed like a new toy from hand to hand. Each time he shook hands he parted with five bucks, and loosened further the screws at the back of his throat, the ones that hold down tight the dribble of laughter that threaded its way out of him and joined mellifluously, dangerously, with that of others. He talked psychobabble. He
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drank beer like water. He took part in the systematic, made-toorder ruin of kin; and as he spun deliriously among them he kept his eye out for Petra, who was somehow hilariously also not there. This was business. Fellowship. The floor was concrete, with splotches of old paint on it. This was where almost everything in the community really happened, Jean-Loup realised, or at least its place in folklore tried and tested, chipped out until it slotted into place. No doubt there was no traditional equivalent to this, but there was no traditional equivalent for so much of what happened at Mission Hole now. The likes of Monica and Ulrich, the more conscientious of the white people, were nowhere to be seen. Probably they believed that it was a violation of trust, that there was something underhand about relying on information you got from this place. Nobody drank anything but green cans, which were passed from hand to hand—legal tender, in fact the best form of exchange, for it was something everybody wanted and had an immediate use for. Money, mostly in crumpled tenand twenty-dollar notes, flowed back smoothly to the scarred and pirate-like whitefellas operating the bar. Nobody said a word about the funeral next day. Suddenly he found himself speaking to Nancy, Lazarus Johnson’s wife. He saw now that she was young, slim, almost as tall as Jean-Loup. She wore a sleeveless screen-printed dress and no shoes. She had large prominent teeth and a split lip which hovered dangerously before him when she came up to him after who knows how many drinks, when he was fumbling quizzically, trying to work out the value of the coins remaining in his hand, a sum which at that moment was as difficult as any accounting problem he had ever solved. ‘He’s no good man,’ she said.
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‘Who?’ ‘He’s in that casino in Darwin all day. That Diamond Beach. You think I don’t know? All day he’s playing, playing. And always he lose. What kind of man is that, eh?’ ‘Many kinds of men.’ ‘You want to dance?’ She grabbed his wrist and dragged him out onto the concrete space in front of the band. They danced, both of them cans in hand. She laughed when he looked into her eyes, and for a moment seemed to go shy, an almost sober movement that made him wonder what was possible, inflaming him. He looked around for Petra, who was still most definitely not there. He was dancing here in front of the whole community, a whole community of people standing not ten metres away, pretending not to see. The song finished. He tried to drift away from her, not wanting to attract too much attention, but she followed him, driven by the urge to communicate. ‘I went to school in mission. Them nuns always saying to me: keep your legs together! Hold your back straight! One day I say to them: you keep your God! I don’t want Him! I got strap for that.’ ‘What’d you do after that?’ Like Duchess, he thought, perhaps she ran away. Nancy didn’t reply. She was looking about, craning her neck as though searching for somebody, at the same time breathing hard. For a minute she seemed to have forgotten him, then she suddenly breathed out loud. ‘Would you come down to the barge landing with me?’ He drew back. ‘What for?’ ‘Can I have a drink?’ He drew away, glad of the chance to escape. He expected to be collared by somebody in each group of men between the dance floor and the bar, asked again for cigarettes and beer.
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But to his amazement nobody stopped him. They let him go through like one whose status had suddenly changed, and he returned sooner than he would have liked to Nancy with two beers. ‘Come with me down to the barge landing,’ she said again. ‘I want to talk.’ ‘Why can’t we talk here?’ ‘We can’t talk here. I want to talk in private.’ Jean-Loup felt trapped. He looked around, caught the eye of the closest man, who looked away, so he said in a loud voice, for everyone to hear: ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’m just going to walk Nancy home.’ He was satisfied, knowing people had heard, even when Nancy, energy undiminished, grabbed him by the wrist and led him towards the door. One step outside she dropped him, instantly sobered by the cooler night air. The frenzy was suddenly over. Nancy walked several steps ahead, uncertain. ‘Do you want to go back inside?’ ‘I got to go,’ she said. They walked on, feet apart now. At the cyclone-wire gate Jean-Loup hesitated, unsure whether to obey the ‘No Alcohol Past This Point’ sign, but Nancy walked on without a pause. Her steps seemed heavy, leaden. ‘I got two kids at home,’ she said. Her voice had gone dull. ‘They got no tucker now, just toast is all I got. Just toast, nothin else.’ ‘Why nothing else?’ ‘No money, stupid.’ Jean-Loup was surprised at how quickly her voice could change. ‘No money and nothin to do. Nothin to ease the pain. I got one man dead, and another one in gaol. Neither of em done nothin wrong.’ ‘Neither of them?’
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Jean-Loup wanted to touch her for the first time, in sympathy. The community seemed silent and empty now. But she sensed his sympathy and rejected it, looking at his face with an expression of anger and shock, as though suddenly realising who he really was. They had reached a corner and she turned abruptly and walked away from him, quite steady now, and disappeared into a house three or four doors down. Jean-Loup stood at the intersection and looked around. He realised he had been led by Nancy just a street or two away from the ones he had walked on before, but he felt disoriented, threatened, like a lost child. It only lasted a moment. He saw the glow of the club back the way he had come, an alien presence, a bright, savage temple to the newer gods. He turned away, wondering what Nancy had really intended to say to him. Was it just drunk talk, the urge to confide that evaporates when it hits the night? Would she now never want to talk to him again? And what did she mean by ‘neither of them’? Did she think Lazarus was innocent? If she did, then others in the community must know she thought that too. No wonder, then, he had this feeling of implicit consent to his dancing with Nancy. He was being allowed access to this piece of knowledge—the whole community, in a sense, shifting aside to let it through. But to what purpose? Had she said this to the police? Was she just a loose cannon now, a bereaved woman, half out of her mind? He felt that he had been given a clue which he lacked the knowledge to interpret. Those who had fed it to him, perhaps, understood well how a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Jean-Loup kept walking until he reached the river, down near the barge landing where he had been the first night. The river was impossibly wide in the darkness. The landing area was completely under water. Its banks were far away, dark,
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inaccessible, dotted with half-submerged clumps of pandanus, whose fronds stuck sharply over the water like jagged-beaked, insatiable birds. The water was rippling by like treacle and just downstream something rotting had caught in a tree. He felt the direction home with his nose.
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chapter nine
Petra Leonelli Gandarrwuy
At seven o’clock next morning the first of the engines fired up. They were starting all around. The coughing of clearing exhausts, the shrieking of ignition switches seldom used, the tinny, startled barking of the four-cylinder four-wheel-drives, somewhere the sullen rumble of a V8. Jean-Loup got up. He drank two glasses of water and stood on the verandah looking out. All around, black plumes of exhaust smoke rose into the limitless blue. Fifty metres down the road, in somebody’s dusty front yard, was an old ute with its tray turned into a cage. It was crowded with people, their feet and hands and faces pressed against the wire grill. The engine was running but the ute was going nowhere. Some men had already jumped down and were staring with apparent incomprehension at a flat tyre. It was Valerian’s funeral day. In the yard where the ute stood the spear grass was 121
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trodden flat as hessian and pieces of frayed blue tarp and alfoil and plastic bag were scattered around the blackened remains of fire. Jean-Loup slowed his headlong rush down the street to a walk, then waved, then stood still and stared into the unyielding faces of men he had laughed with in the pub the night before. Jerome Gandarrwuy was there, and Nelson and Jake and their hangers-on, their faces not enthusiastic now, not even animated by a hint of hangover humour, just bleak-eyed and preoccupied and hard as dry-season rock. ‘Got a flat tyre, eh?’ said Jean-Loup. ‘We don’t need help.’ Nevertheless they moved aside enough for him to be able to see, down a solid aisle of shoulders, the ute’s rear wheel. It was dead flat, rubber cracking, held on with ugly prongs of fencing wire and nuts that were probably rusted tight. It was the ute in which Valerian had picked up Jean-Loup from the airport. ‘No wheel brace. You can’t get the nuts off without a wheel brace.’ A thought came to Jean-Loup: the wheel brace the police had found in Lazarus Johnson’s back garden. It must have come from the ute. ‘What do you want?’ ‘A lift to the funeral.’ Jean-Loup had picked up enough Mission Hole English now to know that ‘please’ was redundant. ‘You can sit in the back.’ A teenage boy finally appeared with a wheel brace and an extra-long piece of hollow steel for leverage on the rusty nuts. Nevertheless it took two men, bouncing, to get each nut off. Jean-Loup helped. Sweat, rich and sharp, rose into the steelblue air. When it was all over he clambered, breathless, into the tray with the others, breathed in the dust and sweat,
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watched as they drove out of the community, the white people in their gardens pursuing their Sunday morning chores— watering the garden, washing down the car, recognising and acknowledging each other with the subtle displeasure of tourists caught out pretending to be something else. Cars all around were leaving, an alliance of noise and light against the proximity of death. Sitting in the back was a demotion, perhaps, or maybe an acknowledgment that he was slightly more one of them. The order to sit there was emphatic. To Jean-Loup it implied that they knew the first time, with Valerian, he had sat in the front. ‘What’s happening in this funeral?’ ‘Red Mud Bay mob. Mission Hole mob. Everyone got business, got to be there.’ ‘Is this the same car from the other night? The one the dead man was driving?’ They pretended not to understand. They got out water, passed it around, offered him none until he remembered, suddenly, that if he wanted some he had to ask, otherwise he might wait until he was half-dead of thirst. The road was first dusty then bumpy where it became a track. Jean-Loup tried at first to sit up, hold onto the side bars so that he could watch the landscape upright, but eventually he abandoned the attempt and watched the world from his back: sardine-like, coffin-like, they could see only the tops of trees. There was no talk after they left the safety of the community. The men were grim, preoccupied, saving their energy. Jean-Loup could not help noticing, under the tarp near the front of the tray, the nulla-nullas and steel bars. He saw the cars first. They had pulled off the track and parked in two ragged lines in the bush. All the same he was unprepared for so many people. They had crowded, breathless,
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into a small cleared area on high ground. There were old tin shacks here and there, on wooden posts rotted out by termites, almost collapsed into the earth. It was impossible for JeanLoup to know at first where the centre was. There were so many centres. He thought for a moment it was raining: but it was sweat, tears, the visible score of emotion, falling and rising again as steam from shoulders, hot clothes, tarpaulins, the holed and rusted tin roofs, arms that were upraised in lamentation, mourning cries that rose and struck in futile rage against the sky. The Mission Hole men stood in a bloc, off to one side. Jean-Loup separated himself from them and edged forward but found no place for himself except the least conspicuous, the area under a large flame tree where several of the white people of the community had each in their turn made their way. There were four or five coppers there too, in plain clothes. They stood close together, whispering their unease to one another, and had suspiciously bulky jackets for the heat. Jean-Loup stood with the others, his white skin raw as bone. With his throat tightening as it always did at funerals he saw the hole, dug in rock-red earth, saw the man-size bundle beside it, bulging like a mummy with clothes then wrapped and tied in a swag. An old man danced. Somebody said he was the dead man’s uncle. He was the same clan, the crocodile—not from Mission Hole but from Red Mud Bay, where Valerian had been born. He circled around the grave, imitating the reptile, then singing, stamping his feet, his voice wheeling into the sky, tracing out the song cycle, the stellar points in Valerian’s life. Was he a shooting star, or a candle untimely snuffed out? The Mission Hole men shifted from foot to foot, itching. The coppers, too, had fingers that flexed, moved surreptitiously closer to the
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rougher instruments that might speak when they could not understand the tongues. Jean-Loup stood on the edge of it, mutely broadcasting his own distress. His mourning was like that, tearless and just under the surface, although from outside he was just another whitefella, sharp-faced and taking mental notes. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ he heard a copper say. ‘Don’t ask me.’ A woman came forward from the dancing mess of mourners, painted up, and slashed herself with a stone. She took its sharp edge and she roiled it down her thigh, bringing forth dark blood and a cry to match the wailing cry of others just gone. She moaned horribly. Suddenly she was trying to jump into the grave, and while the Mission Hole mob watched, cold-eyed, her relatives restrained her. She threw herself on the wrapped-up bundle, screaming. Any moment, Jean-Loup thought, the accusation will come. The violence was so thick in the air he could feel his testicles shrinking, feel the collusion of the elements, taste the blood at the back of his throat. Instead, something else happened. A white man came forward, a priest. He wore white robes and held a Bible in his right hand. He raised his arms like a prophet parting the Red Sea. ‘My friends,’ he cried. ‘We are gathered today to mourn the untimely departure of our good friend, Valerian.’ Instantly, there was silence. From amidst the painted warriors and the wailing, the women whose sorry cuts still ran with blood, a new emotion rose up. It was shock. The priest had spoken the dead man’s name. The priest’s voice rose high, breasting the wave, a cork bobbing in a froth-and-bubble sea. ‘It is a sad time for us all.
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I too have known Valerian a long time, in fact, since he was a child. As a young brother at the mission here I well remember teaching him, his brightness, his irrepressible spirit, his eager and inquiring mind. In another time or place he could well have been one of our leaders here. I wish only to say that I myself regret the manner of his passing. I would like to see it not as a time for division and recriminations, but as an opportunity to reflect on the unity that holds us together, a unity that can exist only in the Lord. So I would ask you to join me in a prayer for the soul of Valerian …’ The priest opened his Bible. While he gathered himself to speak, the mourners shuffled and gathered together their threads of noise. The first words of his prayer rang out, clear and high. For an instant there was silence. Something teetered on the edge. It was a moment of rebellion, perhaps, a force that could have gathered together and in an instant cast the priest away. Then it was gone. A moment later came the murmur of the response: dolorous and mumbling, drawn from empty bellies and clogged-up veins, from smoking and hangovers and waterless houses and tin shacks and hoarse and calcified throats. It was a cry of the starving to the well-fed, the sick to the healthy, the poor to the rich—a unity all right, but not a unity in the Lord. Only a deaf person could have thought of this as a faithful response. The priest kept going— obtuse and single-minded, raw-boned and convinced. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, he said, and the mourners responded— dust in their faces, ashes in their throats. The coppers shuffled their feet and began to look away. There was no violence here now. That much was clear. Another painted mourner came out and began to hit herself and wail beside the priest, who ploughed on regardless. It didn’t matter. Her face was intense, frenetic, a pantomime of
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grief, like a woman who strives to reach orgasm but can’t quite arrive. A few minutes later, the first of the white people began to peel away. Jean-Loup decided to take this opportunity to grab a lift. The next day Jean-Loup arrived at the art centre to find Petra sitting in his place. It wasn’t his place, certainly. He had to recognise that. Nevertheless, even Monica, for all her hostility, had let him use that spot, while Randhawa had practically put Jean-Loup’s nameplate there—transferred all the files and accounts JeanLoup would need over there, let him spread out all over the desk and the floor underneath. He had even left a dirty coffee cup and a plate with dry biscuit crumbs in that spot the day before. All that was gone now. The papers had been folded up, marked where they had been opened with a neat tab, and placed in a pile to one side. His cup and plate had disappeared—in the kitchen, probably, washed and placed back on the sink, where strictly speaking they belonged. ‘Where’s Randhawa?’ Jean-Loup asked. Petra looked up, blinked, smiled politely, as though noticing him for the first time. ‘Out bush,’ she said. ‘He’ll be gone for three or four days.’ ‘What about Monica and the others?’ ‘They’ve gone, too. Back down south, I think. They left yesterday. I only noticed because all their gear was gone.’ ‘Randhawa hasn’t gone to see Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy?’ Petra only smiled. Supple and straight-backed, she sat with a portable computer stationed midway in front of her perfectly symmetrical form. Her nails were long, slightly
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curled and pinkish as though with embarrassment, a lost, girlish feeling, still lingering there at the edges of a persona that was otherwise completely self-contained. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, how are you related to Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy?’ ‘She’s my auntie,’ she said. ‘Aboriginal way. Classificatory aunt.’ ‘Classificatory?’ The word seemed so clinical, so devoid of any display of emotion, so tailored to his own familiar world. Somehow, Petra’s presence had changed the atmosphere of this room. There was something almost sexless about her, so carefully had she been dressed and packaged up. No, she wasn’t completely self-contained, he realised. She had very carefully rehearsed to achieve that effect. ‘But you don’t need to worry,’ she added. ‘It won’t affect my part in this investigation. Besides, I haven’t seen my auntie in years.’ ‘Oh, yes. Randhawa told me about that.’ A car went past outside. Petra looked behind Jean-Loup at the road. He saw her stiffen slightly, then relax, a tiny slip. Jean-Loup half-turned and looked over his shoulder at the vehicle disappearing in a crowd of red dust. It was a white four-wheel-drive, similar to the one Randhawa drove—one of the community employment program workers, no doubt, heading out for post-wet season repairs to the road. Why had she stiffened? Did she think it was Randhawa, unexpectedly driving past? When he turned back Petra’s smile was cool, formal, one of the package of personality cards she seemed to flip over on demand, hiding herself unapproachably behind. ‘Well, I suppose I should get some work done. I see you’re already well installed.’
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‘I’ve been here over an hour. I have to start early if I’m going to get any work done around here. I’ve been putting all these figures onto a spreadsheet. It’s a Pandata program. You’d be surprised how much better the new version is than the old. I’ve also been entering records of phone conversations I’ve had with various people—suppliers and tradesmen and various businesses in Darwin that sell things to the centre. I’ve asked them to check their records against ours and to send me copies of invoices if possible. I’m going through it all item by item, checking for discrepancies.’ ‘Excellent,’ said Jean-Loup. He tried to sound friendly, but his voice rang formal in the air. She wore a blue sleeveless cotton dress and a thin silver necklace. Around her left wrist was a saffron-and-red macrame string, such as Buddhist monks or Western travellers in Asia sometimes wear. Her fingers—he found himself looking at her hands—were delicate, dark brown and completely relaxed. Her face, he thought, had something statuesque, vaguely Asian about it. ‘I couldn’t find any of that information in Randhawa’s records myself.’ ‘You didn’t know the password. As well, I’ve been trying to clear up the mess some of these WOOFers have left. I keep telling Randhawa they’re no help to anybody, but he doesn’t listen.’ ‘Who are the WOOFers?’ ‘New Age travellers. People like Boab and Skye. The WOOFers are an international network. World Organisation of Overseas Friends, something like that. They do environmentally friendly work in exchange for board and a bit of pay. They travel around with their Kombies and their dope and their dreads and their babies in slings. They put ads in environmental magazines, and they come and stay up here.’
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Petra laughed, lightly. ‘They’re gypsies. Ferals. They like to think they’re just like us, all black under the skin.’ ‘They can stay out here without a permit?’ ‘Strictly, no. But they come anyway. They stay here for weeks, sometimes, as long as nobody objects.’ ‘Randhawa told me it’s a business he operates, making a bit of money on the side.’ ‘The money goes to the council. He’s got full permission from them. There’s nothing about it on the side.’ She was staring back at her keys. Jean-Loup was astonished at the sharpness of her response. There was an apology already on the tip of his tongue, but he swallowed it with difficulty. After all, it was she who had come in here, taking over his work space, showing up his inability to do the work he was supposedly here to do. But then, whose territory was it, really? Without even seeming to she was challenging his sense of property, letting him understand that, here, he was on Aboriginal land. He felt manipulated, put in the wrong. His initial impression of her needed revision. ‘I’m not suggesting anything underhand. It’s just that Randhawa’s let me waste two days here, looking at useless information.’ ‘Perhaps it’s not useless, then. Perhaps you needed to look at it first, to understand.’ ‘Well, I suppose I’d better get my files and things. I’ll work for the moment in the other room, since you’ve obviously taken over this space.’ He approached the table. She shifted slightly, sideways, to let him by. He had to bend down quite close to her to pick up the files he needed. He wondered for a moment whether she was even aware of his presence. She sat regally, concentrating on her screen, only the slight flaring of her nostrils a subtle
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form of reproach. She reached forward smoothly to pass him a file that was closer to her. ‘We need to double-check with the financial information Randhawa’s provided to the Mission Hole Land Council,’ she was saying. ‘And also match up some of the undated receipts with the gallery records. Randhawa knows most, if not all, of the gallery owners and souvenir shops in Darwin. One of us should probably do the rounds.’ ‘I was planning on that myself,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘You never know what’s an irregularity. And what’s simply an honest mistake.’ ‘Excuse me. Could I just get past?’ She moved aside a little more, squeezing herself up against the table. He wondered, as he watched her so assiduously avoiding physical contact with him, whether it had been deliberate, that moment when she passed him the paper and her fingers had brushed against his. He found it impossible to concentrate. The new documents Randhawa had given him were as incomprehensible as the last lot. More blank spaces and question marks speckled his notes, another rash of papers that were undated, unnamed or unknown. Partly it was simple annoyance. At one of the accounting firms he had once briefly worked for, the partners had shuffled around the junior accountants like pieces in a game of Chinese checkers, according to who was in favour that week. Every Monday morning Jean-Loup and the other recent graduates would arrive at work not knowing which office they would be in. It was a deliberate power play, of course. It struck him that Randhawa’s refusal to let him access the real financial records for two days was a power-play of just that type.
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But this was just an obvious example. In fact, he was experiencing that same sensation everywhere he turned. When he had tried to find out where Randhawa was, he was stopped short. When he had tried to find Parker Gandarrwuy, let alone Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy, he was stopped short. The few pieces of information he had been given were on other people’s terms, not his own: Randhawa’s revelations about Valerian, for example, or Nancy Johnson’s story. He had the same sensation even regarding that other search of his, the search for Duchess. Brother O’Gorman’s hints about drifters taking advantage of the women were opaque, written for another audience. O’Gorman’s words spoke past Jean-Loup to another reality he did not yet understand. His certainties, everywhere, were breaking down. He felt he understood less about Duchess than ever before. Aboriginal reality did not correspond to his reality, and he felt he might as well acknowledge this, and slide, thereby, into the torpor that afflicted so many around here. He felt sure of only one thing. Valerian’s death and the art scandal were somehow linked, but he could not imagine how. There was another reason for his lack of concentration. He was intensely aware of Petra’s presence. He was fascinated by the small things: by her physicality, by the faint roughness in her hands and face, by the flash of black armpit hair when she reached up suddenly and adjusted the shoulder of her dress. After an hour she shut down her portable computer, leaving it closed on the table. She stood up and began to walk towards the door that led out the back. As she passed JeanLoup’s door she turned, one hand on her hip, and said over her shoulder to him: ‘You went to the funeral yesterday, did you?’ Jean-Loup caught his breath. Apart from Nancy Johnson’s
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allusions, it was the first time any Aboriginal person here had raised the topic of Valerian’s death. ‘Some people were trying to change a tyre,’ he said. ‘I got a lift.’ ‘All the council members were there. Almost everybody on the community. Even the people who weren’t the old man’s friends.’ ‘I was told there might be fighting. Arguments. The police told me they were bringing extra people out from Darwin.’ ‘What would they know?’ said Petra. She took a deep breath. He saw her nostrils flare, her shoulders raise as she took in the air. ‘Who was that priest?’ ‘One of the old ones from the mission days.’ ‘Why did he keep on saying the old man’s name?’ ‘He knew perfectly well he shouldn’t. He was making a point. He knew the old man hated the Church. He wanted to let everyone know his ways are better than ours.’ Petra was still standing in the doorway, hand on her hip, in a posture that suddenly struck him as immensely proud. At this moment, he thought, he was being summed up. ‘Was Nancy Johnson there as well?’ he asked. ‘Of course.’ ‘Wouldn’t people be angry with her? I mean, if Lazarus has really done what the police say.’ Petra turned abruptly on her heels. She walked into the tiny kitchen area with its power point, instant coffee and electric jug. Jean-Loup stood in the doorway and watched her while she poured water, ripped the lid off the coffee tin and dumped a teaspoon of coffee into the mug he had used himself the day before. In an angry mutter she asked him if he would like coffee as well.
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‘What did I say to offend you?’ She turned away from him and was silent for a moment. ‘There’s a meeting on in Darwin this week. The Mission Hole Arts Advisory Committee. I’m a member. They want you to go along.’ ‘All right. Then I’ll go.’ Jean-Loup realised that he was holding his breath. She was, he thought, like one of those trick pictures used by psychologists to test personality, the ones that depict, say, a white vase or two black faces kissing, depending on your point of view. One moment she was the height of efficiency, some sort of corporate junior executive type; and the next she was brooding, suffering, authoritarian in her demands. Suddenly, he had a sharp, almost photographic image of the funeral. He saw the priest in his white robes out there among the mourners, raising his arms for silence; and there, at the same time, were the painted warriors and the old men, and the women wailing and cutting themselves with stones. ‘Our people keep on dying,’ Petra said. ‘That’s the third funeral for our people I’ve been to in the past six months.’ And she whacked herself suddenly, with a clenched fist, hard above her breasts.
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chapter ten
Silvertails
The room was large and steel-ceilinged, more like a warehouse or a granary than an art gallery. The Mission Hole Arts Advisory Committee members sat, somewhat gingerly, at a wooden table on a bare concrete slab floor. They were variously dressed in screen-printed dresses and T-shirts, one emblazoned with the slogan ‘Let’s Plant a Billion Trees’, as well as earrings, meditation strings and silver-and-garnet necklaces from Thailand or Byron Bay. But they weren’t hippies, these people. Clearly they were two or three tax brackets above. When one of them laughed or mentioned a name the others laughed and nodded in perfect unison. It was lucky they had given him a sort of agenda for their meeting, a sheet of paper which included their names and employing organisations—he gathered that, on this committee at least, they were all volunteers. Kindly, also, they had provided him with a copy of their constitution. It informed 135
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him that the major object of the committee was to advise Mission Hole Art Centre on matters relevant to the production, marketing and development of local indigenous arts. Advisory was stressed, as was Self-Determination, Two Ways Learning, Working Together. None of those documents helped him guess what the meeting was about. The agenda had just one item on it. Mission Hole Art Centre, special progress report. There was no progress report, though. There was a silence. When the formalities were over, when everybody had introduced each other, they all sat looking expectantly at Jean-Loup. ‘To begin with,’ said Sybil from the Arts Council, rescuing the silence from embarrassment, ‘we’d like to get to know you a little. Have you had anything to do with Aboriginal art before?’ ‘Very little,’ said Jean-Loup. He had come here straight off the light plane from Mission Hole, and could feel the sweat trickling down his back. ‘What about art in general?’ ‘I’ve been involved in auditing and financial advice to a number of different organisations. Some of them have been in the arts. Like a lot of other people, I’ve got my own private interests.’ ‘Have you had much political experience?’ Sybil, a largeboned woman in her fifties wearing an expensive-looking hand-woven dress, gave Jean-Loup a direct, challenging stare. The others looked down, as though debating whether this type of questioning was going too far. ‘What does that have to do with anything?’ ‘I’ll rephrase that question. What I meant was, do you have any knowledge of the political issues involved in the funding of Aboriginal art?’
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‘Politicians want to save money,’ said Jean-Loup dryly. ‘They want to look as though they’re doing something for art and culture. They want to big-note themselves against their opposition, especially those in their own party. And, of course, they’re instinctively hostile to the arts in general, unless they can stay in control of what’s produced. As for Aboriginal art, I’d say mostly they just see tourist dollars.’ ‘That’s a bit of a generalisation, wouldn’t you say?’ smiled mild-mannered Gavin from the Boomerang Art Gallery. ‘He’s new up here, my dear,’ said Lydia, sotto voce. Lydia was listed on the agenda by name but not occupation. She seemed to Jean-Loup like one of those well-bred women who are always near the centre of such circles. ‘You surprise me,’ resumed Sybil, twisting her hands. Her voice had become more familiar, but not more friendly. ‘From your tone, you sound to me like an idealist. I’d not expected an idealist to be in a position like yours.’ ‘What kind of person did you expect to see?’ The faces around expressed incredulity, boredom. JeanLoup had experienced many different kinds of hostility, but never quite like this. It was as though these middle-class people, with their Sydneysider accents, actually pitied him. He sat his cup of jasmine tea back on the table. ‘May I ask what it is you propose to discuss?’ Jean-Loup sat back and watched. Five white faces were turned eagerly towards him. They seemed leached of colour in the heat and brightness. Only Petra’s face at the far end of the table seemed real to him now, and she was silent, taking notes. ‘It’s just that …’ David from the Visual Arts Newsletter took up the thread this time, opening his fine-boned hands in a graceful arc. ‘It’s just that we do get such a lot of people up in this part of the world. Asking questions, and asking to
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get taken out onto communities to ask more questions, and hassling Aboriginal people for information. And then they disappear to write their doctoral theses, or their highly paid consultants’ reports, and you never see them again.’ ‘It’s just that it presses buttons, when you talk like that,’ put in Gavin. ‘You know, whitefellas coming up here, and asking blackfellas about their culture.’ ‘I don’t recall saying anything like that,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘For one thing, they asked me to come up here.’ He looked across at Petra, who had dropped him straight into this. She kept her gaze firmly on her notes. ‘We didn’t ask you,’ said Lydia sweetly. ‘Sally Galilee did.’ There was a silence. A teardrop of sweat had formed at the end of David’s lantern-like nose. ‘Let’s take a raincheck,’ said Sybil softly. ‘You’ve been out there nearly three weeks. Correct me if I’m wrong, but from where I sit, it looks as though things have gone from bad to worse.’ ‘Meisterlinck’s are getting very anxious.’ Lydia’s voice sounded anxious. Her eyes were bright, mouse-like, her bloodless hands gripping each other under the table. ‘They’ve got over a hundred thousand dollars worth of stock sitting in their warehouse and they can’t shift it. Johann Meisterlinck thinks it’ll never recover now. It’s like a house of cards, he said to me. You pull out one card and the whole pile collapses.’ ‘There now, Lydia.’ Sybil put her hand out in Lydia’s direction: her eyes remained reproachfully on Jean-Loup. ‘Things aren’t beyond repair. But it’s true, her work’s still not selling. And it’s not just her work, it’s affecting all Aboriginal art. It’s taken over twenty years and a lot of hard work from a lot of dedicated people to build Aboriginal art to the position it was in six months ago. Now all of that’s in jeopardy. We’ve
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got investments here, we’ve got jobs in the industry, we’ve got people here who have dedicated their whole lives to making sure that Aboriginal art works, do you know? That it’s understood.’ ‘We know what the problem is,’ said Lydia. ‘If you know, then why are you all asking me?’ asked JeanLoup. There was a silence. Lydia squirmed. Sybil opened her mouth, then shut it again. David from the Visual Arts Newsletter discreetly rubbed the droplet of sweat from his nose. ‘Can we start again?’ said Sybil. ‘I think what we’d like from you, since you’re here, Jean-Loup, is some indication of the direction of your inquiries. Who have you been talking to, what sort of issues have you covered in your discussions, what sorts of networks have you set up? We’d all love to see the good name of the Mission Hole Art Centre and its products restored. I’m sure at least we can agree on that.’ ‘I’d love to see that, too. Providing there’s some genuine basis for it. But I’m finding, frankly, that there’s been a certain reluctance on the part of some people to respond to my inquiries.’ This time, without doubt, knowing glances were exchanged. David coughed, brushed at something on his sheet of notepaper, and took up a thread whose tangled end was becoming visible now to Jean-Loup. ‘We heard about that, er, unfortunate incident in which you were involved,’ he said. ‘Most unfortunate. Very upsetting,’ said Sybil. ‘Something like that happened to a friend of mine once,’ said Lydia, horrified. David coughed, censoriously this time. ‘The fact is,’ he said, ‘we were wondering whether the whole business might be
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worrying you still. Perfectly natural that it should affect your work and so forth.’ ‘Affect my work?’ ‘The isolation. Being away from your family and friends, your support groups and so on. Many of us are, of course. But it’s worse out there. There’s a lack of basic services. Domestic violence. Alcohol and so forth. I shouldn’t wonder if you wanted to go home.’ ‘If I wanted to go home?’ Jean-Loup stopped. Anger was brewing inside him. Petra was still silent at the end of the table, absorbing all this, pretending all the while to be just taking notes. ‘Back to Melbourne, that is. We’re always strapped for funds, of course. All Aboriginal organisations are. But we could probably find you the money for your fare.’ ‘I’m really not quite sure,’ began Jean-Loup quietly. ‘In fact, I don’t believe you’ve really got a clue what’s going on out at Mission Hole. You’re all worried about using offensive language. Out there it’s the weapons that are offensive. Of course the murder’s affected my work. It’s affected everybody. You can’t get away from it. It—’ He stopped, suddenly. He realised that they were all looking uncomfortably at him: waiting for him to finish, flinching as though from a blow. They had put him in a basket now, he realised: in there with the Sally Galilees of the world, with the radicals and the soapbox hustlers and the loose cannons. Only Petra Leonelli Gandarrwuy was smiling, and she was doing it discreetly, intensely scrutinising last year’s Mission Hole Progress Association Annual Report. ‘We can’t all get out to the communities,’ said Sybil. ‘Not as often as we’d like.’ ‘I used to go out to Bathurst Island regularly,’ said David,
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looking at his hands. ‘I spent quite a while out there, but these last few years, with the business—’ ‘And I used to go when my husband was Chief Magistrate on circuit,’ said Lydia. ‘Well, I think we should wind this up,’ said Sybil, looking at her watch. ‘It’s very kind of you, Jean-Loup, to have come in here to meet us. We understand perfectly the obstacles. Nevertheless, the committee feels it should express to you its …’ ‘Consternation?’ ‘Too strong.’ ‘Concern. Yes, that’s it. That seems the right way to put it. We understand the difficulties of your situation, but nevertheless we are concerned.’ When the meeting was over Petra took Jean-Loup to the Aquarium coffee shop on Cavenagh Street. The coffee shop was less than spotless and looked out across a shadeless street to a building site. Free East Timor posters peeled from the offwhite walls. Jean-Loup planned to spend the rest of the afternoon and the next couple of days looking around the shops and galleries in Darwin, particularly at the Ridji-Didj and Boomerang, which were well-known for stocking Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s work. He wanted to double-check records, and start filling in gaps in the art centre accounts. Petra was also spending the next few days in Darwin. She had apparently planned some other, unspecified, business of her own—Land Council business, perhaps, or family. She seemed to have almost as many relatives in Darwin as she did out at Mission Hole. Probably it was Council business this time, since she had told Jean-Loup the name of her hotel. Beside Jean-Loup Petra was petite. She was probably five
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or six years younger than he was. She smiled now whenever they spoke or made eye contact, an impossibly broad movement that seemed to split her face open. ‘Sorry about that meeting.’ Somehow Petra managed to speak through her smile. It involved machinations with the front of her lips and with her tongue. ‘They just demanded to speak to you. They’re supposed to be an advisory committee, but I’m afraid they just can’t get used to the idea.’ ‘What was the purpose of the meeting, exactly?’ ‘Generally, they’re supposed to be people with expertise in the distribution and marketing of Aboriginal art. The Mission Hole Land Council set it all up about three years ago. It was a first in the industry. Randhawa’s idea was that it keeps the white people happy. Makes them feel like they’ve got a stake in the whole process.’ Again Petra laughed. Her sense of humour, Jean-Loup realised, was insurgent, political. She had beautifully white teeth. ‘Meanwhile, the Aboriginal people can get on with running the land council.’ ‘Who were they all?’ ‘Sybil’s from the Department of the Arts. They provide funds for deserving Territory arts projects, including those in rural and remote areas. They’re keen to improve their profile in some of these areas. David’s from the Visual Arts Association. He acts as a kind of link between Territory arts groups and federal bodies. He tells them what’s going on and points people in the right direction when they come up here to make documentaries and so forth. Gavin purchases quite a bit of Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s work for his own gallery, and buys other pieces as agent for the larger southern dealers. As you can imagine, he’s quite anxious that any difficulties concerning her work should be properly aired and resolved.’ ‘He wants her in the clear, you mean.’
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‘Not necessarily.’ Petra turned and, without breaking her conversational flow, ordered a rosehip tea and a Greek salad from a hungover-looking waitress. ‘If it does turn out that somebody’s been tampering with her work, the price will probably drop further. If the price drops, Gavin buys up her work in job lots, then makes his profit when things improve. Either way he wins.’ If things improve, thought Jean-Loup. ‘What about Sybil? Obviously, she wants the artist to look as good as possible.’ ‘Again, it’s not so simple.’ Petra gave a quick, practised glance around. The only other patrons were a haggard man in black, with round, rose-coloured sunglasses, and a middleaged woman stirring a cold cup of coffee with a straw. ‘Excuse me, you learn to do this in Darwin after a while. It’s a small town—you never know who’s behind you. Sybil’s job is to promote the interests of all Territory artists, as she sees it. Not just those who are already successful, or those from socalled special interest groups. Also, you’ve got to remember that Mission Hole has a reputation as a bit of a shit-stirring community.’ The word sounded incongruous, dropping from that still-smiling mouth. A part of Jean-Loup found it hard to believe at that moment that Petra had been brought up at Mission Hole. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ ‘The government doesn’t like having its money spent on subversion. It tends to withdraw funding very quickly from any group that expresses controversial views. Everybody remembers how ATSIC and the Multi-Cultural Community Network co-sponsored the anti-Pauline Hanson rally a couple of years ago. They got a letter from the chief minister saying it was a misuse of their funds to support an anti-government
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demonstration. Anti-government! And the government claims it doesn’t support One Nation! In the next Budget they had their $100 000-a-year funding withdrawn. The Mission Hole Land Council’s a breakaway land council, and the government’s opposed everything that it’s done. So, of course, Sybil’s treading a very fine line.’ ‘What’s Lydia’s position?’ ‘Lydia’s the judge’s wife.’ Petra’s expression never wavered. Jean-Loup wondered what emotions, if any, she could be concealing. Certainly she had the trick of giving nothing away. ‘How does that fit in?’ ‘It doesn’t. She’s just there on every committee. She stops you in the street and says she’d like to help out. Of course, nobody dares to refuse her.’ ‘Obviously not.’ ‘And besides, she doesn’t throw her weight around. We’re quite lucky with the arts advisory committee. Not like some of the other committees around the place. There’s a lot of retired judges and public servants bumping around joining committees, and once they’re there, of course, nobody dares say anything officially in case it gets back to the wrong ears.’ ‘Don’t you have freedom of speech in Darwin?’ ‘Oh, yes.’ Petra took a sip of tea. ‘There’s plenty of freedom of speech. Just go to any dinner party or gathering. We just don’t have freedom of official speech.’ ‘Do you get on well with all these people?’ ‘Well, yes. I mean, Mission Hole Land Council’s totally opposed to their whole agenda. You should have seen the last council meeting. They weren’t even going to allow the advisory committee members access to Margaret’s work anymore. Randhawa persuaded them otherwise in the end. There was
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literally blood on the floor. But we’re all friends on the committee. Darwin’s a small place.’ Jean-Loup paused, took a breath, tried to consider his words: a thing he did more or less automatically in Melbourne, but which here, in this heat, and with Petra, he found suddenly difficult to do. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, you seem different here.’ ‘Why, different?’ ‘Out at Mission Hole, I thought you were uncompromising, like a radical. Here, you’re more like a diplomat: land council and community council and advisory committee— you seem to slide so easily between them.’ The smile never left her face. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, you’ve only got one disguise.’ ‘Well, what’s underneath yours?’ ‘What’s underneath yours?’ She said it so quickly and quietly he was scarcely sure he had heard. For an instant he saw the tip of a tongue, red as the rosehip tea, between her teeth. She took a couple more quick sips and Jean-Loup noticed with surprise that the cup was empty. ‘Things do work a little differently up here. But don’t worry. We’ll make sure your feet don’t touch the ground.’ She stood up, suddenly eager to go. They paid and he followed her out into the dazzling sunlight. Everywhere the heat hung invisibly from the vacant blue sky. On building sites, shirtless tradesmen, their bodies glistening, slaved with welding torches and huge steel beams. When Petra left him he suddenly realised two things: he had forgotten to ask her how she was connected to these various committees and to Randhawa himself; and, secondly, that his cheeks ached from trying to match her smile. He closed his eyes.
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Below her smile, hanging before his eyelids, floating breezy as a kite, was an image that gave him an illicit, quite irrational pleasure. It was the image of her leaning towards him in the coffee shop, the tops of her breasts rising just visibly above her ochre and black dress.
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chapter eleven
Lazarus Johnson
Jean-Loup never tried to visualise the outcome of an investigation. While studying first-year accounting he had read about George Berkeley, the philosopher who had asked whether a chair you could see in a room disappeared when you left the room. For Jean-Loup it was the other way around. You could never really see the chair by being in the room. You had to leave the room and use your imagination. Or, rather, you had to be able to imagine its existence independent of your imagination, a paradox that could only be grasped in fleeting instants of illumination, the way religious people might occasionally grasp the existence of God. The next morning Jean-Loup caught a taxi out to Berrimah gaol, a concrete palace on the outskirts of Darwin. On the way he passed several miles of dry spear grass paddocks, white suburban encampments and military or naval 147
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bases fringed with wire. The gaol, too, was an encampment fringed with wire. Jean-Loup asked to see Lazarus Johnson. They wouldn’t let him in. Staring at the high concrete walls circled with silvery coils of barbed wire, however, he had a clearer picture of Johnson than he had ever had at Mission Hole. Jean-Loup could see Lazarus at all stages of his life: as a child, eating fish eyes from a missionary’s stew; as a young man flailing blind and mosquito-ridden through a mangrove swamp, fearing crocodiles; and now, hooked, himself, like one of the fish he used to catch, replaying in prison the dark and flickering film of his life. What Lazarus craved was on the other side of high concrete walls, walls topped with barbed wire that was exactly like the wire that crowned the fence around the Mission Hole Sports and Social Club, guarding the beer. When he got back into town he began to call on some of the art galleries. Outside the shops he stared through flyspecked front windows at collections of spears and shields and old paintings jumbled in dark corners, like the great white hunter’s trophy collection, smelling of decay and old wood. He would go inside and pose as a collector of Gandarrwuys. He’d ask if they had any recent ones, any that had come in cheap, anything brought in by long-grassers off the street. He watched while long-legged European tourists, muscly as Crocodile Dundee, bargained in lazy voices over didgeridoos or miniature spears that would fit in suitcases or that could be retracted or taken apart to fit in the post. Then he would tell the shop owners who he really was and why he was there. A dozen times he watched their expressions change, and each time the shutters came down they enclosed more exactly that black spot where he knew Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy resided, that terra nullius, the empty land,
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that place nobody among the non-Aboriginal people dared to look. The owner of the last gallery he visited was Gavin, from Boomerang Art Gallery and the Mission Hole Arts Advisory Committee. The day before Gavin had worn an understated, slightly down-at-heel business suit. In his own gallery he sat in Thai-style drawstring pants and smoked a clove cigarette. In the first half hour Jean-Loup heard a fair slice of Gavin’s life story. It had many elements familiar to him—drugs, the hippie trail, gun-running in Tunisia in the 1960s. Gavin listened nonchalantly to Jean-Loup’s explanation for inspecting the books, and from then on showed not the slightest apparent interest in anything Jean-Loup had to say. Jean-Loup looked through his records, which were written in a shaky, grandiloquent hand. He learnt nothing new. And then, finally, when Jean-Loup was about to leave, Gavin said abruptly: ‘It’s all nonsense, of course.’ ‘What is?’ ‘Those records. Everybody fakes them. Even the committee knows that.’ ‘What about your expenses?’ These, Jean-Loup assumed, were genuine. He had seen Gavin’s name on the print-out of dealers’ receipts that Petra had obtained. As far as he could remember, they all tallied perfectly with the documentation here. ‘That depends.’ ‘Depends on what?’ ‘On what the supplier wants. Sometimes they’ve got a budget that needs spending by the end of the financial year. Then we bump up the amount. Sometimes the painting’s worth a lot, but the supplier doesn’t want the artist to know how much they’ve been paid. They always say they want the
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receipt small, for their own tax purposes. I’m not going to argue.’ Gavin’s cigarette was burning his fingers. ‘Does Mission Hole Art Centre do this?’ Gavin looked around. There was nobody else in his shop. ‘We all know they’re fakes on the committee,’ he said. ‘What are? The receipts?’ But Gavin was shaking his head. ‘Not the receipts. The paintings.’ ‘Why are you telling me this?’ ‘Because …’ Gavin leant back. ‘Apart, perhaps, from some of the people at Mission Hole, I’m the only person who knows who you are.’ Jean-Loup leant back. Like Gavin, he stared at the last trails of smoke from the dying cigarette. He glanced up and found Gavin looking at him so arrogantly, with such a triumphant gleam, that Jean-Loup wondered whether he had told other people. ‘Who am I, then? An accountant. A financial advisor. You tell me.’ ‘There aren’t many of us old Darwin people left, you see. You could probably walk the streets in Darwin for a week with a name tag on your chest and not be recognised. Most of the old guard left with the cyclone. The only ones that stayed were the builders and the estate agents, the ones in the right industries to make money. But they weren’t part of society. Not the old society, I mean. The ones who would have known a man like Terry Wild.’ ‘Terry Wild? And how do you know that name?’ ‘I didn’t know your father personally. I was just a child at the time. My mother knew of him mostly through her work for the Church. Terry Wild was one of the biggest southern donors to Mission Hole. She used to bank his cheques in the Mission Hole account every month. The donors usually liked
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to remain anonymous, she said, but then when you checked the name on the cheque butt, you could always find out who they were.’ Jean-Loup knew nothing about any donations. And anyway, where could his father have got the money? Jean-Loup’s mother’s family had had money but, as far as Jean-Loup knew, none of it had ever found its way to his father. ‘Why would you have remembered that?’ ‘Because my mother used to take me to committee meetings. They were usually such boring affairs. Then one day there was this terrible argument. One of the society gentlemen started going all purple. He was an ex-patrol officer, I think, a real long-socks type with a walking stick. He said we shouldn’t be accepting donations from such immoral sources. We knew full well they were communist, and un-Christian, and probably ill-gotten as well. You all know what I mean, he said. And if you shake hands with the devil, you shouldn’t be surprised to get spattered with blood.’ ‘What do you think he meant by that?’ ‘Darwin was a small town in those days. My mother just told me Terry Wild was a bad man. She also told me never to play with any of the kids from the Retta Dixon Home, where the part-Aboriginal kids were all brought up. It wasn’t until years later that I worked it out.’ ‘And what makes you connect any of this with me?’ Gavin shrugged his shoulders. His grey hair, tied in a discreet ponytail at the meeting, had been allowed to run rampant. Jean-Loup noticed for the first time the curling, extraordinarily long painted fingernails on Gavin’s left hand. ‘Once you’ve got the right clue, its just a matter of asking around,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t worry too much. You wouldn’t be the first person up here with a skeleton or two in the closet.’
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• • • Jean-Loup walked to the mall and had an Indonesian beef curry and a salad, his first fresh vegetables in over three weeks. After that he went to the State Reference Library and worked on his notes from Randhawa’s books—without interruption, without distraction, with a desperate attempt at concentration that convinced him, finally, that the books were a waste of time. He searched the computer databases and the library shelves for information about Mission Hole in the 1950s. He asked the librarians where else he might go for help. There were government reports and academic theses by the trolleyfull, but no specific information, no lists of inhabitants, nothing that might help him identify his father or Duchess. He walked back to a public phone booth in the mall and rang Gavin. Gavin this time was curt, unhelpful. He refused to tell Jean-Loup anything else about his father. It was all just a lucky guess, Gavin said. Family resemblance. Gavin’s mother was dead now, and Jean-Loup should just let the past be past Jean-Loup sat down at a bench in Raintree Park, at the far end of the mall. His skin prickled with sensual memories of Mission Hole: the flight of the black cockatoos that searched out the burnt country, the dry leaves and smoke on the escarpment, the faint, riverine smell of the swamp. All of it coalesced into one memory that hovered, ever-present, at the back of his thoughts: Petra’s smell, rising from some intimate, undifferentiated patch of skin, perhaps the slight hollow of the triangle between her collarbone and neck. You’ve just got to find the right clue, Gavin had said. The art dealer’s intuition had leapt straight to the truth, on the basis of a surname alone. From there it had simply been a matter of knowing the right people, of asking around. Of
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course the paintings are fakes. Apparently everybody in certain circles knew that, even if their knowledge was just intuition, even if nothing was ever said. Jean-Loup was inching around his ideas, never looking directly at them, letting them take shape in their own time. He was experiencing the idea that the truth must first be imagined before it can become the truth. It was 1974, and Jean-Loup was eight years old. It was the tail end of the last of his father’s religious phases, a phase that for the most part was an apocalyptic mix of Calvinism, Catholicism and hysteria. He had taken to seeing things. Once a week they would walk down the logging road to the phone box in the nearest small town, and there, above the treetops, his father would claim to see a demon towering twenty stories high. ‘We must become men of peace,’ he said, back around the dinner table that night. ‘What makes the difference between civilisation and the savage is the ability to beat your swords into ploughshares. Use these things as implements, not as weapons.’ He held up a chisel, elbow on the table in front of him, turning it so that it glistened in the kerosene lamp, threw up great shadows on the wall behind. ‘There. There is the difference.’ He pointed at the wall. ‘The light and the shadow, white and black, civilisation and the ape. There is a thin facade between one and the other. Often it is prayer alone that keeps us from boiling in blood.’ Jean-Loup’s awareness of race was very dim. He knew only that in some vague way this performance was directed at Duchess. She had only just recently returned—or at least ‘returned’ was the word his father used, although to Jean Loup’s mind it was as though an incubus had suddenly appeared out of the forest, fastening itself onto the family.
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‘Dad,’ he said. ‘What’s a facade?’ ‘It’s French,’ said his father, pointing behind Jean-Loup, towards the chair where his mother had always sat. ‘Why don’t you ask your mother?’ Jean-Loup did not dare to look around. For a long time he watched the black hairs bristling on his father’s arm. Words are weapons, he thought. He is using words as weapons, not as prayer. ‘Go on then,’ said his father. ‘She’s waiting.’ Slowly, hopefully, half-believing in the force of his father’s fierce will, he began to turn around. His mother was not there, of course. There was only Duchess, like a cuckoo that had returned and thrust its foster mother from the nest, staring mulishly at the wall. The next day Jean-Loup went to visit Mark Lavazzo, Lazarus Johnson’s solicitor. Lavazzo was a tubby, prematurely aged man, with the body of a forty-year-old, and a twenty-fiveyear-old’s dancing, babyish eyes. ‘I’m Jean-Loup Wild, and I’ve been doing some work out at Mission Hole.’ ‘So?’ It was a grunt that managed at the same time to sound cheerful, the noise of a man fighting against a naturally optimistic temperament. Jean-Loup thought immediately of what he had once heard about law: it was a profession in which young men pretended solemnly to be old. ‘While I was out there I discovered the body of a man. As a result of what I told them, the police charged a client of yours, Lazarus Johnson, with murder.’ ‘Come through to my office.’ Lavazzo led Jean-Loup through a waiting room crowded with sweating, shabby people. His manner was brusque,
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aristocratic. He smoothed legal papers away from desk, floor, chair. There was a large fishtank in one corner from which a barramundi eyed him lugubriously. From a small cassette player behind Lavazzo’s chair came the muffled notes of Brahms. Lavazzo seated Jean-Loup and waded back past him out his office door. A couple of minutes later he returned with two instant coffees in polystyrene cups. ‘Sorry about the cups,’ he said. ‘We had a break-in again last night.’ ‘People break in to steal cups?’ ‘It’s not the cups they want. It’s the grog out of the fridge. The cups they’re just borrowing. We almost always get them back.’ ‘You get your cups back?’ ‘Of course. Somebody always knows somebody. We put the word around.’ Lavazzo’s gaze was avuncular. His hair was wild, unkempt, like a musician’s, Jean-Loup decided, a Mozart, his appeal books and interrogatories lying about him like a rising sea. ‘So what happened?’ said Lavazzo. ‘I was out for a walk when Valerian Pride was killed. Half an hour before, there were at least ten people on the oval. Then when I found him nobody was there.’ ‘You didn’t see Lazarus Johnson?’ ‘Not near the body. In fact, that very same night Lazarus Johnson and his wife were involved in a fight. It was down by the boat landing, some distance away. I was there and broke it up. It was my opinion, based on what I saw, that Lazarus Johnson couldn’t have been the murderer.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘I don’t think he would have had time to do it. I walked straight back to the oval from the boat landing, and when I got
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there Valerian was already dead. And anyway, the psychology’s all wrong. Lazarus Johnson wasn’t the aggressor. If anything he was frightened and submissive.’ ‘Why would he have been like that? You know about Nancy’s affair?’ ‘I heard about it. But we can’t assume that’s what they were fighting about.’ Lavazzo grunted in reply. ‘Another thing. I saw Valerian Pride at the airport that afternoon. The police told me he’d been seen drinking at lunchtime. I don’t believe them.’ ‘So?’ ‘So if Valerian was sober, it makes it even less likely Lazarus could have killed him. Lazarus was not much more than half his size.’ ‘What about the wheel brace? How do you explain the wheel brace buried in his backyard? Lazarus told the police it was a murder weapon. I’ve seen the photo. It’s certainly vicious enough to be a murder weapon. Why would he bury it, unless he wanted to hide it?’ ‘If he wanted to hide it, why would he show it to police?’ ‘He was under interrogation.’ The lawyer said it as though this was a final, and absolute, response. ‘Did Lazarus Johnson even have a car?’ ‘I believe,’ said the lawyer slowly, ‘that he doesn’t even have a licence, let alone a car.’ ‘Well, then. He must have borrowed or pinched the wheel brace.’ ‘Or else it was a set-up. Somebody else took the wheel brace and buried it in Lazarus’s backyard. But then how would Lazarus have known where it was?’ ‘I’ll tell you something I saw. It was on the morning of the
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funeral. I was sitting on the verandah at the front of the house. People were piling into cars and heading off. Except for one car, a ute in the front garden of one of the houses down the road. There were about six people standing around it. Nothing wrong with it, just a bit of black smoke coming from the exhaust, and a flat tyre. Suddenly it occurred to me. They didn’t have a wheel brace. And then I realised that it was the very same car Valerian had picked me up in the day I arrived, the car that always does the airport run.’ Lavazzo swung abruptly on his chair. For a moment JeanLoup thought he was going to pull down one of the dog-eared law textbooks on the shelf behind him, as though the answer to the question might be buried somewhere in those tomes. Instead he sought inspiration in his fishtank. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘So let’s assume that Lazarus did take the wheel brace from the car. Let’s assume he did it on the day, or rather the night of the murder. And then he lets the tyre down, is that what you’re suggesting?’ ‘Perhaps he let the tyre down because he wanted to disable the car.’ ‘So?’ ‘Perhaps he wants a lift. He can’t drive himself, and cars are a scarce resource at Mission Hole. A car with a flat tyre and no brace isn’t going anywhere in a hurry. In fact, when he wants his lift he can just find the wheel brace, fix the tyre, and he looks like a hero and guarantees his lift.’ ‘Then why would he bury the wheel brace? Why not just keep it somewhere in his house, or under a bush in the garden?’ ‘Because he hasn’t got a house, or a garden. Not one with cupboards and wardrobes, and no private places to hide a thing like that. Why don’t you go and check out where he lives?’
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Lavazzo took a deep breath. He seemed to collect himself, remember suddenly who and where he was. He folded his hands on the table in front of him. His fingers were soft, plump, unlike any Jean-Loup had seen now for weeks. ‘It’s an extraordinary chain of reasoning. Thank you very much for coming in.’ ‘Well? Are you going to check it out?’ ‘Frankly, it’s impossible to check out. It’s pure speculation. The only facts are that Lazarus took the wheel brace and buried it. Together with the motive, the weapon, the confession and the community’s silence, it’s going to make our jury very likely draw an inference of guilt. Besides, our funding won’t stretch to a field trip for a thing like that.’ ‘You know what I think? The community’s silent because they’re scared.’ ‘Of the police? We all know that. But what can we do? We can only work with the material we’ve got. I can’t see how I can convince the jury of your theory. Valerian used to go out at full moon and throw spears. He’d thrown one into the side of the church, another one into the art centre. It’s all right when you bash and spear black people, but when you start doing it to white people, and with white juries, the skies fall in.’ ‘We’re talking about Lazarus Johnson, not Valerian.’ ‘Well. I’ll tell you how the jury’s going to think. Mission Hole’s a violent place. Everybody knows that. It’s got violent people on it, and the prosecution’s going to paint Valerian as one of them, which on the evidence I’ve seen he was. They’re going to reason that the community regarded Valerian Pride as somebody they were well rid of. Lazarus Johnson’s a bit of an outcast as well, not well-liked, and of course he’s got an obvious grudge against Valerian.’ ‘So what you’re telling me,’ said Jean-Loup, ‘is that there’ll
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be a negotiated outcome. This trial’s going to have nothing to do with the truth.’ Lavazzo spread his palms. Jean-Loup had heard of people working in legal aid services too long. They can become victims themselves: hemmed in by the constant pressures, by the prejudices, by the impossibility of so many things. It’s a failure of imagination, Jean-Loup thought. Lazarus Johnson was a victim of a failure of imagination. Perhaps Valerian was too. He stood up to leave. ‘I’d like to go to see Lazarus Johnson,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘What for?’ ‘He knows me. I was there with him that night. He might have something to say.’ Mark Lavazzo stood up too, staring past Jean-Loup’s shoulder, smiling in a kind of vacant, lopsided way. ‘I’m going out there later this afternoon. I could probably get you in.’ Jean-Loup walked out into the sunshine. Outside the air-conditioned office, with its darkened windows and metal slats, a group of Aboriginal people were sitting in the dust, passing around smokes and casks of wine, blown up and fishbelly white. As he walked with Lavazzo towards the three-metre-high front gate, Jean-Loup could feel a sentry’s gaze on him from inside a darkened-glass observation tower. At the end of portalled concrete corridors and a succession of labyrinthine and completely disorienting turns, they came upon Lazarus Johnson. He was seated by himself at a low concrete bench, wearing a neatly pressed blue prisoner’s uniform and a pair of handcuffs that forced his clasped hands into a penitential pose. He seemed wilted now, even smaller than before.
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Lavazzo introduced Jean-Loup and explained briefly why he was here. Lazarus gave no sign of having heard, let alone understood, except that, when the lawyer got to the part about Jean-Loup having been there on the night of the murder, Lazarus threw Jean-Loup a quick, indifferent glance. ‘He wants to talk to you about the murder weapon,’ concluded the lawyer. ‘Is that all right with you?’ ‘Yeah.’ Lavazzo looked expectant. Jean-Loup cleared his throat. He was suddenly aware of the speaker—or was it a listening device?—mounted high in one corner of the puke-green painted concrete walls. ‘The police said you showed them a wheel brace, buried in your backyard.’ There was no reply. ‘They’re saying that’s the murder weapon. Did you know that? They’re saying you used that wheel brace to kill that dead man, and then you buried it.’ Again, no reply. ‘Well, I’ve been out at the community. There might be some other explanation. Maybe you buried that wheel brace because you wanted to be able to use it in the future. Maybe you buried it so that you knew you could always get a lift.’ Still there was no sign from Lazarus. ‘Would that be right?’ ‘Yeah.’ The voice was barely audible. ‘That’s right? You buried it?’ ‘Yeah.’ Jean-Loup looked across at the lawyer, who was sitting, arms folded, staring past Lazarus at the tiny barred window in the door behind them. ‘What do you think?’ murmured Jean-Loup.
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For answer Lavazzo leant forward, elbows on the table, exposing the sweat patches on his shirt. ‘It’s not the murder weapon, then?’ he said. ‘Yeah.’ ‘It is the murder weapon?’ There was no reply. Lavazzo took a deep breath. ‘You understand how important this is, don’t you? I mean, we have to explain why you buried the brace in your backyard. Why did you tell the police it was the murder weapon, if it wasn’t?’ ‘Yeah,’ said Lazarus Johnson, staring at his hands. ‘You see what I mean?’ said Lavazzo. ‘How’s he going to go in cross-examination, in front of a jury? We’re better off not having him give evidence at all.’ Lazarus is aptly named, thought Jean-Loup. He’s like a dead man in here, still walking the earth.
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chapter twelve
Aboriginal Diana
He knew, even as he picked up the phone, that he shouldn’t be doing this. Taking this step was like inching along a tree branch way above ground: every muscle rebelled against it, his senses threatened to lock up and go into free fall. ‘Hello Petra. It’s Jean-Loup here.’ ‘Jean-Loup. Hi.’ ‘Are you free for dinner tonight? There’s a Thai restaurant down the road a bit from my hotel that looks okay.’ ‘Yes. Sure.’ Her voice was formal, but in his stomach an explosion occurred. Making the arrangements, Jean-Loup had the feeling that she was still half in work mode, that she was sheltering behind the banalities. He had as little idea as ever of what she really felt. He waited for fifteen minutes in the foyer of her hotel, a runnel of sweat like a tie tucked under his shirt, while on the 162
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other side of the street drunken American sailors prowled after black-skirted, nightclub-hopping teenagers dropping cigarette ash like breadcrumbs in the sailors’ path. ‘Hello Petra. I hope you like Thai food.’ ‘That’s fine. I like all Asian food.’ ‘You look good.’ In fact, she looked stunning. Down the hot street, step for step, they turned at the same time and caught the same glimpses of other worlds. A tipsy, besuited businessman barrelled past, an acne-scarred Christian missionary handed out leaflets, they heard the raw, salty clatter of a Chinese restaurant kitchen. They were on Mitchell Street, the backpacker strip. Executive cars cruised by, their darkened windows up, headlights on high beam. Bouncers and touts murmured propositions from the doorways of pubs. Every now and then, from under newly constructed, pastel-shaded residential flats, the clash of skateboards and voices floated up. Bored kids were down there, slicing out wheelies in the carparks, spurning the tiny, self-satisfied patches of lawn. From overgrown vacant blocks, dark as gaping mouths and festooned with ‘Keep Out’ signs and fencing wire, glowed the fitful orange glare of cigarettes. ‘Who’s in there?’ Jean-Loup asked. ‘Homeless people. Long-grassers, they call them up here. Most of them Aboriginal, from the communities.’ ‘Are there many from Mission Hole?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, in that voice he was beginning to know, that did not invite any reply. For a minute or two they walked on awkwardly, in silence. Abruptly Petra laughed. ‘Check out these new housing developments. Out at Bayview Haven the residents can’t go out at night. Because of the mosquitoes. It’s built on reclaimed
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mangrove swamp, you see. They call it Baygon Haven. The mosquitoes have just stayed around.’ The restaurant, though, was past all that. Out where the suburbs began the cars grew quieter and less frequent, the drunks and revellers wheeled off and crashed in patches of bush. Mango and frangipani trees, heavy scented, leant confidentially over the road. Jean-Loup and Petra grew silent. Jean-Loup wondered whether Petra, like him, was thinking of Mission Hole, of how such peace as there was out there was always likely to be broken by violence—the other side of the coin to all these somnolent suburban streets. ‘It’s too quiet out here,’ he said. ‘Yeah. Reminds me of the mission.’ The restaurant decor was ersatz Thai-cosmopolitan. There were silkscreen Chinese brush paintings, an oak beer barrel below a picture of hounds and the hunt, the moon and stars painted in psychedelic deep blue on the ceiling. A young woman with a nose-ring intoned Janis Joplin with catatonic eyes. ‘What were the missionaries like?’ ‘Strict. I think they hated everybody—us, themselves, and their God. They used to make us stand outside for hours in the sun. Morning assembly, it was supposed to be. They’d do it to punish us for people who’d escaped into the bush. We used to sit in church with our hands over our eyes. They thought we were scared, or ashamed before God, but it wasn’t that. It was so we couldn’t see our relations who were in there as well, the people we were forbidden to look at by Aboriginal law!’ Petra laughed. It was an odd, raucous movement. She threw her head back like a society woman, baring her throat. ‘Did you get to see your parents much?’
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‘Yeah. Of course. We weren’t like the kids with white fathers, taken away.’ They ordered their meals. A tall, indifferent waitress penpecked at a pad. They had tacitly agreed, it seemed, not to talk about the difficult things. Or perhaps they didn’t need to— perhaps skating over them, referring to them obliquely, was enough. ‘How long did you live on the mission?’ ‘Until I was twelve. Then I went down to boarding school in Canberra.’ ‘How did you come to go to a boarding school?’ ‘I was a bright kid. Plus, I was growing up just at the right time. Mining royalties were starting to come in. I was one of the lucky kids who got sent down. If I’d been born two or three years earlier or later it wouldn’t have happened.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘The price of copper dropped. The mining company started looking elsewhere. In the end they just packed up and moved out. The land round there’s rubbish country now, of course. They didn’t even try to clean up their sites.’ ‘Whose country was that?’ ‘Out past Goyder River way.’ He didn’t need to say it: Valerian’s country. Valerian, too, had been brought up by the missionaries. It was the same mission school where Petra had gone. If you believed what Brother O’Gorman wrote, the place was a little Eden. In one of the centre pages of the brother’s book was a photocopied black and white photo of a little Aboriginal child: ‘… one of the healthy, happy, contented little mission girls,’ the caption had said. ‘What was boarding school like?’ ‘I ended up hanging around with some rich kids. I was the
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first Aboriginal girl they’d seen. I used to get invited to their country houses, their holiday houses and such-like on the coast.’ ‘Did you enjoy that?’ Petra shrugged, distracted by the food. The entrees had arrived. She launched into an enthusiastic discourse on Vietnamese, Burmese, Cantonese cooking. She seemed to know every dish, and every cheap Asian restaurant in western Sydney, where, it turned out, she had lived for four years, studying little bits of too many tertiary courses for Jean-Loup to remember, and learning yoga and meditation and gamelan puppetry at nights. Watching her talk was like watching the pirouettes of some nonchalant, preternaturally gifted dancer, and Jean-Loup knew that, in launching himself after her, he had gone a long way out on thin ice. ‘That’s a beautiful necklace,’ he said. It was gold, and with a circular Oriental design. He had found his eye drawn to it several times now, gleaming dully just above the V of her lowcut, crimson dress. She took it off and handed it to him. Their fingers brushed. ‘It’s the Pentacle,’ she said. ‘From the I Ching. The sign’s used in the tarot as well. I studied the I Ching for a while with a Buddhist monk in Newtown.’ ‘Do you use it for prediction?’ ‘It doesn’t predict,’ she said. ‘That’s a common Western fallacy. All it can do is help you to understand where you are at the moment, and where you’re heading. You’re less likely to make false judgments about people and situations. I find that Buddhist and Oriental philosophy’s closer to Aboriginal spirituality than anything I ever learnt on the mission.’ ‘In what way?’ ‘They’re not linear. They’re circular. They’re not so destruc-
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tive. They’ve got a better sense of the connections between things. You can’t explain it. It’s not like maths or accountancy or something. If you get to understand it, you’ll find out.’ ‘But you don’t like the hippies,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘They’re into all that stuff.’ ‘That’s because they don’t know. They’ve got no feel for it, they’re just playing with it, playing mix and match. Most of you whitefellas are like that.’ ‘My father went through an I Ching phase,’ said JeanLoup. ‘Is that right? Is he a hippie, then?’ ‘You could say that. Among other things.’ ‘So you’re a second generation hippie’s child. Your rebellion is to buy a house in the suburbs, mortgaged to the hilt.’ ‘He joined the Communist Party in Adelaide during the Depression. He was just a teenager then. When the coppers came after him he tried to jump the train to Alice Springs, then walk to Darwin. He nearly died of thirst out past Tennant Creek. A travelling salesman picked him up and dropped him at the unemployed workers’ camp in Darwin, where he started to organise demonstrations again. He was one of those that flew the red flag over the Government Resident’s building when the communists stormed it in 1930. He got six months in gaol. When the war came he fought in Balikpapan and New Guinea, then afterwards settled down in Bali, fighting the Dutch and spying for the guerrillas in the mountains. He came back to Australia in 1949. Then, by the mid sixties, he became one of the original hippies in Byron Bay. He was middle-aged by this time, and ready to settle down there with his Oriental clothes and his crystals and his incense, his I Ching and his revolutionary past.’
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‘He’s a wanderer, then. A man with a colourful past.’ ‘Yes. Although it was all over bar the shouting by the time I was growing up.’ ‘So what induced you to come up here?’ They had finished their meals now. The Janis Joplin voice had stopped. He wondered how much of his business image was left for Petra now. Perhaps, after all, he was just a bagman like his father had once been, a tramp. He couldn’t tell her where his father had been during the 1950s. If and when she found out she’d resent him, quite likely, believe he’d been deceitfully silent. But he just couldn’t do it right now. Was that the truth? Wasn’t he being cowardly, not laying his cards out from the start? But then, he had held them to his chest for so long, he was only just beginning to remember what they were. Sitting here with Petra, he had the feeling of perceiving, or at least imagining, the truth. His father, the autocrat, he might have tried to say. His father, the guru with second sight. His father, the court jester with a Beelzebub’s tail. ‘I’ll tell you some other time,’ he said. ‘I promise.’ Petra was watching him closely, her mouth in a half-smile that made her suddenly seem older than she was. She had taken out a cigarette from her handbag and was toying with it, but she did not light it, and a minute later put it back. ‘I don’t smoke anymore,’ she said. ‘I gave it up. But I keep the packet there in my bag to remind me. Like Moses Gandarrwuy, who gave up drinking ten years ago. You’ll notice at the club he always keeps an unopened green can in front of him. He used to be an alcoholic.’ ‘What about Parker Gandarrwuy? Was he an alcoholic too?’ ‘Parker? No. He’s never liked drinking.’ Petra’s tone was ironic. ‘It would get too much in the way of being the boss-man.’
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‘Don’t you like him, then?’ ‘Just listen.’ Petra dropped her voice. ‘Parker Gandarrwuy runs the community council, and he also runs the club. Mission Hole used to be a dry community until two years ago. Parker Gandarrwuy had the liquor licensing laws changed. Now he can sell as much beer as he likes. The club’s open for three hours every night. It’s open slather. You’ve been there.’ ‘I’ve been there once. Yes,’ admitted Jean-Loup. ‘People drink. They fight. All the anger comes out. Sometimes they get arrested, then when they wake up in a police cell, they hit rock bottom. All they want to do is die.’ ‘How can you stop people doing that?’ ‘You can be banned by your family, or by the council. You can be banned for life, or banned for a month, your name written on the board behind the bar. Or you could be allowed to drink four beers or a dozen beers or to take away beer, or even to fly in cartons to the community. That means you’re supposed to be a responsible drinker. Parker Gandarrwuy controls it all.’ ‘You make him sound like a spider, sucking people dry.’ ‘No. That’s not my point. People drink because they want to drink. They want to drink because the rest of their lives are so desolate. Parker Gandarrwuy isn’t responsible for that.’ ‘All right. But what is your point?’ ‘My point is that Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s son died two years ago.’ Petra’s voice was flat, toneless, the voice of somebody used to hiding what she felt. Jean-Loup wondered what her relationship was, exactly, with Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy. She had said she was an auntie, Aboriginal way, but beyond that she had avoided the question, each time he raised it, as though the subject gave her pain.
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‘The same time as when the club opened,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘He died in Darwin, of alcohol poisoning. Away from his family, away from his land. He’d gone to Darwin because Parker Gandarrwuy banned him from the club. Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy blamed Parker. It led to a split. Fighting. That’s why Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy moved away.’ ‘Where were you in all this?’ ‘I was away, mostly. Maybe I’ll tell you some other time. I promise.’ Petra’s eyes met his, and to Jean-Loup’s astonishment he saw laughter in them: not a young person’s laughter, but something that has hit rock bottom, or somewhere near it, and from there drawn the strength to dance. ‘Shall we go?’ he said. Along the town side of the Esplanade were the expensive hotels: the ochre-painted Beaufort, with its cafes and new nightclub, the milky curves of the Atrium, like the flukes of a beached whale. Friday night partygoers, with a silent and mindless intent, surged up and down its steps. The bush on the other side was tangled, sap-smelling. They stood on the edge of the cliff and watched the velvety, softly crawling sea. Suddenly Jean-Loup felt Petra’s hand searching for his own. She was warm, an impossible presence. Far out to sea blinked the red lights of an oil rig. His heart was beating hard; he felt as though his own hand was a thousand miles away. ‘Shall we go down to the beach?’ asked Jean-Loup. Petra turned to him. Her mouth was dark, red-rimmed, like the rosehip tea, he thought, that she had ordered in the cafe the day before. In the darkness he bent and kissed her, felt the impossible presence of her slim, coiled body against him, felt every part of his being rush in from that thousand-mile distance and concentrate at this spot. Her tongue was small,
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unexpectedly resistant. It was as though there, at that moment, she concentrated all her capacity for combat. Her breasts were pressed against him, her throat, arched back, reminded him for an instant of the first gleam of a fish as it rises among the weed. ‘Come on,’ she said. She took his hand and led him down a steep, narrow path. At the bottom they reached a platform of flat rock. With the sea on three sides of him, and the new moon above, she pushed him gently onto his back. In a couple of lithe movements her dress fell from her, and her white bra, gleaming for an instant against her skin. Her breasts were small, delicate as china cups. Above them, hypnotically, swung her gold necklace with its I Ching pentagram. He gasped, called out to her. She rose naked above him, an Aboriginal Diana, arched against the stars. She’s a constellation, he thought. An Aboriginal constellation. That’s how they do it. Their constellations are formed by the absences, the gaps between the stars, the terra nullius which Westerners cannot see. Next morning he returned to his hotel. An urgent message was waiting for him from Sally Galilee. Her secretary put him through to her straight away. Her voice was clipped, emotionless, flat and final as desert dust. ‘You can come back to Melbourne now,’ she said to him. ‘Come back? What for?’ ‘The investigation’s finished. The Mission Hole Art Centre was destroyed last night. Burnt down in a fire. All Randhawa’s records are gone.’
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chapter thirteen
The Beauty of Prime Numbers
Years into adulthood it had occurred to Jean-Loup that his father could, just as easily, have searched for patterns in the last two digits in columns of telephone numbers, or the random typewriter keys pressed by monkeys. In Jean-Loup’s memory it was always dark. His father was stooped over a guttering candle. Great sheets of graph paper were tamped down at the edges and corners with cups, saucers, a hand-bound book of Ian Fairweather prints. His father’s fingers, bruised and red-raw from battling with the spade and crowbar in the garden, or with the loggers in their camps on the mountain, delicately enfolded the clear blue ballpoint, coaxing numbers from it in a crimped, tiny hand. Jean-Loup sat at one corner of the rough-cut table, moving his lips silently to his long division. In his mind the simple sums and his father’s great, lonely quest became confused, so that he, too, would stiffen and mutter silently in mysterious 172
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exaltation, experience the joy of coasting towards the sun on his waxen philosopher’s wings. His father had arranged the numbers in practically all possible ways. To begin with he placed them in square or rectangular boxes. For hours he coloured each column and row in shades of blue and red, then sought along the diagonals and around the spots of livid purple that were the mostfactored numbers with the diagnostic tenderness of a doctor probing a woman’s breast for lumps. Then he arranged them in a spiral, which he twirled like a kaleidoscope, and in a threedimensional wooden block construction which took him over a day to perfect. Like a fortune teller or a card sharp, he shuffled them and laid them out on the table, or cut them up and let them fall like confetti beneath the candle’s triumphal glow. He searched, with all the ways known to science or the imagination, with the absolute self-belief of an alchemist, the imperviousness of a man whose projects have never been known to fail. For Jean-Loup the crisis came when, after maths class, he asked Mr Spelling about prime numbers. He was told, with surprising abruptness, that this was one of pure maths’ classic dead-end streets. There were no secrets there, Mr Spelling said. There were no formulae for deriving prime numbers. Computers could generate prime numbers hundreds of digits long: but they did so without flair, without the astonishing leaps of human mathematical genius, just the number-crunching facility of the accountants who would one day rule the world. He went home and told his father, who, to his surprise, seemed not at all taken aback. ‘Mr Spelling’s right,’ said his father. ‘It’s impossible.’ ‘If it’s impossible, then why are you trying to do it?’ ‘Because the mathematicians and the scientists and the
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computers tell me it’s impossible. Because it’s got no use or interest to anybody in the world except me. Because, in my researches, I’ve discovered a few things—little things, useless things, but things nobody else knows. And besides,’ his father’s eyes softened a little, he let drop a few degrees his jutting, erectile beard, ‘have you ever realised what a beautiful thing is a prime?’ Jean-Loup, as a teenage philosopher, had conjectured that each person had some dominant goal or passion that sustained them throughout their lives. His father’s determining goal, he decided, was Beauty. When Terry Wild walked almost across Australia this had been his aim. Likewise, when in the hills near Kintamani, he had learnt woodcarving from a Balinese master; and likewise when, after storming the Government Resident’s building in Darwin, he had gone out into Arnhem Land, trying to paint word pictures of paradise in a communist world. As a younger man, his father’s thirst for beauty had been his saving grace. Other people jumped hoops and bent over backwards to serve him. He existed, all the time Jean-Loup had known him, in a kind of charmed circle, a zone exempt from the normal rules of social intercourse in whichever time and place he happened to be. He was an aristocrat, a living fossil, a wise fool. He had never got a driver’s licence and had rarely made a telephone call or cooked a meal for himself. In his disregard of modernity he was like a baby. You had to accept the illusion, in coming closer to him, that life could be lived on these terms. He attracted sycophants and seekers after meaning, people eager to prostrate themselves and be anointed with the vital juices of his philosophy. He was willing, for their sakes, to play the guru for a while. Yet, in a moment, the whole process would sicken
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him, and he would send them forth, trembling and impecunious, with a regal flicker of his hand. When Jean-Loup was seven years old he had learnt to drive. His father had inherited a jalopy, an old hand-painted Mini Minor, from some teepee dwellers who had camped a while down the back of the block. Jean-Loup would coast it down the hillside and into a roadside cutting five kilometres from town. He would make the public telephone calls, too. His father, so dictatorial at home, became suddenly fearful and whispering in any official dealings, standing beside the open door of the phone booth, humbly shuffling his hoary, blackened feet. All that, of course, was before Duchess returned. For twenty years his father had called himself a communist, and yet he had never agreed to accept a single official communist line. The notion of received doctrine, he said, is a betrayal. Truth is approached through the dialectical relationship of opposites; by contradiction and paradox; by attempting the impossible, and refusing to accept what cannot be denied. And so, during the Cold War, Terry Wild became a Catholic. This step required, of course, a certain amount of subterfuge about his past. He had had identity papers in three different names in Bali after the Second World War. In the event, however, he found it unnecessary to use these, since nobody with whom he had official contact had been in Darwin when he helped storm the Government Resident’s building in 1930. Nevertheless, Terry Wild must have lived in constant fear of discovery. The Catholic Church and the communists at this time were at opposite ends of the spectrum, about as far apart politically as it was possible to be. There was little risk of life or limb, as there might have been elsewhere. But the risk, Jean-Loup thought, for a man like
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Terry Wild would have been almost as severe: being exposed among his contemporaries as a fraud. ‘What you’re really saying,’ said Jean-Loup, years after this, ‘is that you think you can devise your own moral standards. You can deceive other people and disobey society’s laws, as long as you don’t get caught.’ ‘Society’s laws are hypocritical,’ said his father. ‘The people that obey them are, therefore, necessarily also hypocrites.’ Jean-Loup was fifteen. Ten days later he would be leaving his father’s place and hitching down to Melbourne. Duchess had itchy feet now, too. Her presence, silent and dropsical, no longer hung miserably at the edges of doorways and fields of vision, exciting the old man’s anger and contempt. Years later, Jean-Loup thought how oddly the usual teenage relationship with authority was reversed. Here, he parroted the phrases of authority and became censorious of his father, almost paternal, while over his father’s lips played a tiny, arrogantly rebellious smile. At the time, though, like most people of around his age, he thought only how desperately he wanted to get out. ‘But you obey them, too. Or you make people think you’re going to obey them, and then don’t, when it suits you. And that makes you doubly a hypocrite.’ ‘That just shows how difficult it is for an idealist to live in this world.’ ‘Well, what are these great ideals of yours?’ Jean-Loup looked around at the food scraps on the dirt floor, the beer cans in a pile outside the open back door. ‘I don’t see much evidence of them anymore. All you do these days is smoke dope, and talk about your latest scheme. You reckon now you’re going to run for the senate, and you haven’t even gone to get your nomination form.’
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‘Well, what of it? All you see is the externals. It’s what’s inside the head that counts.’ Jean-Loup was unjust, of course. He realised that now. Part of the problem was that his father was already fifty-two years old in 1966, when Jean-Loup was born. Jean-Loup had missed the glorious years, the years of flame and fire, the years when his father had stood fearlessly on soapboxes and denounced things, revving the knife-cold air with his grizzled, worker’s arm. He had missed, too, the secret years, when seeds were planted whose cankerous fruit was ripening only now. Certain things he had never been able to ask his father: and one of them was how, from such a love of beauty, so much ugliness had been created, and whether he had any hope of being redeemed. Three months had passed since Jean-Loup had left Darwin. In Melbourne it was the end of a chilly winter. Down the Swanston Street hill tram wires uncoiled, even as teeth, shimmering in the grey drizzle. The peak-hour traffic had slowed, then stopped. Outside their shining citadels greysuited businessmen paused to pull on their overcoats, then trooped en masse towards Parliament Station or Flinders Street, flapping their gloves or their folded-up newspapers at each other like courtly penguins. On one corner a purplethroated, wheelchair-bound and totally soaked newspaper seller was opening, then closing, his capacious mouth. He looked to be yelling, but above the traffic noise nothing could be heard. Out on the suburban railway stations, in the kitchens and TV rooms and on the footy paddocks of this cold city, JeanLoup knew how it would be. Boys in white shorts with black muddy knees piling into family cars. Great concrete bridges
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whose undersides shook and rumbled. Miles upon miles of shopping centres and grey streets, whose parks and cars and houses varied in size and ostentation, regularly as the rise and fall of the hills, in proportion to their distance from the central business district, following their own complicated and minutely calculated but utterly predictable suburban rules— until, at their outer limits, they gave way to the first cold, wet paddocks, populated with disconsolate cows. He had been, that day, to his office on Victoria Parade. At dawn he had arrived in the city, having taken the first tram in along St Kilda Road. It was an eerie, dream-like feeling, like that of having arrived just after some disaster. There was just he and the glistening grey buildings, and, grinding its way inexorably along the slippery gutters a raincoat-yellow streetsweeping machine. The office, of course, was empty. He had switched on the light, fighting back an odd feeling of surprise that it still worked. He began to work through his e-mail and answering machine. Of course, he had let people know before he left for Mission Hole that he’d be away for months. But in the end he had just walked away, not bothering to even have his mail forwarded or to check his phone messages or e-mails. He expected there’d be countless messages, and it was the thought of these, partly, that had kept him away from here for so long. He had been expecting to be gone for six months, and he had no desire, now, to come back. There was almost nothing there. Certainly, there was the usual dross—the circulars from stockbroking and accounting firms, the book catalogues and cooked-up annual reports from companies he’d once done work for, the standard-form invitations to tender for jobs he wasn’t qualified to do. But that was all. No phone messages from contacts in the industry, no personal letters thanking him for work successfully completed
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or inviting him to tender for forthcoming work with the implicit message that the job was already his. He had had more personal messages than this on a Monday morning after a quiet weekend. During busy times, he could collect in an hour or two more unanswered e-mails and phone calls than this. He stood up from the computer and walked to the window. Along the rain-swept footpaths, the first hunched commuters were hurrying along. On a concrete ledge, in the narrow space between his own red-brick building and the next, was a mound of grey and white streaked pigeon shit. Somehow he had never before noticed these cold, oblivious birds. He felt a bond with them now, as though he, too, had dropped unnoticed through some lacuna in the city’s vision, as though his own office was now suddenly a blind spot, a no-go area, one of those places you walked past for ten years and never saw. Only six months ago, he had been to a cocktail party just across the road. A Victorian government minister had been eager to talk to him, as had a principal of one of the largest accounting firms, who had been trying to get Jean-Loup to take on some subcontracting work for several months now. He had floated about there, a bright-plumaged bird among the other cocky and bright-plumaged birds, telling himself, as he always had done, that he was different from the rest in his ability to remain aloof, clear-headed, never taking completely seriously any of the latest winds of change. But in reality, wasn’t that just one more pretentious notion to add to the rest? Wasn’t it likely that everybody else there had some similar secret indulgence with which to stroke their tired egos into readiness for another day? He felt himself suddenly privy to the sad insights of the disillusioned, as though a chink in him had been opened up and now a cold
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wind was blowing through him for the indifferent world to see. The truth was that he didn’t want this kind of work anymore. Somehow this piece of knowledge had been transmitted to his associates and so-called friends before he even knew it himself—as though taking on a consultancy at an Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory was code for dropping out. Perhaps, all along, he had had that fatal potential in him, like a sign written on his forehead, invisible to himself in shop windows and mirrors, but plain to the rest of the world. At ten o’clock that morning, and for the first time in months, it was Linda who rang him. ‘Hello, Jean-Loup.’ ‘How did you know I was here?’ ‘Silly question. I know everything.’ Jean-Loup took a deep breath. It was an old trick of hers, and probably coincidental that she tried it now. Nonetheless he had to resist the temptation to lay bare his soul. ‘Isn’t it a little early for you?’ ‘I haven’t been to sleep. Now listen. Your life’s in danger. They’ve covered their tracks, but they saw you take the evidence. Now they’re coming for you. Mine’s the only place you’ve got left to hide.’ ‘You’re hallucinating!’ Her voice was hoarse. She was coming down from another of her chemical experiences. Jean-Loup had been present at the dregs of many such nights, with their smell of disinfectant and their scrabbling for toilet bowls on cold, white-tiled floors. ‘Look. I want you to come over here.’ ‘How did you know I was going to be here?’ ‘I knew you’d be back in Melbourne, didn’t I? Once I
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heard the Mission Hole Art Centre had burnt down. The great Sherlock’s been sent back to Melbourne. Off the pace and in disgrace.’ ‘Well, it doesn’t matter now. I’m not even allowed to go back there. My permit’s been revoked.’ ‘Well, you can come over here then, can’t you? Don’t tell me you’re busy.’ ‘There’s something else.’ ‘What’s that?’ He couldn’t say it. For fifteen seconds he was paralysed, the phone absolutely silent in his hand. ‘Linda. Are you there?’ ‘There’s someone else,’ said Linda. ‘I didn’t say that.’ ‘You don’t have to.’ This time, you could hardly say the phone had gone dead. It had collapsed, shattered, trembled into pieces in a hack of harsh tears. Up until that point he hadn’t realised it. There was, indeed, someone else. Jean-Loup left his office and walked up Brunswick Street in the wind and rain. His hair was swept across his downcast face. Catching his reflection in one of the Gothic-art shop windows, he was reminded of that charcoal drawing given to him by his father, and which he now had by his armchair at home. Was he doomed to repeat his father’s mistakes? When Jean-Loup’s mother left, though, there had been no tears: just a book about Rosa Luxembourg with Jean-Loup’s father’s photograph, pinned in between pages 400 and 401. He found himself walking once again towards Melbourne University library. He thought again of that conversation he had had with Valerian, the only one he had ever had the
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chance to have. The country’s full of sickness now, Valerian had said. Everything’s being destroyed. Everything in this city had been constructed in the same headlong rush towards progress, with the same lunatic attention to minutiae. And yet, in the end, the effect always seemed to be the same—a terra nullius, as Valerian had said, of the soul. It was mid-week and classes were on. Knots of students, all appearing to wear Calvin Klein jeans and cashmere jumpers, straggled across the concrete quadrangles at right angles to Jean-Loup, their reproachful laughter floating past him. The buildings were a mish-mash of different architectural styles and periods. Bland 1950s brick-veneer tutorial rooms were jammed artfully between an Edwardian chapel and the old Victorian law building, which was constructed out of the same convict-era bluestone as Pentridge gaol a few kilometres away. In the old days, when Jean-Loup was studying at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology down the road, he used to get lost coming here. It all added to the sense of alienation he felt again as he walked, that remembered feeling of mixed envy, self-consciousness and pride. The library was busy. Past the baggage room and enquiry desk stood three huge, scratched pine card catalogues on worn, yellow carpet. They were untouched now, computer consoles blinking and whirring in their place along the walls behind. Feeling his way along endless rows of shelves, climbing echoing concrete staircases and passing into silent, scarcely used levels devoted mostly to vanished periodicals, Jean-Loup felt again the suppressed eroticism of the library. It was something that live, young human beings took on in the presence of all this knowledge, a physical charge that was like that created at funerals or in court. At the head of the stairwell he paused and looked through a small window
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at the puce-brown bricks of a science building, which framed a small rectangle of grey sky above. A pigeon skipped along a gutter, its throat throbbing with each movement, fragile as a frog. He finally found the book he wanted on a third-floor shelf. He read: As a searchlight is drawn to explore deepest darkness the attention of anthropologists has always been drawn towards the unique Australian Aboriginal race. Their very appearance suggests a divergence from known types of man. Some have argued that their black skin and long skulls would classify them with the Negroes. However, these ‘blackfellows’ lacked woolly hair, were heavily bearded, and had unusually strong brow-ridges. This seemed to stamp them with a morphologically inferior character. Their lack of bow and arrow, pottery, weaving, and farming, in particular, seemed to suggest the category of ‘lower hunters’. They have been considered by some, therefore, as a singularly low surviving example of Stone Age humanity, perhaps best identified with the Mousterian culture stage and with the Neanderthal race of that period. He was reading from the introduction to the first volume of a report from 1937. It was entitled ‘The Ford Foundation American–Australian Expedition to the Nomadic Coastal Aborigines of the Northern Territory’. The writer was a Professor Percy M Higgins, the expedition leader and editor of the report’s four volumes. Clearly the report had once been much used by students. Its dark-green linen-bound cover was worn, its spine repaired with yellowing sticky tape. From the date stamps at the back, it seemed to have been unborrowed since about 1979.
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For the first three months of their expedition, the Ford Foundation had been based at Mission Hole. It has long been the present writer’s contention, however, that this conception of the Aboriginal race is deeply flawed. He should be recognised as indubitably a member of homo sapiens, closer to the Negroid or even the Caucasian than to any known extinct species. There is a growing body of evidence that, along with unquestionable technological deficiency, the Aborigines have developed a social and ceremonial system of great intricacy. Advancement can lag in one area even while it forges ahead in another. American anthropology has in the past been preponderantly moulded by British and German influences. While I admire the French sociologists led by the late Professor Durkheim, my earlier and most persistent influences remain the functionalist philosophy of culture so ably expounded by Professor Bronislaw Malinowski, together with Professor Kroeber and the Kulturkreis school. My goal in documenting the lives of the Aborigines of Arnhem Land, therefore, was not to determine their niche in the evolutionary scale, but simply to record their lives before their inevitable degradation. Our expedition was assisted greatly by the missionaries, who gave generously of their hard-pressed free time, as well as allowing us to observe every aspect of their arduous lives. I cannot commend too highly the work of Father McCleery, whose energy and acumen led to the establishment of the Mission. It was Brother O’Gorman, however, upon whom we mostly relied. He has had several years’ experience now in negotiations
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involving bush and mission Aborigines and Europeans, including some of a risky and delicate nature. The killing of the Japanese pearlers, and the search for the white woman allegedly missing after the shipwreck of the Lady Jane are two cases in point. After more than three years’ preparation we finally set sail from Darwin in September 1936. The expedition staff were well qualified for the arduous task ahead. Among our personnel we boasted an archaeologist, an ichthyologist, an ornithologist, an entomologist, a nutritionist, a botanist, a biochemist, an ethnologist, a cinematographer and, of course, an anthropologist— myself. Thanks to the generosity of the Ford Foundation we came equipped with forty-seven tons of food, camping gear and scientific equipment. As could be expected along these uncharted coasts, hiccoughs occurred. When we arrived at Mission Hole we found that the barge carrying the supplies had not arrived. This left us entirely without food. Unfortunately radio contact at Mission Hole Mission had broken down. Myself, a patrol officer from Native Affairs, and some Aborigines walked about eighty kilometres in the rain to the CMS Mission at Red Mud Bay. There we contacted Darwin and a vessel was despatched immediately with food. However, we were still left with the problem of the barge. It had gone aground on a reef about five hundred kilometres away. We begged a ride from a passing pearling lugger, and had to battle through heavy seas every inch of the journey back. Five weeks late, we arrived back at Mission Hole. Our serious work could finally begin. Mr J H Fredericks, from the Department of Anatomy, Washington Museum,
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collected samples of hair from 191 individuals. He exhaustively detailed its form, colour, index, crosssectional area, medullation, and scale count, comparing these findings with those from other racial groups. The dermatoglyphics collection was made by the usual ink method. It comprised impressions of both hands and rolled impressions of the ten digits, recorded on sheets of enamelled paper, together with the accession number, name, tribe, birth-place, age, sex, location and relationship to others of the series. Statistics were gathered concerning the dental and periodontal conditions of Aborigines at Mission Hole settlement and its environs. The archaeological team carried out excavations at sites around Mission Hole. They obtained a wide variety of specimens which should serve as an interesting example of an isolated people still living in what is commonly termed ‘the Middle Stone Age’. For six weeks the Nutrition Unit carried out a food consumption survey. They accompanied both men and women on their hunting and gathering trips, and weighed all the food collected using a set of portable spring scales. The interpreter was fully rationed, and directed neither to give the natives in the camp any European food, nor to accept any native foods from them. The Unit also carried out medical tests. After breakfast each morning a group of natives were assembled in the field laboratory. The medical staff withdrew blood by venepuncture and passed it to the biochemist for testing. They also inspected the eyes, lips, tongue, teeth and gums for evidence of nutritional disorder, examining muscle tone and the degree of subcutaneous fat. The abdomen, neck and axillae were
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palpitated, the patellar tendon reflexes tested, and the squatting and the Mantoux tests carried out. A drop of blood was collected for examination for malaria and micro-filaria. After the medical examination, all subjects were given a waxed paper carton in which to bring along the following morning a sample of their faeces for examination for helminth ova. Speculation has mounted in recent times as to why the great majority of Aborigines have freely chosen to abandon an independent lifestyle and depend for their livelihoods on the settlement. Four of the more important reasons are security, tobacco, the desire to become more like the white man, and inertia—not necessarily in order of importance. They now receive food provided they work at the settlement, unless of course the supply runs out. The lure of tobacco, and the desire to become more like the white man require little explanation. Another matter requiring some explanation is the motive behind several of the recent attacks on nonAborigines, in which a number of trepangers, traders and even a member of the Police Force have been killed. In some cases it has been interference with Aboriginal women, or the desire to plunder the stores. Often, however, it may be attributed to their sullen hostility to people invading their territory. Conflicts of this type will no doubt cease once the Aborigines assimilate with the general population, or else die out, as they have in the past following contact with Western civilisation. Jean-Loup skimmed through the remainder of the report. There were photographs of children deemed ‘normal’ and ‘substandard’, of young men and women with leprosy and
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yaws, holding up white notepaper with numbers scribbled in crayon, and a poorly executed sketch of a kangaroo hunter clad only in his loincloth, or ‘naga’, stiffly stooping to aim his spear. There were no Aboriginal names given in the report; or, at least, the names were not linked with the faces. Faces had only numbers, and the names given in the text were italicised. The 1937 Ford Foundation Report was published well before his father’s time at the mission, but it was at this time that the competing policies of assimilation and segregation were being debated. Despite its author’s protestations of lofty independence from government, the Ford Report was critical to defining the assimilation policy of the 1950s, and ultimately, therefore, the future of Duchess. Jean-Loup skimmed again along the shelf, selecting books at random, until he came across an official report to the Department of Native Affairs. The 1952 report was by a former patrol officer. Acting District Superintendent Charles Raymond had been asked by the Director of Welfare to examine the Northern Territory missions and government settlements in the light of the new government policy of assimilation. His report on Mission Hole contained a brief historical survey, a report on the dormitory conditions and on the food production and consumption. There were sections on the general health of the settlement, on the school classes and Bible studies conducted by the missionaries there, and on difficulties with air services and collection of mail. It also contained the accounts for the period 1 July 1950 to 30 June 1951. The payments were mostly for stores, wages and fuel. The receipts were sales and child endowment. The Mission Hole Mission had been paid child endowment since May 1943. The money compensated the
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Church for the expense of bringing up Aboriginal children on the mission. It was paid on a per-child basis, but went as a lump sum to the institution. The Church had to account for each child for which it claimed endowment. If a child died or left the mission, the money could no longer be paid. In an index at the back of the report was a list of the children resident at Mission Hole Mission in January 1952. The children were listed together with their mothers and presumed fathers, in the Anglo-Saxon fashion, rather than by specifying their country, clan and moiety. Jean-Loup skimmed through the list, then returned, reading it more slowly. Perhaps she went by her mother’s name. Perhaps it was an Aboriginal name, something he would never recognise, one of those many things he had never been told. Most likely the name would have been changed, lost, forgotten by all outside the community, when shortly afterwards she was taken away. Nevertheless, by a stroke of good fortune, the report listed children from exactly the right period. Duchess had been born in 1951. Duchess’s name, when he found it, was listed in quotation marks, as if to emphasise the precariousness, the provisional nature of her existence. Her birth name, Dora, was also listed in a prim, crabbed hand. Her mother’s name was also in quotation marks, ‘Empress Billy’, with brackets following, saying ‘real name unknown’. Her father was also simply, discreetly listed as ‘unknown’. Duchess comes wading up the hill, out of the fog. In one hand she carries a rough bundle of firewood. The other arm is extended at head height, blindly paddling at spiderwebs, ferns, the wet slap of branches. She wears rubber boots and a
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shapeless dress that gathers the fog about her, makes her mistress of its groping fingertips, its tendrils. Jean-Loup is eight or nine. It can’t be all that much after his mother left or Duchess moved in. She is fifteen years older than Jean-Loup—almost as old as his mother, and to him at that age she is almost like a mother, an evil stepmother who has moved in and made his real mother go away. She breaks up the firewood and shoves most of it under the rusty trailer, then stumps inside with the rest, her wet feet planting footprints on the wooden floor. She doesn’t even look at JeanLoup. She squats at the empty fireplace and he stares at her wide arse, thinking up spells, curses, a thousand ways to make her die. ‘I’m hungry,’ he says in his most demanding voice. She doesn’t answer him. She just gets up from her fire making without any change of expression, puts in front of him a packet of Weet-Bix from the kitchen cupboard, the milk from the esky. He gives her the evil eye. She is impervious. She doesn’t even look at him. He thinks of smashing his kiln-fired breakfast plate on the floor. He thinks of screaming so loud he wakes up Cataract, Duchess’s latest boyfriend, who has finally got to sleep after keeping her up most of the night. He thinks of going into her room and throwing her crystals out the window, throwing them far into the ferns and watching her rush outside and scrabble for them, anything to penetrate that silent, cow-like obstinacy of hers, that steadfast refusal to acknowledge any part of his truth. ‘Where’s my dad?’ he says. Her reaction astonishes him beyond belief. ‘Go and look for him!’ she screams at him. ‘Why don’t you just go and fucking look for him yourself!’
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chapter fourteen
A Glimpse of Scars
Sally Galilee had moved office. She was on the ground floor now, about three doors down from her old converted Brunswick Street terrace. It was a concrete-walled building this time, converted from what looked like a mechanic’s workshop that had already been cheaply renovated once or twice, perhaps by a failed art gallery. Always, it seemed, her offices were in other people’s converted spaces, with disused fireplaces or awkwardly placed hot water systems, or a cemented-in mechanic’s pit. In a coffee shop across the road Jean-Loup had watched her returning from lunch. She crossed the road against the traffic, her hand raised vainly against the tide of oncoming cars. She looked suddenly top heavy with her large breasts, the billowing folds of her skirt above pipe-stem slacks and a dancer’s slender calves. Jean-Loup was not sure, even now, why he was doing this. Was it for Petra’s sake? These last three 191
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months, until he had rung Linda, he had told himself his affair with Petra was just a one-night stand. But then, during those months, Petra could easily have found out where he was, she could easily have rung him. Why hadn’t she tried? Was he really here for something else? Was Jean-Loup really here because, against all the odds, he still hoped to find out something about Duchess? Jean-Loup left his coffee half-finished and followed Sally inside. Her secretary had gone now, too. He sat for ten minutes staring at a plasterboard partition, while Sally, oblivious to him on the other side, cursed and rummaged through a file. Eventually, a thunder of rectitude, she came striding out in front of him. For a moment Jean-Loup thought she was going to bark an order at him. At the last moment she held her tongue. ‘Fucking journalists,’ she said. ‘That’s the last time I give an interview.’ ‘What happened?’ ‘The ABC bailed me up about that by-election. They asked me if I was going to run for the ALP. You might be in the gutter, I told them, but you don’t have to go sniffing at every turd.’ ‘I’d like to go back to Mission Hole Community.’ ‘What for?’ ‘I believe I can find out who killed Valerian Pride.’ Sally Galilee’s impassivity was like a caricature of itself: it made you want to stop and admire the performance. ‘What is this, a vendetta? You can’t go back now. What are you going to do there, exactly?’ ‘Speak to people. Collect evidence.’ ‘What evidence? The police have taken over. It’s all closed, shut, whitefella business. What makes you think anybody’s going to speak to you?’
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Jean-Loup took a breath. ‘One person will.’ ‘Who’s that?’ ‘Petra Leonelli Gandarrwuy.’ Sally Galilee laughed. ‘And why should she help you, I’d like to know? Even assuming she knows anything, which I doubt.’ ‘She was helping Randhawa with his accounts.’ ‘And you think she’d betray Randhawa and come over to you?’ Sally Galilee must have noticed the change in Jean-Loup’s face, but it was impossible to tell from her own expression. ‘Who do you think you are? James Bond? I can’t let you go back.’ There was a mattress leaning against the wall in the corridor next to his father’s door. It was old, with a large rust-coloured hole across half of one side—a cigarette-burn, most likely, another narrowly averted boarding-house fire. Jean-Loup knocked, then yelled out, listened to the humph and shuffle of his father’s painful progress. His father opened the door a fraction, clutching fearfully at the handle for support. ‘Who is it?’ The right side of his father’s head was shaved to a grey grizzle, the left side still dank and long. On the shaved side he could see a long, freshly unstitched scar. ‘It’s me. Jean-Loup.’ His father opened. The stink inside the room was worse than usual. At least this time there were no empty bottles in the plastic rubbish bag on the inside of the door. His father gestured wordlessly towards one of two identical vinyl chairs. ‘How have you been?’ asked Jean-Loup. ‘I rang you at home and you were never there. I rang
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Telstra. I even rang the police. Your secretary was the only one who could give me a polite answer.’ ‘That wasn’t a secretary. That was an answering machine.’ His father was blinking, peering. He had lost weight, too. The folds of fat hung empty over his drawstring pants. These last few years he had learnt to use the phone and had taken to it with a vengeance made worse by the fact that he could never hear what people said. Or perhaps, thought Jean-Loup, he chose not to hear. Imaginary conversations could take his paranoid zeal to new heights. ‘I’ve been in hospital. They treated me like an animal. Do you know, one of the psychologists asked me whether I’d heard voices in my head telling me to kill people? I told her I’d never heard voices in my head, and if I did they’d better have something a damn sight better to say than that! Another one gave me nine little cards with pictures on them and asked me to say what the pictures were. Dog, cat, bird, chair, chicken, I can remember them all. I was so insulted I told her the first four then shut my mouth. They told me, four out of nine’s not bad.’ ‘I wanted to talk to you about something,’ said Jean-Loup. His father’s face had half-shut down. He was silent now, insensible, his body almost on the point of giving up the fight. ‘It’s about Duchess. I went to the library. I’ve been trying to find her name in the Mission Hole records.’ ‘It was all because I had a nightmare. I was dreaming I was on Balikpapan, during the war. The Japanese soldiers were about to beat me up. So I called out in the middle of the night: “Shitori ni shite ooite! ” Leave me alone! The whole ward woke up.’ Jean-Loup shuddered at that suddenly raised voice. His father had always talked over him that way, drowning out
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whatever he did not want to hear, booming, stentorian, the sound even deeper than ever now because of the drugs. No doubt it would be the last thing about him to go. ‘I can’t understand it. Duchess was born in 1951, wasn’t she? Wasn’t her birth recorded?’ ‘It was a perfectly rational response to the situation. How dare they insinuate I was insane? I’d like to know if I can get my hospital records expunged. They’ve made a mistaken diagnosis of childhood epilepsy, with recurring psychotic episodes. I want to challenge their diagnosis in court. You know, get the psychologists up there on the witness stand and cross-examine them. “Why did you diagnose such and such on date XYZ? On what observations did you base that diagnosis? Compare that with the observations of psychologist Y, whose evidence we have just heard.”’ ‘Was Dora her name at birth? And what was her mother’s real name? Why did they call her Empress Billy?’ ‘It was just that I wasn’t in Balikpapan, I was in a hospital in Melbourne. But that’s not madness, is it? That’s delusion, no doubt, but it’s not madness.’ Jean-Loup found himself peering sideways, trying to get a better look at the scar on the old man’s skull. The savage gaolbird haircut was starting to cover it up. He had the stroke victim’s doublesidedness about him now. One side of his body was already half-dead, shaved and soaped for the grave. The other half, in compensation, had grown even more wild and sententious and unkempt. ‘When did the authorities take her away?’ Jean-Loup persisted. ‘How would she have known who her father was? How on earth did she manage to find you again?’ ‘Of course you don’t understand,’ said his father. ‘You always were a pusillanimous child.’
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Jean-Loup got up to go. His father’s breathing was heavy. Jean-Loup looked around at the bare cupboard, benches, table, at the tiny fridge with its pill bottles that were never touched. He thought, suddenly, of his father dying in this place, lonely and abusive, a beast in his cavern, refusing help from a world which had refused to bend to his will. This, he thought, is how ghosts are created. His father’s animate body, unreconciled, would become one with this inanimate room. ‘Can I get you some food?’ he asked. ‘Fresh fruit and vegetables?’ ‘I prefer the tinned variety. They’re healthier. I have been eating macaroni, mostly, with tinned vegetables, although not with a great deal of gusto.’ ‘Tins of tuna? Salmon?’ ‘Sardines, thank you. I am not partial to tuna. Salmon I like, but that is expensive. Sardines are the poor man’s salmon.’ ‘All right. Is there anything else you’d like?’ ‘Yes.’ His father’s voice was thick, guttural. ‘I’d like you to get my hospital records. I want to find out what they did to me. I was out for forty-eight hours. The surgeon kept me under anaesthetic so he could do exploratory surgery on my brain. I know the man well through the medical journals. He’s the second-best brain surgeon in the world, you see, and he wants to be the best. His rival’s a surgeon named Dubrynov in Russia. Dubrynov gets to experiment on all the living brains he wants. From the gulags.’ Jean-Loup was alone once again in his flat. Outside, a lashing wintry rain had deterred even the Friday night patrons of the nightclub across St Kilda Road. A solitary bouncer stood in the spotlight at the front. His black jacket lapels were plastered flat, glistening on him like a seal pelt.
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Jean-Loup was surrounded by books. A glass of red wine sat with an abandoned pen and notebook on the side table. It was the first drink he had had since the night in the Mission Hole club. His relationship with alcohol was uneasy: he had his father’s weakness but a hard-won self-control. He would remain sober for long periods and then, occasionally and in secret, steer himself deliberately into the rocks. He had started by doodling. He had written down the names that played havoc with his mind: Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy, Valerian, Petra, Randhawa, Lazarus Johnson, Duchess. He drew scribbles around each one, decorated them with flowers, drew lines that connected them so that they looked like a scientist’s diagram of a complex molecule, or the models of family relationships he had seen in the anthropologist’s report. It was a technique he had used since Bernoulli’s theorem at school, that of using lists, formulae, connections of words. Sometimes that map, like an Aboriginal painting, might possess its own secret order. Inscrutable, numinous, it might nevertheless be the flash of minor inspiration that led him on. On the next page in his notebook he had written and underlined the heading ‘Official Version’. Below that were the following points: First, Valerian’s death. Lazarus Johnson killed Valerian Pride. Time: about nine o’clock at night. Place: under mango tree, near group playing cards. Weapon: wheel brace? Johnson had one buried in his backyard. Motive: jealousy. Valerian had been having an affair with Nancy, Johnson’s wife. Other evidence: confession, signed by Johnson. Witnesses: none that Johnson’s lawyer is aware, all the card players having apparently disappeared.
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Secondly, Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s art. Any scandal is said to be unconnected with Valerian’s death. An unknown person defaced one of Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s work, during or shortly after the floods. Identity: literate, or semi-literate, could be either white or Aboriginal. Randhawa claims she did it herself, which seems unlikely. She never leaves her outstation, hence could not have done it without his knowledge, and he clearly did not know. Suspicion of other artists’ work being passed off as hers. Is Randhawa involved? Is he embezzling money? The accounts were kept in a very poor state and are now (conveniently) destroyed by fire. During my investigation nobody on the community would speak. One dealer in Darwin made an allegation of fraud. Nobody will help the investigation, everybody seems to believe in Randhawa, who has been living at Mission Hole for years. What about Petra? What is her relationship with Randhawa, exactly? Why did Randhawa suggest she work with me? Thirdly, unanswered questions. Valerian was not concerned about Lazarus Johnson. Something else was intensely bothering him. Religion, philosophy, madness? Lazarus Johnson was not in an aggressive state, clearly drunk, did not seem capable of acting with the decision required. Valerian was not drunk, is physically bigger than Johnson. Why were there no witnesses? Why were the police so eager to arrest Johnson and tie the whole thing up? Alternatively, Valerian Pride’s death and Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s artwork are connected. Valerian knew something about Randhawa and Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy, something he may have planned
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to tell me. Randhawa’s and Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s interests seem the most powerful, and the most at stake, but the only evidence for this idea is Valerian’s final comment: the artist is a thief. Where else should I look for evidence, now that Valerian is dead? And then, underneath that, he had written, underlined and with a final flourish: ‘Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy herself??’ Jean-Loup’s eyes were half-closed. He laughed aloud at a joke on TV, then a moment later forgot what it was. He felt more stoned than drunk. The alcohol had shaken something loose in him, dislodged some encrusted remnant from the scarred and doped-up vacuum of his soul. Mission Hole from this distance was just another place on television. He felt as remote from it as the anthropologist’s words, as the statistics paraded in the books he had been reading on Aboriginal health, as his own father’s refusal to acknowledge his crime. He stared blankly at his piece of paper. The dialogue from the two-bit cop show was soothing in its meaninglessness, in its assertion of the ephemeral nature of feelings, personalities, words. Suddenly, something struck him. He gave a start, picked up the pen, wrote out the name ‘Gandarrwuy’ once again. Underneath that he wrote ‘Guy Randhawa’. With neat blue accountant’s ticks, so different to his doodles of ten minutes before, he began to cross off letters. He drew in his breath as the evidence appeared. It was perfect. Well, as near to perfect as made no difference. ‘Guy Randhawa’ was almost an anagram of ‘Gandarrwuy’. At two o’clock in the morning he woke up in his armchair, his mind chillingly clear and filled with the certainty that he had to go back to Mission Hole.
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The phone was ringing. He stared at it a few moments before willing himself to pick it up. ‘Jean-Loup here.’ His voice, to his surprise, was thick. ‘Jean-Loup. It’s Petra.’ ‘Petra!’ ‘I can’t talk long. Things are getting bad here. It’s Randhawa.’ ‘What’s happened?’ ‘I tried to help him get the place going again. I coaxed some of the artists into bringing in a few of their old works. I even got one or two to agree to paint some more. He’s trashed them, Jean-Loup. Just tonight Randhawa’s destroyed them all.’ ‘Why on earth would he do that?’ ‘I think he knows, Jean-Loup.’ ‘Knows about what?’ ‘About what happened that night. With us. Look, I can arrange the permit. I want you to come back to Mission Hole.’
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chapter fifteen
Mission Hole Gold
It was October in Mission Hole now. He’d been back three weeks. The build-up time was here. The air had changed. While two weeks ago Jean-Loup could walk the half-kilometre from the contractors’ house to the general store and still be dry at the end of it, he found himself now bathed in a thin sheen of sweat. He would put his hand out to pay for something and realise suddenly that his hands were wet or that his shirt, which he’d have washed and dried early that morning, was once again sticking to his back. It was as though he had underestimated his own body’s capacity to cause him discomfort. Or as though some disease, rotting away deep inside him for years, was only now beginning to seep out through his pores. He had noticed, too, a change in the quality of his observations. On his first visit to Mission Hole he had regarded the life here as mostly monotonous. Long periods of tedium were 201
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punched through by geysers of violence. Now he was not so sure. For the first time he began to notice the different species of grass and birds, and how the speargrass, which in May had been tall, had now long since dried and crackled down under the wind. He noticed now who was and was not in the various groups of people who slept and woke up around campfires on the brown and overgrown front gardens, on the school oval, among the long grass in the patches of scrub. The things closest to his senses now occupied most of his mind. He dwelt on the hot wind from the escarpment, the funeral-dry crackling grass, an old mattress leaning sideways on the verandah of a burnt-out house. He noticed the almost total absence of young people here. Presumably they had gone into Darwin, maybe to try to find work or study, or down south, or to join their countrymen camping under tarps on certain beaches or foreshores around the city. Anywhere but here, where there was just the heat and the grog, and boredom and violence, and the old people with nothing any more to teach them. Nothing they had any use for, anyway: nothing but traditional law. Certain aspects of the life here had begun to form part of his dreams. He heard the music played from radios inside empty, unfurnished houses. He saw, when he closed his eyes, the rusting roofs and graffitied walls and the people sitting inside on the concrete floors. He watched the kids climbing the tamarind trees, heard them rushing past him singing and in gangs, with childish indifference pulling the limbs from geckos and flinging the pieces, laughing, at each other. He saw the empty forty-four-gallon drums on the street corners, serving as rubbish bins and painted the red, black and yellow of the Aboriginal flag. He smelt the bushfires that burnt on the horizon, glowing red at night and sending smoke flushing
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upwards like blood into water, and he heard the first, shivering intimations of thunder. Everywhere he had looked nobody seemed to know. Petra Gandarrwuy was not there. He was not eighteen years old anymore. He understood that his feelings would no doubt, like all other things, lessen and flow downstream with time. But too much knowing didn’t help. It had not happened to him since he was eighteen years old. That time, as well, she had been somebody unattainable. If Petra did not contact him, it must be because she had changed her mind. There was one other thing. He was intensely aware of how bad his actions must appear. Paradoxically, what had attracted him to Petra was her artifice. He had fallen for her impeccable clothes, her manners, the layer upon layer of her acting—the white woman playing black, the black woman playing white—applied to her nakedness like an eighteenth-century courtesan’s maquillage. He felt, suddenly, that in coming to Mission Hole he had seen no more than a sequence of representations invented by other white people— the missionaries, the misfits, the Machiavellian authors of government reports. In the world where such things are judged he was the guilty one. Very guilty. Very white. There was only one way out of it. Every day he was trying to forget Petra, trying to steel himself against her, prepare himself for the day he would see her again. He had to fight an emotion so powerful it was as if his barren heart had suddenly been connected to the mains electricity supply of life. It was past midnight. Jean-Loup had given up on trying to go to sleep. The air in his room had grown acrid with the bodies of gnats and tiny biters which had crept in their thousands through his grimy insect screen and incinerated
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themselves against the yellow light above his head. Ulrich had arrived back that day from Germany. He had said not a word to Jean-Loup, just gone straight into the kitchen, where he still sat typing. He must have been suffering from the insects, too. Above his head wheeled a thick cloud, the forms of individual freaks, an entomologist’s dream, occasionally spreadeagled against the light. His self-absorption, though, was complete. Jean-Loup went out and sat on the armchair at the edge of Ulrich’s vision. Outside on the school oval there was complete silence: no voices now, not even the glow of a fire. ‘Did you ever study the missions?’ Jean-Loup asked. ‘Of course. Why do you think I should know nothing? You think I am still ignorant?’ Jean-Loup spread his hands. Ulrich had charming ways of expressing his general annoyance at the world. ‘Were children of mixed blood brought up here during the mission days?’ ‘That depends.’ Ulrich’s voice took on a high, hectoring tone. ‘Officially there were no children of mixed blood born at the mission until 1943. In the Ford Foundation Report, for example, you will find no mention of such children. In 1943 the Commonwealth government introduces child endowment. This changes the situation. Suddenly it is to the mission’s advantage to have as many children as possible on their records. On the other hand, the mission must not get a reputation for immorality. They must take steps.’ ‘What do you mean, take steps?’ ‘They must try to control the behaviour of the men. The white men. This means the priests and the lay brothers, also the mechanics, the gardeners, the schoolteachers, the itinerant people. The ones who are always out here in the bush. If any
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of them are known to be—what do you say?—consorting with the Aboriginal women, they must be sent away. And then, if there are children born, they must also be sent away.’ ‘Sent away where?’ ‘They might go to Garden Point. Or to Retta Dixon Home. Or to one of the other places established for the halfcaste children. This was official government policy.’ Ulrich pressed a scroll key on his computer a few times and began to intone: ‘Half-castes in the Territory approximate in numbers to one-third of the European population, and their rate of natural increase is considerably higher than that of any other section of the population. It has become a matter of social and economic urgency, therefore, that the living standard of the half-caste be elevated to that of a white, and to the development of this policy the activities of the Department of Native Affairs have been directed. Illegitimate children of not less than fifty per cent white blood are removed from the Aboriginal camps at an early age and placed in institutions where they are reared at European standards and given statutory state school education.’ ‘What happened to the children?’ Ulrich spread his hands. ‘Some children, no doubt, received an education. Others did not. Nearly all of them grew up to believe that the real reason they were taken away was because their Aboriginal blood was shameful. A taint that needed to be washed away.’ Ulrich was silent, like a lecturer waiting for the right prompt so that he could come out with the answer. ‘How would the children go about finding their parents again?’ ‘They could find their mothers through the mission records. If their fathers were white, they were usually not
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recorded. They might find out from their mothers, if their mothers wanted them to know.’ Jean-Loup could not fault Ulrich’s logic, but there was something offensive about the remoteness, the remorseless way he proceeded from A to Z. His voice when he spoke again was thick. ‘Could I get access to these records?’ ‘If they still exist, and if the Church consents,’ said Ulrich in a tone that implied the question was foolish. Jean-Loup decided to try another tack. ‘Why did the Catholics come here?’ ‘They came because nobody else wanted it. The place was disused, away from the coast, too many hostile tribes. The missions always tried to establish themselves on an island if possible. That way they have a captive audience. At Mission Hole, if people wanted to go off and join the buffalo shooters’ or a miners’ camp, then they just go. The government offered the mission lease in 1932. The Catholics were the only response.’ ‘Would I be able to locate the original missionaries, if they’re still alive?’ ‘Why would you want to do that? Father McCleery was the official founder, according to the Catholic Church. A hard man. He went and broke up the ceremonies and he bought the old men’s wives. One day he found some men killing cattle. He brought them all back to the mission and flogged them himself. They called it muscular Christianity. They could have speared him or run away, but they did not. But Father McCleery died in 1972.’ ‘What about Brother O’Gorman?’ ‘Never heard of him.’ Ulrich looked offended at being asked a question to which he couldn’t reply. Jean-Loup sat forward, preparing to stand up. Ulrich,
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however, turned away from his computer and picked out a small volume from his pile of books. It was dog-eared and canvas-covered, in the style in which they used to write children’s books, or adventure stories, before the Second World War. It was called Up North and the author was a man named Michael Stoneham. A look had come over Ulrich’s face which made Jean-Loup think suddenly of Germany, of the debates there about justice, which Ulrich must have sat through at school and university, of the fear which underlay every discussion there of the past. ‘You want to know the real reason why the children were taken away?’ Ulrich said. ‘It was shame.’ It was the hottest morning Jean-Loup had seen. From the verandah he could see nobody about, just three or four dogs on the other side of the school oval lying supine under a tree. The main street leaked thin wisps of dust, like smoke drifts from an active volcano, and the air around him was thick with the smell of mango and frangipani from the whitefellas’ houses on his side of the street. Ulrich had gone out early, trying to catch one of the old men, he said, before he went fishing or off to the club. Then suddenly Randhawa came into view. He was moving awkwardly, making his way along the road that ran around one side of the perimeter of the community, the side on which all the whitefellas’ houses had been built. With each step he swung backwards on his heels. He wore a white broadbrimmed hat and was carrying a cane now, trailing it along the railings of each white-painted picket fence, like a blind man or a child. The heat did not seem to affect him. Perhaps it was the hat, and his shirt, white and collared and freshly ironed, a thing that reflected the sunlight and made you think of snow,
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crystal, some stiff-upper-lip coloniser from an Africa of fifty years before. Without even glancing up Randhawa turned into the almost non-existent front garden of the contractors’ house. He had changed. Jean-Loup realised that the instant he glanced full into Randhawa’s face. The unnatural paleness, the sensuality of the nose and lips had become more pronounced. The fineness that had gone with them had receded. It was as though a clumsy sculptor had taken hold of his face and brutalised it, smoothed it out with rough trowel strokes, erasing willy-nilly the subtlety, the swiftness of perception, all the polite signs of the businessman or the intellectual. Jean-Loup was relieved when Randhawa put out a hand to shake and it was the same supple, fine-boned hand as before. ‘You surprise me,’ said Randhawa. Jean-Loup stood up to offer him the armchair. Randhawa sat down slowly. His white cotton pants were incongruous against the tattiness of the sarong-covered chair. His flat, almost concave chest was surprisingly bony. ‘Why do I surprise you?’ ‘I hadn’t expected you to come back.’ Jean-Loup sat in the kitchen chair. Randhawa’s shoulders slumped. He looked older now. Somehow he also looked physically stronger. Perhaps it was just that, with the loss of his appearance of great mental force, his physical features now came to the fore. ‘You don’t look well,’ said Jean-Loup. Randhawa looked up. There was a greyness about his eyes now, but they still had the power to hold. ‘I spent twelve weeks in hospital after the fire,’ he said. ‘What with complications, and one thing and another, they only let me out a month ago.’ ‘What happened?’
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Randhawa replied in a singsong voice, almost to himself. ‘I keep on trying to save the place. First from the floods, then fire. Like the seven plagues of Egypt, and all the torments of Job. And still my enemies are saying that I did it. I, who built it all up, have now taken it into my head to destroy. And so, amid so much destruction, I indulged in a little destruction myself. Perhaps it will keep them quiet.’ ‘Is your real name Guy Randhawa?’ asked Jean-Loup. ‘Of course not. My real name’s that of a little middle-class boy in Mount Waverley. It doesn’t matter to me anymore. I changed it when I first arrived in Mission Hole. All that was a long time ago.’ ‘Why did you choose that name?’ ‘I was drawn to it. For the same reasons I was drawn to come here. For the same reasons you’re here, like a man drawn to the edge of the abyss.’ ‘I wouldn’t put it quite that way.’ ‘Not quite that way.’ Randhawa’s voice was hollow with sarcasm. ‘Middle-class white people no longer know how to use words to say things. You’ve invented post-modernism to justify your obscurantism. You sit here playing word games while the old people starve and the young ones work out new and more tortured ways to kill each other and themselves.’ ‘But you’ve just said you’re a middle-class white person yourself.’ ‘Am I?’ Randhawa turned his gaze on Jean-Loup. ‘That depends on your attitude. I can never forget that feeling that everything can be taken away at any moment. I’ve been here fifteen years now. I’ve seen it built up from nothing, and now I’m watching it go.’ ‘Aren’t you overreacting? I’m sure the art centre can be rebuilt.’
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‘I’m not just talking about the art centre. Have you looked around you? A year ago this community was probably one of the healthiest in Australia. Now look at it. Another four people have died here in the last three months. One of them was forty-five, two of them were in their thirties and the last one was a child. The club’s open longer hours. People are drinking and gambling their lives away. And meanwhile, the whitefellas, in their green little oases on the edge of town, are talking about the need for independence and accountability.’ Randhawa blinked once. His eyelids were heavy and soporific. In each was a network of pale blue veins, fine as porcelain. ‘How long have you been out here now?’ Randhawa asked. ‘I’ve spent about six weeks, on and off, since May.’ ‘What’s your opinion about the situation here?’ ‘There’s poverty, and violence. The art centre seems like one way to help things to improve.’ But Randhawa, not listening, was following the exalted tangent of his thoughts. ‘I mean, do you feel alien from the people here, or estranged? Or do you feel like you’re getting to know them better now that you’ve been here a while? Do you think they’re primitive, and backward, and a bunch of drunks? Or do you think they’ve got a nobility the rest of us have lost? Take your pick. Are they noble, or are they savages? Or would you say they’re both?’ ‘I suppose all those things cross my mind at different times. I’m not proud or ashamed. I’m just not in a position to judge.’ ‘I mean, you’ve got to say something.’ Randhawa’s voice was abruptly aggressive. ‘In a little while you’re going to go back to your cocktail parties in Melbourne and everyone’s going to
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ask you: “How were the Aborigines, I mean the indigenous people, up in the styx? Are they bad or good, are they better or worse?” You can’t just sit on the fence. You want to know something? Racial hatred in this country’s alive and well. And it’s not all coming from the non-Aboriginal side, not anymore.’ ‘Maybe I am sitting on the fence. But at least I’m not pretending to be something I’m not.’ Jean-Loup wanted to get away. Randhawa struck him as a man pierced by a shaft of God’s light, a man who believed he had a direct line to God. Randhawa was watching him closely. ‘You know what the average person does? He knows subconsciously he lacks the courage to be different, and so he makes a virtue out of his fear. He calls his fear courage and his failure success, and pretty soon he’s learnt to call everything by its opposite name. He thinks he’s braved great dangers because he’s managed to avoid the reefs and shoals of life. He’s desperately unhappy but he calls himself happy, and he ends up thinking that’s all there is. And so, more and more deeply, the great lies are woven into the fabric of our lives.’ Jean-Loup pictured himself getting up and walking away, but his muscles seemed unable to move. ‘Anyway, can’t stop,’ said Randhawa. His voice echoed, for a moment, something of his old business-like air. ‘I actually came by to invite you over to dinner tonight. In my green little oasis.’ Jean-Loup forced a smile. Randhawa gave directions and turned to go. He left in Jean-Loup’s mind the after-image of a bone-white shirt, and his last phrase, uttered when he was already out the door, floating sibilantly in the air. ‘You never know. The beautiful Petra might even be there.’
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• • • Published in 1935, Up North was older than any of the books about Mission Hole Jean-Loup had read. Its front pages had yellowed and were spotted with mould. The first of its advertised sixty-seven illustrations was a pair of black and white photographs facing the title page. One showed four white men slouched against their new Morris six-wheeled truck. They wore bushman’s hats with cotton or khaki shirts and calico trousers. The author’s white trousers, in particular, shone out against the sun and dust, lighting him up against his companions as he leaned negligently against the bonnet. The other showed six men, but only two of the original four. They were dirty, sun-tanned, smoking pipes. All but the author and one other were looking down into the dust. In their sagging belts revolvers could clearly be seen. Jean-Loup continued to skim through. He was well over halfway through when a section caught his eye. It was entitled ‘Mission Hole Gold’. Down south, where one hundred miles seems a fair distance, and politics and murders fill the papers, indeed but few know of Mission Hole, and still fewer trouble how things go forward there. The discovery at Mission Hole is over two hundred miles from the nearest port at Darwin. Without roads, telegraphs or settlement, and with wild mountainous country between, it was some time before the knowledge became public. When it did there was the first rush to the area. Some trekked up from Adelaide or Melbourne, some came by steamer from Sydney or even occasionally Perth. Some came overland from Queensland. All of them were fired by the same thing, that gleam which has shone in men’s eyes since before the
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Egyptians, that hope which makes a man leave hearth and home and set out with a spade and knapsack to try his wits in the wilderness. Gold. Such men come to know the stories of the frontier. They are passed around the campfire, small change to go with tobacco and a pot of tea—not such stories as are heard in polite society, but the truth of how the new world is made, and the old one too, if the truth be told. They might tell, for example, of the Ragged Thirteen. They were a camp of men from Queensland and Central Australia who collected near the mouth of the Goyder River and made their way across the north at the point of a gun. One cannot say if they should be thought of as desperadoes or picturesque ruffians. At any rate, according to the yarns one hears, they were a pretty tough gang, and had things pretty much their own way. At Mission Hole one night the white men slept by the river. On the next day they were attacked by natives, whom they succeeded in repulsing without injury to themselves. The following night the blacks in stronger forces made another attack. In the course of this the whites were wounded, though not seriously. They managed to seize two survivors whom they ordered to conduct a search party to the native camp. After leading the search party astray, they attempted to escape and were shot. Finally they found the native camp and took revenge for an unprovoked attack, calculated only to satisfy the savage lust for blood. On the way back from the camp they were followed by a further large body of natives. On one occasion they had to fight their way through an ambush, with disastrous results to the blacks.
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On another occasion one of the party was camping alone, apart from a lubra working for the men named Sally. Six strapping young bucks, amongst them Mangalilli, whose tremendous big feet make a track every new chum could spot, and a finely built young myall named Billy, approached over the flat. They were fully armed, and painted grotesquely. Sally began to plead: ‘Him no more sulky feller, nothing want ’em kill you. Might be you shoot ’em that one, you shoot ’em me longa him.’ Came sundown, the treacherous Sally, dressed in a wide red smock, which hid a black crouching behind, came up. The rifle was grabbed by the muzzle, the bucks war-whooped and made a rush for the luckless white man. The first blow he guarded with his fingers, which were broken. He kicked one in the guts, and laid another out with a right under the jaw, broke away and rushed back to camp for another rifle. Though his arm was still paralysed he began to shoot. He got two, one only wounded. That was enough; they bolted. Some gentle souls may find this treatment harsh. But I ask you, what is a man to do? Leave it to the police, you say. Right. In this area there are six police to look after over 200 000 square miles. We know that no nation retains idle lands once a stronger people desire possession. However we may try to alter it in the future, might has been right. And history has shown just as plainly that no conqueror or possessor can hold his terrain without justifying possession, for the iron law of progress demands development or forfeiture. In the march of history no doubt these things will be forgotten. Out at Mission Hole, where little can be
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seen now except spear grass, many men’s dreams have fought, flared and died. No monuments mark their bones, and nothing but a rusty jam tin their camp sites. It is not always a pretty picture, and much of it, perhaps, is best passed over in silence, but here the battles were fought which made the North. Now, of course, a new, softer generation has come to Mission Hole. A man named Fred Heisner arrived first, a pearler and wanderer with typical southerner’s ideas of rescuing the Aborigines, & co, & co. When he made some kind of ruckus with the administration in Darwin the whole area was converted into a lease. In the end there was little gold found at Mission Hole. After a few years I believe the whole outfit was taken over by the Catholic Church.
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chapter sixteen
The Naked Emperor
Inside Randhawa’s front door a dozen wooden wind chimes tinkled and tolled. Each one was just out of reach of the fan, on which Randhawa had scribbled a few cryptic curls. Different functional and decorative styles jostled for wall space. On one side, painted bright blue, Jean-Loup saw a large poster of a whale surfacing in an Antarctic-looking seascape, three or four glass snowstorm spheres with Scandinavian scenes, a Rubik’s cube, and the dried and fully open jawbone of what was probably a large shark. The left-hand wall, redpainted, looked like Randhawa’s tropical wall. There were African mahogany statues, Oriental masks and, of course, Aboriginal bark paintings and didgeridoos. This division, however, Jean-Loup’s eye picked out only after a full minute of gazing about the room. Everything was far less orderly than that. There were a brass-pieced chessboard and a set of wicked-looking knuckledusters; incense 216
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sticks and a packet of Indonesian kreteks; a set of dumbbells and an Egyptian coloured-glass vase. Randhawa had a junk collector’s intelligence, with taste in objects but no sense of overall pattern or style. The whole room, Jean-Loup thought, seemed to have been taken on as an exercise by ten vastly different artists, who had begun inspired, then copied each other, then fought and junked the whole thing halfway. Byron Bay arabesque, it might have been called. This house, a kilometre away from the community and on steelbased columns in the middle of a paperbark swamp, was— according to the sign on the front door—Randhawa’s Kundalini Dome. Jean-Loup looked around, searching for a neutral conversation opener, while Randhawa mixed up an elaborate drink in the kitchen. ‘You’ve obviously done a lot of travelling,’ he said. ‘You’re very observant,’ said Randhawa caustically. ‘You can’t buy this sort of stuff at Community Aid Abroad.’ Jean-Loup waited, stirring his drink with the straw. It was half-dark. A minute later Randhawa decided to pick up the threads. ‘I’ve been to lots of places,’ he said. ‘I went to Africa, Europe, the Karakoram, the West Bank. I got myself into trouble, lots of trouble, much more than I could probably handle. Anything to get away from the family in the suburbs of Melbourne.’ ‘So how did you end up here?’ ‘I haven’t ended up here. I’m just passing through. As are you, or anybody else on the community, for that matter. Allow me to point out to you that our place, like our identity, is plastic. It is useless to look for causes for anything, just as it is
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useless to ask why one of a pair of identical twins became a doctor and the other a criminal.’ ‘Do you ever see your family?’ ‘No. I certainly do not. I left them when I was fifteen, and I’ve never been back.’ Jean-Loup kept stirring his drink, which was banana and soy. He would have to make it last as long as possible. Clearly he was not going to be offered anything alcoholic. Randhawa sat for a minute, staring with great intensity at Jean-Loup, then gave a sudden violent twitch, as though about to leap up and fetch something from the kitchen. ‘From where I sit,’ he said, ‘this whole business about Gandarrwuy’s art has got completely out of hand. I mean, people aren’t capable of distinguishing anymore between representation and reality. There’s a bunch of kids over in Dusseldorf that are playing at being Aboriginal. Can you believe that? I mean Dusseldorf, Germany. They paint themselves in ochre and they call each other waku and mingeringgi and kurdungurlu. And they send each other tribal messages on the internet.’ The sharpness in Randhawa’s voice had become more pronounced. It had a nagging, almost bitter quality, out of control now, a seed that had grown and ripened and put out a poisonous flower. There was no sign of food. ‘You seem pretty fascinated by it all yourself,’ said Jean-Loup. Randhawa’s eyes grew wide, his arms like loose ends of electric wire. ‘We’ve got Vikings in Melbourne. Feral hippies in New South Wales. We’ve got breatharians, and people that think it’s nature’s way that you should eat your own shit. The trouble is, so many people want to return to a time that existed forty thousand, a hundred thousand years ago. You see them coming up here from Melbourne or Sydney, people like yourself, all
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eager to sit down with the Aboriginals in the dust. It’s the old Noble Savage idea all over again, except back in Rousseau’s time they had the good sense to stay in their dinner jackets.’ ‘What’s that got to do with Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s art?’ ‘Can’t you see what’s happened to her? She’s sick. She has a horror of white people. People don’t want to see a blackfella doing well. Can you imagine the pressure on an Aboriginal artist? Or on any Aboriginal person trying to do anything other than self-destruct? They’re considered as representatives of their whole race. They’ve got to be purer than pure or the whole race gets maligned. When they fall down the whole world says that’s exactly what you’d expect from an Aboriginal person. After all, they only just recently emerged from the Stone Age. You know why she won’t see anybody, don’t you? Her son that died of the white people’s poison. Now I’m the only person she trusts.’ Randhawa’s shoulders suddenly dropped, his whole body expressed failure and despair. One hand, outstretched, had been gesturing at Jean-Loup, futilely kneading the air. ‘I’ve spent fifteen years working on this community. Almost singlehandedly I’ve built Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s reputation. Do you think I’m out here, living in Third-World conditions half the time, just to boost my own ego? If you listen to what other people say you’d believe it. Half of them haven’t even been to an Aboriginal community. Sally Galilee chose you to come out here because you know nothing about Aboriginal politics. She made sure of that before she allowed you to come. She knew that, naive as you are, you’d fall for the first lot of stories that got sold to you. Don’t think that just because Sally Galilee’s got black skin she’s above a bit of manipulation.’
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Jean-Loup had been wondering whether Randhawa had something specific to tell him. Now his only thought was to extract any information he could. ‘All right then,’ he said. ‘Who do you think slashed that painting of Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s?’ ‘Valerian, maybe. Or Johnson. So many people had access to the art centre. All they had to do was take the plastic off and then rewrap it afterwards. A ten-minute job.’ ‘If it wasn’t Valerian, was it the person who killed him?’ ‘I’m not interested. I have no idea.’ Randhawa’s eyes were staring. An acrid staleness came from his body. Jean-Loup thought for a moment that Randhawa had given up. He asked his next question, then realised immediately that he had been wrong. Randhawa had not given up, he had just closed in on himself, like a penknife or a grasshopper, enclosing its energy for one final, flying leap. ‘If Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy has a horror of white people, why does she trust you?’ ‘Don’t you understand yet?’ Randhawa sprang. ‘You don’t even know what you want to know. Your culture knows almost nothing about Aboriginal people. You know as little about them as about Dyaks, or Bugis, or any other strange and uncouth tribe. Their stories have never been translated properly. Everything in their mythology depends on knowing the bush, knowing the land around. To you they’re like fragments of stories, stories with all the vital bits ripped out. The stories of China or the Middle East or of some other alien nation are more immediately recognisable. But non-Aboriginal people can’t understand Aboriginal art. Doesn’t that make the whole Aboriginal art industry a fraud? You can’t say. The savage emperor has no clothes. Their secrets are kept locked away, or hidden like the tjuringa in caves and at the bottoms of rivers,
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while the naked fellow is paraded before you and you declaim upon how the scales have fallen from your eyes. You can’t learn from the Aboriginal people. You can only despise them or worship them, accept from them every piece of superstition and trickery which you rejected in your own culture a hundred years ago. You, the children of the New Age, worship Aboriginal people as others once worshipped the Lamb of God. You appease them with offerings, you submit guiltily and dutifully to their wrath.’ ‘You talk about non-Aboriginal culture,’ said Jean-Loup, ‘as though you weren’t one of us yourself.’ ‘I’m terribly sorry.’ Randhawa’s voice, for an instant, held a trace of his old courtesy, but his eyes, jaundiced and lizardlidded, focused steadily on Jean-Loup. ‘I’ve let my thoughts run away with me. They’ve been running on rather tempestuous lines of late. What would you like to talk about?’ Jean-Loup considered. There was just one line of inquiry open, but to pursue it he needed to keep his voice as cautious, as neutral as possible. ‘I haven’t seen Petra since I got back.’ ‘She’s her own boss, isn’t she?’ ‘I’m just curious, that’s all.’ ‘Just curious.’ Randhawa’s tone mocked Jean-Loup. ‘I’ve told you before about that half-hearted manner of speech. Why don’t you say what you really want to know? Why did I ask her to help with your investigation? Or was I really just asking her to be my spy?’ ‘Well, yes. Since you put it that way.’ ‘Or is there something more? Do you want to know who she really is? What she wants? What her relationship is with me?’ ‘Only if you want to tell me.’ Jean-Loup tried unsuccessfully to smile.
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‘Of course.’ Randhawa was hunched forward over the chessboard on the table between them, his bony fingers pickpicking at the head of a pawn. ‘All right, then. Petra seems exotic and self-sufficient, but do you know what she really wants? Respectability. Convention. Sophistication. All the things she never had.’ ‘That wasn’t my impression,’ said Jean-Loup. But Randhawa did not even hear him. His words seemed to come from some source independent of himself, a kind of pre- or post-eruptive volcanic flow: steady, subliminal, and with their own implacable force. ‘Petra does not question too much the way things are. She knows what she wants and to a lesser extent what her people want. She is motivated partly by an unexamined and naive idealism. Idealism of the type which yields unthinkingly in any contest with reality, and so remains always pure. More powerfully, she is motivated by self-interest. She has an instinctive grasp of politics. She knows always at what point in a debate to say something, and what to say. Formal social occasions are for her the pinnacle of life. She knows her own value, both as a beautiful and an Aboriginal woman. She knows who the important people are. It would never occur to her not to know what to say—unless, of course, the conversation turns to intellectual or philosophical things, and then she becomes strangely fearful and lacking in selfconfidence. This, I am afraid to say, is the young lady’s secret fear, her bête noire.’ ‘I disagree,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘And yet, for all these things, she is not superficial. She has about her an ardent spiritual side. Beginning, of course, with her own Aboriginal spirituality, she has journeyed to India, with which like so many young Aboriginal people she feels a spiritual affinity, and she has taken on Buddhism, Hindu love
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epics, the I Ching. An eclectic mix, to be sure, but one which adds fascination to an already alluring personality. It must surely raise the question to any ardent young man who crosses her path: by what ingenious philosophical route has she managed to reconcile all these? Surely that road must be well worth travelling! Behind those sweet lips, which so rarely murmur anything but the most banal cliches, there must surely reside a mind wise beyond all journeying, serenely spiritual, self-sufficient and yet at the same time capable of welcoming the most passionate outbursts of love! Do you not think so, Jean-Loup? Does she not seem to you a depth worth plumbing? It is inconceivable, is it not, that those eyes, which seem to contain so much, could really be concealing just the thought of whether she should have that second chocolate eclair?’ Randhawa’s voice had risen high. He was expostulating, berating, his fists clenched and beating the air. ‘You’re right. It is inconceivable,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘Of course,’ said Randhawa. His voice returned in a moment to its usual dry, cynical tone. ‘Of course, she is just an innocent young girl. It is you and I who are not innocent, Jean-Loup.’ ‘That’s what I’ve been wondering about you. Are you innocent or guilty?’ ‘Innocent of what? Guilty of what? A sterile essentialism,’ Randhawa sneered. ‘Sexless, bloodless and universalist. A typical white man’s view, who can’t conceive of anything outside himself. Well, if I were you, I’d be hoping her fantasies about you match yours about her. Then you’ll really have a match made in hell.’ In the next moment Jean-Loup saw Petra herself. She had appeared in the open back doorway to the kitchen, behind
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Randhawa’s back. Making a gesture to Jean-Loup to keep silent, she ran silently down the back steps. Randhawa had followed Jean-Loup’s glance, but too late, Jean-Loup saw, to catch Petra’s disappearing form. ‘Everything’s been bastardised,’ said Randhawa. ‘Even the murmurings of lovers are just, sotto voce, the stammerings of the gunfire by which the white man came to rule the world.’ Jean-Loup walked out. Randhawa made no move to stop him. Walking down the wide, ironwood steps, nevertheless, Jean-Loup felt Randhawa’s presence behind him, watching him leave, felt a tingling premonition that he was about to be jumped on. The frogs had begun. He had never heard them before, or never been aware of their presence beneath the fans, the computer, the night revellers’ bibulous return. Here, in the paperbark swamp their ratcheting creaked out from under the soil, in tiny cool hollows where they had been hidden for months, waiting for rain. The sky was grey and low. A dirty yellow moon was streaked with rags of cloud. There were dull groans of thunder. Jean-Loup made his way by moonlight along the narrow track that led back to the road, jumping several times at a sudden croak from under his feet. He felt disoriented, indifferent. He realised now why people talked about whether a sick man had ‘croaked’. He reached the road and began to walk back in the direction of the community. It was difficult for him to see. Distant fissures of lightning lit up patches of the sky, brilliant white counterparts to the cracking of the dry earth, as though a manic projectionist were playing about with the light. Twice he jumped off the road and waited while a ute passed him, gunning back from the airport, its tray converted into a cage.
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Both times it was crowded with people, their feet and hands and faces pressed hard against the wire grill, oblivious to the dust and discomfort and crowding, their faces distorted in eagerness to return. Nobody noticed him standing there. Real life was being played out anywhere but here, where everything was sullen, heavy, waiting for the clouds to burst. For ten minutes, along the dark ribbon of road, the lights of the community were invisible. Then he reached a dry creek bed and a bend. Coming out of there he saw ahead of him the clusters of low houses, bunched and dimly lit as pale grapes, criss-crossed by geometric lines of road which, in the dark, looked like striations, skin torn off to reveal dark blood underneath. At the centre, at the top of the slight rise, he saw the club. It was as though he saw it for the first time. He had not noticed before how bright its lights were, how much harsher and more permanent they were than the rest of the lights around. Its green VB sign winked like a monstrous eye. Then he saw a woman ahead of him, lying in the middle of the road. At first, he thought she was injured or dead. Her face was twisted sideways at a vicious angle, her mouth and nose almost eating the dirt. He ran towards her. Her white front teeth split her dark lips, which seemed now to have grown impossibly large, flattened, like the petals of a crimson frangipani smudged across her face. The woman was Nancy Johnson. ‘Leave me alone,’ she murmured into the dust. Jean-Loup looked up. From the direction of the airport, he realised, a large vehicle was approaching: another of those utes, perhaps, with its Hella lamps and laden with people, or a concrete or crane truck on a last desperate dash out to Red Mud Bay. ‘There’s a car coming. You’ve got to get up.’
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‘Leave me alone.’ He reached down, hesitated before touching her, gently, on the shoulder. God, she was heavy. Her shoulder was like a deadweight, straining to rejoin the ground. She groaned when he tugged. That smudge of blood from her mouth was now running into the dust. He realised that there was no way he could lift her without help, and he jumped sideways instinctively as the oncoming car’s headlights swung suddenly around the bend. Ashamed of himself, he stepped forward and began signalling wildly. The car came straight for him, then swerved twenty metres away and careered by, filling his ears with its roaring engine and the incoherent shout of its driver, a white face pressed hard and angry against a shut window. He took a step back. His whole body was shaking. Nancy Johnson had not moved. He looked around and realised that there were two other people here, a woman and a man, watching from the edge of the road. ‘I can’t move her. She’s too heavy for me,’ he said. ‘Too much beer,’ said the man. The man, nevertheless, came forward, and together, taking one shoulder each, they tried to get Nancy Johnson to rise. She came up like a scarecrow. At a certain point some vitality seemed to flow back into her and she pulled herself away from the two men and began to stagger about, shouting abuse in one of the Mission Hole languages at the woman watching from the side. The other woman backed away, and for a little while Jean-Loup was relieved. Then he saw the headlights of another oncoming car. Nancy Johnson saw them too, and flung herself back in the middle of the road. ‘I want to die,’ she said. ‘You’ll get yourself killed,’ said Jean-Loup meaninglessly. The car came around the bend. Once again Jean-Loup felt
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how close it came before seeing them, felt its monstrous power as it thrust past them, chewing up the miles to somewhere else. He called out wildly. There had to be somebody who could come and somehow defuse this situation, somebody with access to a phone, somebody who, magically, could stop all this from happening. A couple of women appeared. They wandered off thirty metres down the road and began to create a kind of diversion, a roadblock. It was all done quietly, casually. There were no torches, no authoritative figures, no immovable objects brought and dumped on the road. Another woman appeared and began talking quietly to Nancy Johnson, again in a local language. Nancy stopped moaning to listen, turned her head slightly away from the dust. Jean-Loup began to step away. His presence here was irrelevant. He felt the contrast between the authority that was part of his actions and his actual power. Another car was appearing. It was a police car, a paddywagon this time. Low to the ground, its blue light spun slowly, all-seeing and alien. It slowed right down as it approached the group on the road. In first gear it cruised past, then stopped, doubled back. The people had grown silent, guilty. It was as though they were hypnotised, charmed by that revolving eye, like a bandicoot frozen in headlights, waiting to be mown down. The paddywagon stopped. Its front door opened. Sergeant Jack stepped out of the vehicle. His presence was stolid, arrogant. There was a pistol in the holster at his belt. ‘Nancy Johnson,’ he heard Sergeant Jack say in a loud voice. Nancy Johnson did not move. Sergeant Jack moved forward, caught hold of her unceremoniously under each arm.
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‘Fuckin Jesus. She’s heavy.’ Jean-Loup moved forward, just within range of the blue revolving light. ‘Why are you arresting her?’ ‘She’s not under arrest. She’s in protective custody. She’s drunk.’ Nancy Johnson seemed to recover some use of her limbs. Docilely, scarcely supported now by the arms of Sergeant Jack, she began to move towards the open black mouth of the wagon. She got a knee up into the back and with an almost graceful ease, disappeared inside. ‘She knows where she’s going,’ said Sergeant Jack. ‘Don’t you, Nancy? We’re just taking her home.’
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chapter seventeen
Reptiles and Insects
Next morning Jean-Loup walked to the community council office. It was closed. The public phone wasn’t working, but at the store they let him use the phone to ring the Mission Hole Land Council office in Darwin. Petra Gandarrwuy was out at Mission Hole, they said, and they had no contact for her. On the phone to Darwin, Jean-Loup was aware of the store manager’s eyes on him, albino and pink-rimmed, blinking as they followed his every move. Jean-Loup suddenly remembered who it was that the store manager resembled: the white rabbit in ‘Alice in Wonderland’, the one who exclaims fastidiously at the lateness of the hour and disappears down a hole. Sure enough there was a watch chain protruding from the man’s pocket and tied at the other end to a shirt button; or, at least, if it wasn’t a watch chain it was a piece of string. Solemn and musty, the man kept his eyes steadily on JeanLoup. Jean-Loup felt, for a moment, the urge to break 229
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everything in the shop, to smash down the fifty-year-old shelves and windows and fairytale atmosphere and let the real world in. ‘Do you know Petra Leonelli Gandarrwuy?’ he asked. ‘Who’s she?’ ‘One of the women here.’ The man called to his wife in the back, but she was not around. ‘What did you say her name was?’ ‘Petra.’ ‘Petra. And how long has she been here?’ ‘She’s been here all her life, as far as I know.’ ‘All her life? I’ve been here twenty-eight years, I’m afraid. I don’t know any people of that name.’ ‘She’s not white. She’s Aboriginal. She’s from one of the main clans here, the ones that run the community council.’ ‘Oh. Well in that case I wouldn’t know.’ The voice was apologetic, but only remotely. ‘I used to know some of the children by name, but that was before.’ ‘I see,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘Have you tried asking the priest?’ ‘The priest?’ ‘The priest would know them all, I should say. The ones that go to church.’ ‘There isn’t a priest here anymore. Even I know that. There hasn’t been one for ten years.’ ‘Oh.’ The store manager accepted the correction without embarrassment or regret. ‘Well, everyone comes and goes. You should try tomatoes, you know. They grow well here during the dry season, although not as well as in Toowoomba. That’s where my wife and I are retiring next year.’ ‘Oh, really?’
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‘I can tell you something about the locals, though,’ added the store manager in the same inconsequential tone. ‘One of them died here last night. One of the women. Got arrested and hung herself in gaol.’ Another funeral was being arranged at Mission Hole. JeanLoup was becoming familiar with them by now. Once again he heard the roar of engines, the thick black plumes of exhaust smoke as people fired up to go and pass on the word to other communities or out bush. He saw the intense discussion circles around campfires on the brown and overgrown front gardens, saw the messengers walking, heads down, through ragged strings of kids. He heard the wailing from inside burnt-out houses, on the verandahs of which were old mattresses piled sideways, fresh washing hanging out to dry on wire fences. Things were being hastily done, mental and physical space prepared. Music played from radios inside houses where people sat on the concrete floor, talking quietly or rocking backwards and forwards on their haunches. Taped to a rubbish bin was another of those peeling but still ubiquitous posters advertising Princess Diana’s memorial service. Suddenly it was as though funerals were everywhere. Jean-Loup was being forced into a closer and more intimate relationship with death. Could it be true, Jean-Loup wondered, that things like this are passed down through generations? He had heard of twins running in families, and mental illness and suicides. As Randhawa had once told him, for the Mission Hole people every effect has a cosmic cause. A person may die of drowning or tuberculosis or cancer or murder or heart disease, but all these things are essentially irrelevant. Hanging was the immediate cause of Nancy Johnson’s death, but what mattered, really, was the seed.
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At times like this he thought of ends. An end to striving, chasing after wealth, acceptance, love. An end to the separation of himself from the earth, the trees. A return to a state where he did not criticise or judge, love or hate, where he was not criticised or judged by others, where he was not black or white, male or female, young or old, where none of that mattered anymore. For over two weeks he had been unable to contact her—and then, on the night he went to Randhawa’s, Petra was there. She must have crept close to the house in the dark, climbed silently up the back steps, peered through the back door … Crept? Peered? What was Petra doing, creeping silently about, in her own community, on her own land? And where was she now? When he thought of Petra his heart began pounding, his breath grew faster. Petra and Randhawa must have been lovers. Randhawa had sent Petra to find out what he knew about Valerian, whether Valerian, that fatal night, had said anything to Jean-Loup. About what he was still not entirely sure. There was no other explanation for Randhawa’s extraordinary performance that night, when he must have known—as Petra had said—that Jean-Loup’s interest in Petra went far beyond her work. He didn’t want to believe it. It suddenly occurred to him that it had been staring him in the face all along, but that he had chosen to ignore it. He had had to ignore it. He was beginning to notice the way so many of his observations about Mission Hole were just extensions of things Randhawa had said, as though Randhawa’s world was more real than the world he saw about him, or that Randhawa’s imagination injected meaning into the real. There was a sense in which Randhawa had created Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy. He
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had created her image, after all, and virtually everything that was known about her in the non-Aboriginal art world had come through him. Randhawa considered himself to be Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s spokesperson, her amanuensis, the mouthpiece through which she communicated her culture to the world. Had he begun to create her paintings as well? At four o’clock the afternoon of the funeral, the storm broke. All day the clouds had been successively thickening and loosening, darkening and lightening under the sun’s influence, as though under tidal pull. Suddenly and from nowhere came a breeze. It cooled the sweat on Jean-Loup’s shirt instantly, and he looked up to a shimmering of thunder—not so different from what had been happening all day, but transformed by the breeze into something hopeful, vital. Immediately the first raindrops began. It was light at first, instantly soaked up by the dust. Within ten minutes it was raining heavily. A new smell was everywhere. It was the smell of wet grass, soaking now after six months of dry. That evening, Jean-Loup sat on the verandah, drinking from a bottle of Scotch he had smuggled in and watching the geckos crawling on the wire screen, hunting by light for blinded insects that rushed headlong into the wire. In their pale white mouths they were like little suffocating bundles of paper, Japanese fans. With a further snatch they disappeared inside. He had become familiar with the dance between gecko predator and prey, the way the insect in its heedless scrambling seemed drawn inevitably to the gecko’s mouth. The fan rushed on overhead. The last couple of weeks it had given him little relief from the heat. Now it was cool, but the fan flung at him insects that crawled on the back of his
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neck and dropped from the ceiling onto his book, resolving themselves upon landing into their various shapes, tiny caterpillars or flies or mites, and began to crawl away. A line of ants skirted around a half-moon of damp that had crept onto the floor. All of them seemingly were moving in the same direction, so that he wondered where they were going and how many of them might return. These last few hours, something had been resolved. For weeks now the earth had been itchy, the grass rasping. All of nature had been in revolt against the sun that came every day and turned everything to an inferno. Only that morning JeanLoup had left a jar of Vegemite on his breakfast table. When he returned in the afternoon it had liquidised, gone through some mysterious tropical refermentation, its heat glowing dully through the glass. It was a mistake, he thought, to imagine this as the land of crocodiles and huge snakes. Rather it was the land of insects, termites, cockroaches, those tiny gnawing things whose body masses were small enough to survive, and which spread in their millions, blindly inimical to human life. There was thunder in the distance. The rain fell softly now, lit by flashes of distant lightning that to Jean-Loup’s mind were like a lightbulb flashing on and off. For the first time that day he felt physically comfortable, even though insects crawled on one arm, even though on the other was an itching like a surface contagion sullenly waiting for another burst of heat. Something was itching at his heel. He had given up trying to keep this place clean—at least cleanliness such as he had known it in Melbourne—and now satisfied himself occasionally with sweeping aside the most obvious of the daddy-long-legs’ webs, those, for example, which festooned over the stove overnight. Nothing would dry here, and nothing had its proper place. He
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looked with desperation at the still-wet raincoat hanging off the back of a chair, at the green towelling hat on the back of another, at the clothesline he had strung across the third of the verandah he used the least, on which were damp pegs he mistook for geckos out of the corner of his eye. He was glad when a gecko caught an insect. He liked to see their fat bellies prosper, see them fucking as he did occasionally like dogs caught in his kitchen light. It was a victory of the reptile over the insect, and by extension that of the higher over the lower, and it gave him satisfaction. In the morning the insects had their revenge. He would walk out into the kitchen and see the body of some lizard, which had crawled under the door in the night and been unable to find its way out, overrun by ants. He took the broom and swept their tiny carcasses outside, where they did not smell. How much more was there to say of insects? There were volumes, a thousand times more. Fat bugs crawled under the door, and he had grown into the habit of flicking them incidentally with his foot as he walked back to the fridge or the sink, not caring which way they landed, and watching them unconcerned while upside down their legs scrabbled, waiting to be overcome by ants. Every so often a larger, more grotesquely ugly creature lumbered inside, a rhinoceros beetle so heavy on its forelegs that its tiny shiny backside teetered forward at every step. He did not know why this life that was everywhere outside scrambled so desperately to get in. He felt as though it was personally attacking him, as though his presence had somehow affronted the world outside. It rained all night. The next morning, when he went outside, the worms were everywhere. They crawled out of the ground onto stones, exposed pieces of concrete, every piece of high ground. He had to step among them. There were none
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alive now. They were each bloodied masses, jellied as he had read of jellied eels. An early monsoon had arrived. For the next two days and nights it rained. The rain draped its grey curtain over everything, filling an earth that was at first thirsty and welcoming, then replete, then subtly slipping into aqua tones, faint drowned images, until you could scarcely remember a time when there had ever not been rain. On the third morning the rain began to ease. It was no longer thunderstorm weather, just a solid build-up of greyness that sank lower and lower over the soaked wetlands, clogging up even the very thought of escape. The roads to the outside world were all cut off now, the airstrip closed. Sight and vision were restricted to fifty metres. During a lull in the rain Jean-Loup stepped outside. He picked his way gingerly over the red laterite high ground where the house had been built, skirting the slithering pools of water, turning his face away from the wet slash of the spear grass, holding up one arm against the spider webs. For half an hour he walked, past the club and the store and the blackened remains of the art centre, driven by the urge to move, the urge to uncover a secret shrouded by the rain. There was nobody else about. He stood still in a clear spot and looked at the ground. For the first time he noticed tiny things. There was a white flower poking up from a Venus flytrap, beside it the vicious pink twist of a spear-grass root piercing the earth. The rain was a lifted bridal veil. Glistening trees jigged off down the slope towards the creek, their branches like dancing cancer patients, or lepers at a nightmare rock concert, leaving pieces of themselves all over. He stooped and picked up a wet piece of wood. Instantly the cicada noise deafened him, and the termites underneath, sightlessly trying
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to escape the light, looked like little malicious children’s toys. He stumbled back towards the community. He found himself drawn towards the river, drawn in by the urge to see the miraculous sight of flowing water. He was looking, as always, mostly at the ground, taking care that his bare feet didn’t catch in the grass and slash between his toes. He stopped for a minute and picked at another termite mound. On an impulse he pulled away a thick crust of it, exposing seeds like shiny black beads and a myriad of tiny holes, over which in a moment black ants swarmed and dragged away the termites, which made no effort to escape. The swamp grass was flattened where the floodwaters ran through. He could get nowhere near the river. He was stopped two hundred metres from its normal course by a vast sheet of water. Near the edges it was gentle, grey, streaming through the paperbarks and pandanus and prickly reeds. He stood there, ankle-deep in black mud, picturing himself a thousand times smaller, a termite or cicada perhaps, the river a Zambezi roaring towards Victoria Falls. Then he looked around for detritus, something that would tell him the flood level of the previous night. It was then he saw his sister. Duchess was about twenty metres away, hanging from an upper fork of a paperbark tree. Her torso was obscured, twisted over and behind the trunk of the tree. She was wearing a pair of navy blue football shorts, with the gold stars of the Darwin Buffaloes. Individual droplets of water ran down them, caught, translucent against her glistening, coffee-brown skin. Her features had blended, somehow, with Valerian’s, so that man and woman, Aboriginal and part-Aboriginal, past and present, had become one. On her face was the expression she had had on the night she had hanged herself, twenty years ago.
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Running back from the river, he was an island that did not yet know fear. Spear grass and spurs of pandanus slashed ineffectually at his legs. He soared in his mind over pools and mud holes, not even noticing how his body landed heavily, how the black mud speckled his white flesh. He was cold, though. He came upon Maisie, whom he had met once before, boiling water under the community water tank, and suddenly limped, pulled up, dredged speech back to his frozen lips. ‘I saw my sister,’ he said. He pointed at the river. He felt his own bedraggledness, his scarecrow arm, saw his image sink and engrave itself in Maisie’s memory. Now he realised it was raining. It was coming down now even harder than last night, a physical weight pouring over him, a baptism into loneliness and despair. He held his head back. He sucked in his lower jaw to keep the water out of his nose and mouth. He saw immediately that Maisie understood. Through streaming eyelids he saw her with a blanket over her head, fleeing for the nearest house between iron bars of rain. There was a gap. Jean-Loup had no idea what he had been doing. His clothes were soaked. Perhaps an hour later he passed by the same watertank and found Maisie once again sitting under it, sipping at a now-boiled billy of tea. ‘Henry’s here,’ she said. ‘Who?’ ‘Henry. You can speak to Henry now.’ She looked at him with frightened eyes. ‘He shouldn’t have come to the club. They told him not to come. They already told him, stay away, stay away from that place, and they bash him once already.’ ‘Who bashed him?’
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‘Them council mob. Parker Gandarrwuy and them.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Don’t you know who we are?’ A small man had just appeared from the back door of a nearby house. In the light of a nearby street lamp he looked about forty-five, although it was hard to tell. He moved with jerky, seemingly involuntary movements, like somebody with the beginnings of Parkinson’s disease. His face was pinched, terrier-like, marked, Jean-Loup thought, with the determination needed to control his body. Then he fell on the ground. Jean-Loup thought at first, from the way he fell, that he was drunk. In the next moment he realised that he had seen Henry before, even spoken to him, but he could not remember where. It had fallen somehow into the scrap room of his memory. ‘He a sick man,’ said Maisie. ‘Sick from what?’ ‘Too much beer. Too much sugar in his tea. Like Lazarus, from when he a child.’ Maisie and the small man began a discussion in the Mission Hole language. It was scarcely a discussion, really, more like a set of whispered orders from Maisie. Jean-Loup could scarcely hear, let alone understand, and he doubted whether the small man could either, for he seemed to be having trouble staying on his feet. Maisie’s lips were moving intently, like the paper snapdragons made by children, open and shut. The small man said something back and Maisie withdrew theatrically, hands on her hips, looking about as though there were others to see. ‘You a coward,’ she said, distinctly. ‘You just scared.’ The small man tried to grab Maisie’s hand. Maisie pulled away, looked panicky for an instant, then turned with contempt back to Jean-Loup.
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‘Look, Henry,’ she said. ‘You can talk to this man, not to me. I can talk to you any time. I can talk to you for the rest of my life!’ Jean-Loup walked back through the community. Everything was closed. He followed the main street uphill to the club, past the health clinic and the shut-up, empty houses, when he reached an intersection and heard a man’s voice behind him. It was Henry. He seemed suddenly younger—perhaps forty, no more. The deeply scored lines, the illness in his face, had given that misleading first impression. He settled in close to Jean-Loup with a tripping, quirky walk. His beard when he turned to speak was framed against the light grey, midday clouds, sharp as a Saracen’s. ‘You follow me,’ he said. Jean-Loup did as he said. Henry walked off the main road, clearly anxious for nobody to see him, following a trail that led behind the houses and into ankle-deep water back down to the edge of the swamp. ‘You just a stranger here,’ said Henry. ‘Yeah.’ ‘You got no family, no skin name, nothing.’ ‘Is that right?’ Jean-Loup paused and looked sharply at Henry. But Henry did not seem to be making any threat or challenge. He seemed deeply preoccupied with his own problems, his words by comparison almost random. ‘I try, many times. I go to council meeting. I tell them, you got to do proper way. I tell them, that’s too much humbug, you got there.’ ‘Tell them what?’ ‘I been eating store food. Only store food, nothing else.’ ‘Why store food?’
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‘In tins. So no sorcery get in.’ Henry was staring out over the river now. His face was working, twisting incessantly. For the first time Jean-Loup felt the full force of Henry’s frustrated will. ‘Who are you?’ asked Jean-Loup. ‘I’m not anybody. I got no country left now.’ ‘Why not? Who’s taken your country?’ ‘That art centre man. That Randhawa.’ Henry turned away. He began to walk off in the direction Jean-Loup had taken once before, towards the row of small brick bungalows, now abandoned, where Ulrich had told him the Catholic Brothers used to live. Abruptly it began to rain again. Henry seemed even smaller now, dwarfed by javelins of rain. At the first large tree he turned and waited for Jean-Loup to catch up. ‘What do you mean? How did he take your country?’ ‘I’m that dead man’s brother,’ he said. ‘That man who been murdered, last time.’ Henry pointed. Jean-Loup glanced at Henry’s pointing hand. He saw the top joints of two fingers missing, saw the stubby, leprous ends, and remembered suddenly where he had seen Henry before. He was the old man, his face hidden under the orange baseball cap, whom Jean-Loup had spoken to that time under the tree. Or rather, the man he had presumed to be old, the one who had warned him about death adder country, there near the contractors’ house, when he had first experienced the sensation of being watched. Henry indicated the first of the tiny bungalows. ‘You speak to that man there,’ he said. Jean-Loup’s eyes and ears were burning. He wanted to let his whole body slip within the flames. He had seen things which
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he should never have seen, not secrets anymore, but passion, lies, shame. Everything here happened faster: the growing, the dying, the process of decay. That was why they had so many insects here, to keep turning everything back into dirt. That night, too, the night of her suicide, they had been out there, just like the night of Valerian’s death. Men lurching in the dark. They were drinking, fighting. The coppers had turned up early in the night, their lights shining pale blue as a grave robber’s lamp. Duchess had come back but his father was too drunk and she wasn’t going to sleep on the concrete floor with the free-loaders, not her with her pride and her slicked-up hair. And so she went outside. Jean-Loup covered up his eyes and ears and his sister walked out sober and alone into the night. He opened his door when the shouting stopped. There had been some kind of argument over cards. Now that was over, struck dumb. Men were standing, frozen, looking out the back verandah across the dark stubble of grass. He remembered things in snapshots after that. Images of excessive clarity were enclosed between blank walls of time. A fog, a great greyness had finished its journey downwards and engulfed everybody. Each person became a lighthouse, a semaphore, eyeless and earless and mutely broadcasting their own distress. Finally the first person found a torch and for a moment, as though at a children’s birthday party and Duchess about to blow out the candles, sumptuously lit the dead woman’s face. It all took much longer than it should. At some stage in the drawn-out, nauseating proceedings the cops arrived with ropes and a chainsaw, with which they cut off various branches of the tree. They had a camera, too. They moved everybody
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back and they took pictures. They asked where her relatives were, where she had been staying. His father finally appeared and for the first time told the locals who he was. For the time being everybody was too busy; nobody had anything to say. One arm became jammed deeply into a fork of the tree. When they finally got her out they dropped her on the ground, dropped the car boot lid once, twice, on her zippered-up head. Every night for years her bone-white image would appear on the inside of his eyes. When that stopped he thought she was truly dead. Perhaps, instead, she had just jumped on an air current, flung herself, an ace of diamonds into the sky. His sister’s face was like the moon, her eyes the stars.
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chapter eighteen
Fred Heisner
In the front garden of the bungalow where Henry had directed Jean-Loup were rows of vegetables. There were Chinese cabbage, buk choy, beans on wooden frames and glistening green capsicum, pumpkin whose fruit sheltered coyly under curling, white-haired leaves. Each of the rows was raised above ground, formed by long strips of corrugated iron cut lengthways and tied with wire, and stacked with coffee rock at each open end. Jean-Loup knocked on a second-hand front door which didn’t quite fit the original frame. A set of original glass louvres had been broken and replaced with even older metal ones and with a corrugated iron shutter. Wire had been used to retie a gate post to a star picket. Old sheets and bamboo screens replaced original curtains and blinds. In places holes or termite-eaten timber had been replaced with a muddy concrete paste, peppered while wet with variously coloured bathroom tiles. With a deafening noise storm water poured 244
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into a bucket from where it ran into pipes running around two sides of the house. ‘Good afternoon,’ said a cultivated voice. Jean-Loup turned. At the door was a white man, easily eighty years old. He wore bare feet, and homemade cotton drawstring trousers. He was small and wiry, with a sharply cut, rust-red burnished face. ‘I’ve been tinkering with that watering system all dry,’ he said. ‘It’s running my fridge at the moment quite nicely, but obviously I never counted on the noise.’ He turned and padded into the house, skirting a cloth hanging from the ceiling, a large and broken-down wardrobe supported on bricks, a collection of old car batteries trailing leads. Jean-Loup followed. They reached a kitchen and dining area from which part of the back wall had been removed. Through flyscreen and over a metre-high brick wall, they looked out to a backyard dotted with tiny, corrugated iron constructions of various sizes, from phone booth to cardboard box. In colour they varied from post-box red, lemon yellow to eggshell blue. All were motley, banged together with nails, weighted down with rocks, pieces of old timber, whatever else was to hand. ‘They’re for my animals,’ said the old man. ‘Or they were, until the RSPCA heard about it and told me to take it down. I even had a sign out the front at one stage: Fred’s Zoo.’ ‘Fred?’ ‘Fred Heisner. You’ve probably never heard of me. Of course, I knew Parker Gandarrwuy’s father when we were both not much more than boys. You’re a bit wet. I’ll get you a towel. Can I also offer you a lemongrass tea?’ ‘Thanks,’ said Jean-Loup. He remembered, suddenly, the name he had read in Up North, Michael Stoneham’s book,
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three nights before: the white man, the pearler, who had settled here nearly seventy years before. ‘Have you been here a long time?’ ‘In this place? No. Just twenty years. I first visited Mission Hole when I was practically a boy. That was in about 1930, I think.’ ‘Wasn’t that before the Catholic Church even founded this place?’ ‘They didn’t found it.’ With extraordinary briskness, he passed Jean-Loup a towel from the wardrobe, then scrubbed at tin cups and set water to boil over an ancient cast-iron stove. There were no shelves or kitchen cupboards. Rather, the plates and cups were in wooden racks, or hanging from nails banged into the wall. ‘I came out here two years before any other Europeans had even heard of this place. If it wasn’t for my influence, the first missionaries would probably have been killed.’ ‘What brought you out here?’ ‘I was working a pearling lugger. I had to stop here to do some repairs. The people here helped me. We began to trade. Later, the Catholics tried to claim I was exploiting them. When I wouldn’t join their lay ministry they lobbied the government in Darwin to grant them the lease. For the next ten years I was just like the Aborigines, a squatter on my own piece of land.’ ‘Did they kick you out?’ ‘They offered me some money to leave. Compensation for all the improvements I’d made. Nothing, of course, for my labour for the previous twenty years. I went to Darwin. I only came back here in the seventies, when the Mission Hole people got land rights.’ ‘Why did you come back?’
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The old man shrugged. ‘I thought I could help. Besides, the people here invited me back.’ The water was boiling and Fred Heisner brought the lemongrass teas. Outside the rain still gushed from the roof and through the pipe which ran just behind the kitchen sink, operating—as Jean-Loup could see now—a tiny turbine, apparently running power to the batteries and to the old, single-door fridge. ‘I think when I came out here I wanted to help, too,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘Be forgiven. I wonder sometimes about what somebody said to me, Randhawa I think. There’s no such thing as reconciliation or forgiveness. The depth of hatred is too great.’ ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘I’m a financial investigator, from Melbourne. I was invited out here by the Aboriginal Artists’ Association to conduct an audit. Officially I was to clear up any allegations about the Aboriginal artist, Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy. The very first night I was here a man was murdered. Valerian Pride. He had met me at the airport that same afternoon. Effectively that was the end of the investigation. Nobody would talk. I feel as though I’m being shown the surface of a story, and as soon as I start to explore the next level I get shut out.’ ‘Why are you still here, then?’ asked Heisner. His voice was flat, scarcely curious. Jean-Loup had the sudden sense that he knew the answer already. ‘I’m trying to find out about my sister,’ he said. The old man said nothing. His blue eyes were bright, bulbous, flecked with rust-red lashes. His fingers touched lightly around his half-finished cup of tea. ‘You want forgiveness,’ he said. ‘Is that what you want?’
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Heisner stood up and walked into another room. JeanLoup heard the sound of things being shifted about. Several minutes later he emerged with a wooden packing crate, which he placed on the kitchen table between them. ‘From the floods,’ he said. ‘You were here during the floods?’ ‘I had no choice. I’m eighty-seven years old. The helicopter took me away.’ His white, bony fingers stabbed inside the crate. He brought out a sheaf of papers and dumped it on the table. The papers were old, and covered in blue, watery handwriting. Over and over the old man’s fingers re-entered the crate: like crab legs, Jean-Loup thought, or like a fisherman, rummaging for the swim bladder in the guts of his catch. ‘I can’t do anything about the past,’ said Fred Heisner. ‘It’s the present you’ve got to change. I get people who come here. Mission Hole people, young people, some of the old ones too. I let them stay here, as long as they’re not drunk and they don’t bring grog. They don’t want to talk. They don’t come looking for anything. Mostly, all they want is rest.’ At the bottom of the box he brought out a blue manila folder, worn at the edges, browned and faded. He held it lightly, balancing it on the tips of those almost translucent fingers. He spun it around and tossed it on the table in front of Jean-Loup. ‘Valerian brought this here,’ said Heisner. ‘He said that, if he was killed, I was to give it to the first person from the government who came asking after him.’ Jean-Loup glanced inside the folder. Then, clutching it to him, he stood up to leave. ‘I suppose you’re from the government, then, aren’t you?’ asked Heisner.
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‘How did he get it?’ asked Jean-Loup. ‘He took it, of course. Stole it from the art centre during the flood. Or should I say, stole it back.’ ‘What do you mean, stole it back?’ ‘It was his country on that painting. Nobody should have been allowed to paint that without his permission. To him that was theft—or worse than theft, a desecration. The colours weren’t even right, or the stories. It was worse than the gold mine, he told me. At least the mines went around some of his sacred sites. Here they were just destroyed.’ ‘Why would Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy have painted somebody else’s country?’ ‘It wasn’t Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy. It was a white person. No Aboriginal person would have painted such a thing.’ So Valerian slashed the painting, thought Jean-Loup. He took Randhawa’s records and he slashed the painting. But he must have known Randhawa would come looking for him, especially when Randhawa found out about Valerian meeting me. Why didn’t Valerian tell me about it straight away, in the car from the airport? Probably because there were other people in the tray, the back windows were broken and they might have heard. Perhaps, that very night, after he dropped the others off, he was planning on coming back in private to talk. Maybe, when he was killed, he was on his way. ‘How would he have known what the papers were worth?’ Heisner shrugged. ‘He could read and write. Obviously. Besides, he probably had other avenues for knowing what was going on.’ ‘You’re saying other people knew about the forgeries?’ ‘Undoubtedly.’ ‘Why didn’t anybody do anything?’
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‘Who says they didn’t? They just didn’t do anything you would recognise, that’s all. They use their own system. What are they going to gain by running to the white men’s law? They use the law, where they can, to work out some process of their own.’ Fred Heisner wasn’t just talking about the forgeries, JeanLoup realised. He was talking about that thing which had troubled Jean-Loup since he first arrived at Mission Hole: why there were no witnesses to the murder, why nobody on the community had spoken to him about Valerian’s death. It wasn’t that they were apathetic, or incapable. On the contrary, they were the real decision makers. As Heisner said, they used their own system. They just didn’t do anything he would recognise, that was all. ‘Aren’t they concerned about Lazarus? I mean, an innocent person’s in gaol.’ ‘Who says he was innocent? Innocent of that crime, maybe. Maybe guilty of others. It’s been a process of negotiation. People have to make the best of things. Besides, one stupid police officer can have a lot of power.’ Heisner laughed. There was a harsh, almost metallic quality to the sound, without either friendliness or malice. Jean-Loup had heard more or less the same laughter from both children and adults at Mission Hole, when they were faced with minor accidents or painful falls, bruises or broken arms or with working without pay for twenty years—the taken-forgranted minutiae of life. ‘Take that folder away from here. It’s white man’s business now.’ Jean-Loup knew exactly what it was, of course, the moment he opened the folder in the shelter of Fred Heisner’s front porch.
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There had to be a second set of books. Any experienced person, any good accountant, could see that. It was just a matter of whether Randhawa had been keeping them, or somebody else—Parker Gandarrwuy, perhaps, or one of the others he had never been able to meet. In Randhawa’s writing, that black, crabbed handwriting he had spent many hours studying, was a list of expenses. Paint, canvas, brushes, bark, transport, airfares, accommodation, even postage. All were clearly itemised and dated with a precision he could not have surpassed himself. In another column was a list of sales. It tallied perfectly in most cases with the figures he had suspected, or had obtained from galleries outside. There were figures carried forward, profits, a monthly balance sheet. In two minutes’ perusal he could see that everything was there. And yet the exhilaration was brief. ‘Creating a work of art,’ Linda had once told him, ‘is like working out an intricate puzzle. The clues and the final form are all within you. The difficult thing is to work them out without falling into banality or illusion. You’re discovering answers that were within yourself all the time.’ ‘You make art sound like a religion,’ Jean-Loup had replied. She had surprised him, laughing. ‘That’s the classical view,’ she said. ‘Art was like a religion. Artists slept and worshipped their muses like nuns sleep with Jesus Christ. But only old prudes believe that now. There’s no answers in religion anymore; why should we look for them in art? Postmodernists are only allowed to ask questions.’ This, suddenly, was how Jean-Loup felt. His fleeting moments of inspiration were quite inadequate to the questions he was posed. For one instant, like that moment just before,
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everything would seem to make sense, and then in the next he would see that all he had done was make one tiny logical step out of thousands, drawn a single line between two unconnected ideas. Flashes of inspiration like Bernoulli’s happened only once in a hundred years. Perhaps, if Linda’s theory was correct, they didn’t happen at all anymore. Randhawa wasn’t doing it for himself. The money was being channelled, not into any private bank account, but into Mission Hole Land Council funds. With the folder tucked inside his shirt, Jean-Loup began to walk back, taking a circuitous route this time, one that ran along the edge of the swamp where he hoped he would not be seen. In the last ten minutes the rain had stopped. A slight, almost cool breeze was blowing, swirling plastic bags and bits of rubbish about. A group of children rushed past him. He watched them stop, swing around each other and then around him, dancing with ferocious concentration. He felt they knew everything he had done. There was water everywhere. It flowed in trickles and rivulets from the higher ground, became a stream across the track, a river beside it and swept down until it became a torrent in the swamp. The land was buckling, collapsing. It could no longer support the weight of water. For some time now the floodwaters would continue to rise, like a fever which continues to rise even after the illness itself has been purged, while onlookers watch to find out whether the patient will survive. Jean-Loup’s hair, feet and ankles were wet. The rest of him had remained protected from the rain by the green japara jacket he had put on that morning. The wetness now in those parts of his body came from sweat, from the inside. Water was welling up from within, willing him to join the
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flow. Only this thin plastic skin saved him from dissolution into the flood. From a bend in the track the contractors’ house came into view. Abruptly Jean-Loup stopped. There was a figure walking through the back garden of the house. He wore a long grey jacket, like a poncho, that covered and hid everything, including the arms. He walked quickly, nimbly. Two at a time he sprang up the back steps. The figure found the back door locked, but that wasn’t a problem. Within ten seconds, Jean-Loup could not see from a distance exactly how, the man had it opened. He took a quick look around and disappeared inside. It wasn’t Ulrich. There was no doubt about that. He was too short, too sharp, the litheness of his movements—even covered in that jacket—too obviously recognisable to JeanLoup. That hobbling he had seen last time, that walking stick, must have been temporary at most. There was no sign of it now. There was no doubt it was Randhawa. No doubt Randhawa was looking for him. Jean-Loup turned around and began to run.
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chapter nineteen
Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy
Through the crying splash of insects on his face and arms, through the rain that had squeezed from the clouds and run into everything, warm as blood, Jean-Loup ran. He knew without thinking where to go. He simply followed his own footsteps back to where the wheel ruts began, sliced through the shin-deep flowing water, scattering tadpoles and passing— the image not even registering until later—a snake coiled like a wet rag in a snatch of spear grass, just above flood level. He passed the garbage dump, with its fridges and near-new cars. At another graveyard, further on, a tiny doll caught his eye, propped on a wooden platform and lovingly corralled in chicken-wire. Jean-Loup drank and ate and breathed water. He had become a creature of that element now, swinging his way along water trails, eyeballs dull and all-seeing as a fish, rounding corners with a casual flick of his tail. It was eight kilometres from the edge of Mission Hole 254
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Community to the airport. Slowed up by the water and soft ground, it took Jean-Loup well over an hour to cover half the distance. Then he heard the sound of a vehicle coming from behind. Lungs rasping, he stopped to listen. Long before it was visible its sound had filled the air, driving off, screeching, a band of white cockatoos. Its engine roared as it accelerated out of the creek beds that had formed in every tiny depression. It could only be a four-wheel-drive. Jean-Loup was standing in the middle of a swamp. There were no trees. His only cover was the metre-high grass, in which he would be shin-deep in water. His greatest problem was not a place to hide. He had seen that when he first looked behind him, seeking the source of the sound, and realised that in the mud his every step had taken him in up to the ankles, leaving footprints even an accountant could have read. He had no option. He jumped off the track. He took a few water-logged leaps into the swamp and crouched down. The machine came on. He could see its nightmarish whiteness glinting through the trees. When it reached the swampy area where he was hiding it slowed down. Inching through the mud, it finally reached the spot where Jean-Loup’s footprints left the track. It stopped altogether. The driver, Jean-Loup could see, was leaning forward. Through the darkened glass she was peering from the driver’s seat through the passenger window, gaze moving periscopelike towards where Jean-Loup was crouching. Jean-Loup could not, at first, clearly see her face. When she wound down the driver’s side window Jean-Loup could make out her features more clearly against a lighter grey patch of sky, and he remembered that same face, outlined in different circumstances against a patch of starry night sky. He stood up and walked out of the swamp. The decision
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was instantaneous, made by muscle reflex, perhaps heart, without prior mediation of the mind. The passenger-side window wound down, the door locks clicked up. Petra’s face was leaning towards him. ‘I’ve got to get to the airport,’ he said. ‘That’s a waste of time, and dangerous. The airstrip’s closed, haven’t you heard? Nothing can get in or out by air.’ Petra was dressed this time in loose-fitting, ochre and red cotton trousers that were rolled above her bare feet and ankles, and in a subdued dark-green shirt. Not her office clothes, Jean-Loup thought. These were made for the bush. ‘How did you know I was out here?’ ‘It’s not that hard to find a city man, Jean-Loup. Not when you’re bush born and bred.’ ‘I thought you were Randhawa after me.’ ‘You’re lucky I’m not.’ There was a fork in the road, or scarcely a fork, really, more a spot where a vehicle, some weeks before, might have skidded off and lost itself against a tree. Petra spun the wheel and they were off the airport road. There was very little to follow. Grass had overgrown any wheel markings that might once have been there. The bush had turned a vivid, biting green. Cycads corkscrewed upwards, their fronds flattened against the sky, sharp as stained glass. Above them, red tails splashes of scarlet, flew a pair of black cockatoos. The wheels bit deeply into the mud, plastering it over the back windscreen and halfway up the doors. The vehicle swayed, half-sank. Its hard metal surface seemed, increasingly, the only sure thing in a dissolving world. ‘Where have you been?’ ‘I’ve been watching, and listening. When you came back here Randhawa started watching you. You never noticed? He
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saw you meet Henry. He saw where you went, to Fred’s house. He went and waited for you back at the house. I was watching too. When I saw you turn and run, I went looking for you by car.’ ‘Why did you ring me in Melbourne? What were you doing, that night I had dinner at Randhawa’s place?’ ‘You must have worked it out by now. Randhawa and I were together, before. Besides, I wanted to check you’d be okay. It’s not safe with Randhawa anymore, not by yourself.’ ‘Do you know what Fred Heisner gave me?’ Petra glanced downwards without curiosity at the hard flat section visible under his jacket. ‘He gave you your proof. Your whitefella proof. Anyone can see.’ ‘So you know about the forgeries, too. You must have known. When did you find out? Why didn’t you help me before?’ ‘You’re not the main man, Jean-Loup. There’s other people behind this, who know much more than you. You’re just like Captain Cook. You keep talking as though you’re discovering everything for the first time.’ She jerked her head, indicating the folder. ‘That’s not important. It changes nothing. We been living that life, Jean-Loup. We know what’s going on.’ ‘Why didn’t you do anything, then?’ Petra did not reply. She was right, Jean-Loup realised. From the beginning he had thought of himself as a detective, the one who was there to work things out. He hadn’t thought enough about what other people had worked out for themselves. ‘All right, then. I apologise. But when did you find out about Randhawa?’ ‘He’s been here fifteen years. It’s not easy to find out. You begin to suspect. Because you suspect, you begin to act strange. He begins to act strange. Why is this happening? Is it
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because you’ve changed, you’ve become mistrustful? You begin to wonder whether you’re wrong, whether it’s because you’re making him paranoid that he’s become like that, such a good man driven off the rails. Haven’t you ever seen that happen, Jean-Loup? You begin to think that it’s all your fault, that he’s quite right to blame you, abuse you …’ Mud flew, spattering against the windscreen. Jean-Loup marvelled at the determination needed to control the vehicle in this terrain. Her determination, which he had never really fully noticed until now. ‘So why did you come to Mission Hole?’ she said. ‘You said you’d tell me, but you never have.’ ‘It’s because of my father. His name was Terry Wild. He was out here as a lay assistant with the Catholics, during the fifties. He had a child with a woman here. I don’t know who my sister’s mother was. My father was asked to leave. My sister was taken to Darwin, to one of those institutions for partAboriginal children, maybe to Retta Dixon Home or Garden Point. Twenty-five years later she reappeared where we were living in New South Wales. I was eight years old. It was too much for my mother. She left. Duchess left too, but every now and then for years she’d come back. I don’t know where she’d been living, around the place somewhere, probably in the streets. I didn’t even know who she was. I used to hate her. I had no idea about my father’s past.’ He had understood, since that time, from what part of the mind war stories are constructed. Suddenly it was as though an explosive presence had hit the house. He remembered flying glass, the constant coiled tension in his stomach, the sudden attraction of oblivion. He remembered the smile Duchess wore on the day before her death, as she knotted around her neck a raggedly regal, multicoloured scarf.
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‘When I was fifteen,’ he said, ‘she killed herself at the back of my father’s house, and I ran away.’ Petra was silent a long time. She drove the car with extraordinary skill. ‘When Guy Randhawa first came here,’ she said, ‘this place was just a trouble place, no good place. The government wanted to close it down. We had grog, from white people. There was smuggling, selling, two hundred bucks a carton, maybe more. This schoolteacher was especially bad. Randhawa marched around to his house with a spear. Threw it from behind the house, stuck it straight into his back door, just like that. Everybody else was too scared. Too much mission in them still. The schoolteacher got airlifted out. He said he’d been attacked. Letters flew everywhere. The department got onto the council, threatened to close the school down. Randhawa helped save the school. ‘One other time. Two, three years ago, there was this travelling salesman. I don’t know how he got a permit. I think he reckoned he was from the government, doing scientific research. He started asking all the old people questions, about their traditional medicines, the plants and all that. One old man was called Silly Billy. Nobody ever used to take him hunting anywhere, out to his own country. They were scared he was gonna die on them, they’d get the blame. Well, this feller had a car. He took Silly Billy out to his country and made him walk all over the place for three days, collecting plants. No food, his feet were bleeding. Randhawa found out. That man wasn’t really from the government, he was from a pharmaceutical company. He was coming out here looking for bush medicine. Take the plants and make patented drugs. Randhawa got all his leaves and plants taken off him. Got the bloke chucked out. A billion-dollar
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industry, and do you know what they tried to pay Billy? Forty bucks.’ ‘You must have admired him,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘I did more than admire,’ said Petra. ‘When did this start happening? Why didn’t you tell me all this when we went to Darwin?’ ‘I didn’t trust you.’ ‘You didn’t trust me?’ ‘I didn’t know it was going to turn out that way.’ Jean-Loup had a feeling of lightness, unreality. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Now the shit’s going to hit the fan.’ ‘I suppose so. If they get Randhawa, I guess the art centre’s going to fold. The government’s going to love it. It’s all played right into their hands.’ At that moment the car slid, then stopped. They were in the middle of a swamp. Petra revved, spun the wheels, but they only ground three or four inches further into the mud. ‘Shit.’ Jean-Loup got out. He sank in mud halfway to his knees. The land had changed. They were in salt-water country now. Mangrove roots twisted into black mud, the sparse limp leaves swollen with salt. It had started once again to rain. It scarcely seemed like rain anymore, just hot wet drops squeezed like an afterthought from the greyness. ‘Good driving,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘I’m amazed we made it this far.’ ‘I’ve made it all the way during the wet.’ ‘Where are we going?’ ‘To the next barge landing. They drop off supplies for the outstation. We’re in luck. The barge comes by tomorrow morning, and you can be on it back to Darwin.’
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‘Which outstation? Do you mean Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy?’ Petra was out of the car. Her bare feet found mangrove roots as toeholes, making scarcely any impression in the mud. Already she was twenty metres ahead, turning back at JeanLoup. ‘Come on. We’ve got to move. Tide coming in.’ The rain skeetered down. Hermit crabs pranced, spindly and elegant, between its drops. On the edge of silvery pools of salt water, mudskippers stopped and blew out their tissue-thin membranes. In the rain, at least, the mosquitoes stayed away. Jean-Loup tried at first to follow Petra’s footsteps, placing his own feet, now bare, on the muddy black roots hers had touched. He floundered, sank to his knees, had to rip himself from the swamp with main force. They were very near the sea now. To his right, he could see where the mangroves thinned out. A grey and salty bay, the colour and shape of a fingernail clipping, cut them off from sea and sky. The tide was still out, but moving. Little rivulets slid past them, launching themselves with increasing speed and force into the mangroves. ‘Stay under cover. Got to stay in the mangrove,’ called out Petra, now thirty metres ahead. They had made their way half a kilometre or more from the car to where they could see open water. They were now following the wide sweep of bay towards a peninsula. The peninsula was more thickly wooded than where they were now. Jean-Loup could see eucalypts, and higher, at the tip of the headland, a reddish-brown sandstone cliff, whorled with white. At the mouth of a tidal creek they reached a large fig tree full of fruit bats. Petra stopped here a minute, allowing Jean-Loup to catch up, then plunged in waist-deep across the creek. ‘Aren’t you worried about crocodiles?’ he called.
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‘Just splash, and make a noise. We got to move.’ She was off and up, slim body swinging, feet searching expertly for the higher ground. Jean-Loup had no choice but to follow. In the salty, swirling water he had to hold the papers high above his head. He was greatly relieved to come out. Gradually, as they made their way around the bay, the ground grew drier, and as it dried, Petra slowed imperceptibly, allowing Jean-Loup to catch up. He was exhausted, but slowly able to regain his breath. From behind now, he watched her moving, and was filled with a new kind of admiration. It was a feeling of her intense strangeness, an appreciation of how at home she was in this different world. ‘Petra. Stop.’ She stopped, came back, picked absently at the bark of a tree while he struggled for fresh air. ‘Why did you sleep with me, that time?’ She smiled for the first time. ‘I don’t know. You poor boy. You poor white boy. I could tell.’ ‘What could you tell?’ She turned away from him, grinning, the rain running down her nose and cheeks like tears. ‘You just a poor white boy, pretending,’ she said again. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you’re different out here. You even talk differently. More in the Aboriginal way.’ ‘Why not? This my mother’s country.’ ‘I was in love with you, before. I still am.’ ‘We got to move.’ Petra turned, and ran. Among the paperbarks she was clean, black, lithe, a Dreamtime figure, thought Jean-Loup. He began to run. The trees closed in around her. He would lose sight of her for seconds and then suddenly catch a glimpse of her, a figure silhouetted against bark, legs flying, one arm raised as though in salute. She
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seemed to be gliding across the wet ground. She was part of that picture on the front of Brother O’Gorman’s book, the loincloth-clad figures in eternal limbo. She was, he realised, his sister, Duchess, as she might have become. His breath came in gasps. Around him the roots, the boggy hollows, the slashing branches grabbed at him, but the menace had gone from them, they slipped off him uselessly, slimy dream fingers, unable to impede. They came, suddenly, to a clearing. It was a line of sandhills, with the wind and rain in their face, and beyond that the sea. Petra stopped. ‘We’re here.’ ‘Where’s here?’ She indicated her lips for silence, and turned. Jean-Loup followed her gaze. They were, he realised, on the opposite side of the headland. The sandhills swept around in a shallow curve, a mirror image of that on the other side. At the far end a cliff rose out of the sea. On the top of that cliff there was a house. Jean-Loup and Petra began to walk. Petra was careful this time, keeping behind trees or the barrier of sand, keeping out of view from the house. It was a two-storey house, built on steel columns supporting a rich, dark-brown wood. There was a high, sharply pitched roof and wide verandahs. The front verandah looked straight out to sea. In the driving rain the place looked solemn, battling against the elements. Even so, it was possible to imagine it on a dry-season evening, with the blue sky, the flamingo sunset, the white caps on the sea below the verandah, frothing on the shore like champagne. Jean-Loup and Petra drew close. From fifty metres away it was possible to see other things about the house: the wide louvred windows, the steel shutters, the lift that led from the
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elevated section to the concrete slab below. On the verandah, and through the upstairs windows, too, you could see paintings. Large paintings. Slashes of vermilion, tin-bright enamel and polymer, works whose like he had seen before in art books, but never in the art centre at Mission Hole, where only the traditional colours were used. ‘Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy,’ he breathed. They crept in silence closer to the house. The place seemed deserted. There were no cars, no tools or rubbish around the house, no sign that anybody had recently been there. The place seemed like a display home, something that might have won a tropical architects’ design award. From behind a large tamarind tree they looked up at the closed front door on the second storey. Keeping under the house so as to be out of sight of the windows, Petra ran silently to the flight of steps and up to the landing. A couple of minutes later she returned. ‘Locked,’ she said. ‘And deadlocked.’ ‘Where would she be?’ ‘Not there.’ Petra pointed at a line of sandhills. Jean-Loup could see nothing at first, then just a flash of iron. He put one foot on a low branch of the tamarind tree, hauled himself up to get a better view. Partially sheltered from the wind between two sandhills was a construction of corrugated iron. It was low, its roof probably no more than two metres high. Timber corner posts, pitted by termites and the sea, jutted disjointedly from the sand, and although at the moment there was scarcely more than a breeze, one corner of the rusty tin flapped, slack and empty, against the wood. They were fifty metres from the shack with only the sandhills for cover. Petra ran ten metres, then dropped to the ground and began to crawl forward, army-style. Jean-Loup
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tried to copy her. The wet sand stuck to his face. The folder of papers, tucked into his pants like a moneybelt, was by now soaked through. He could see practically nothing. He followed Petra’s bare feet, which inched forward, her big toes levering into the sand, until finally, after a long time, the vague greyness into which he was staring became dark. The smell hit them first. The shack had no door and no floor, just tarpaulins and blankets laid over the sand. It was dark inside. In one corner was a fireplace, just a billy sitting in some ashes, and next to that a couple of wooden packing crates, one of them up-ended for sitting on, the other containing a few tins of food. Twisted and heaped in the furthest corner was a pile of old blankets. ‘Stay there,’ hissed Petra in his ear. She stepped inside. With a shock Jean-Loup realised Petra was sobbing. Her shoulders shook, and from her throat came a low, almost guttural moan. She took two steps towards the pile of blankets in the corner. She was calling out, singing softly in the Mission Hole language, pleading. The pile of blankets moved. What had seemed a darkbrown, dirty edge was an old woman’s arm, withered and gnarled. The hand stretched out towards Petra. The cracked voice, Jean-Loup realised, was calling first for water. A corner of the blanket slipped, uncovering the old woman’s face. It was skeletal, half-starved, the skin stretched drum-tight across the bone. Jean-Loup would not have recognised it but for the eyes. Despite the cataracts creeping across they were limpid, clear. Amazingly they still had an edge of humour. It was the same woman whose photograph he had seen in Melbourne, the woman who had claimed of the so-called Iron Lady, the British prime minister whose name she shared, ‘That Balanda politician, she stole that name from me.’
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There was a noise from behind. Jean-Loup moved to his right, flinching. He was caught a terrific blow on the left shoulder. Pain engulfed him. Petra leapt to the crate by the fireplace, grabbed from it a kitchen knife. There was a white flash of blade as she sent the knife whistling across the room. He thought at first she had buried it in him. Dark hands encircled him, dragging him down. He was able to twist around. They were Randhawa’s hands trying to get a grip around his neck, and it was Randhawa’s face staring into his: only it was painted up now in red, ochre and blue, and twisted with hatred and pain. He was moving his mouth, trying as the knife in his shoulder weakened him to spit out his words. ‘I am no thief,’ he was saying. ‘You are the thief.’ As he and Randhawa fell to the floor, Jean-Loup’s last thought was that Randhawa really was Aboriginal: a kidney fat man, the warrior, with his killing stick, his paint and his piece of blue rope. Then Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy spoke. ‘You stole my country,’ he heard her say in a clear voice: to Randhawa, to Jean-Loup, perhaps to the whole world. ‘Now you got to put it right.’
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chapter twenty
Epilogue
Lazarus Johnson’s lawyer Mark Lavazzo had left with the other lawyers, on the first plane out of Mission Hole the day before. Lavazzo reminded Jean-Loup of one of the barramundi in his office aquarium, overweight and out of his element. His face was red and hungover, and his white knees under his colonialstyle shorts were as pudgy as a schoolboy’s. The coronial inquiry wasn’t over yet. Randhawa would have to give evidence, of course, when he was out of hospital. Petra and Jean-Loup had finished their statements, which the prosecution had not sought to challenge. Unofficially, everybody knew about Randhawa’s tape-recorded statement, made when he regained consciousness, three weeks before. It was enough, the prosecution lawyers intimated over their drinkies at the club. Randhawa would be charged with Valerian’s murder. The charges against Lazarus Johnson would be dropped. 267
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Now, everybody else was leaving too. After eight weeks of flooding, the road out of Mission Hole was finally accessible to four-wheel-drives. The men were off to the footy grand final in Darwin, at which several of the Mission Hole boys were going to play. For the first time that morning the skies had cleared, and from his special spot Jean-Loup watched the first plane back to Darwin take off, its outline etched sharply against the blue. ‘In all this darkness,’ Jean-Loup read in what had once been an expensive coffee-table book on Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s work, ‘there was one glimmer of hope. It was culture. In one of the strange twists which characterise the colonial process, non-Aboriginal people had by the early 1980s conceived a fascination for the culture which hitherto they had despised. What was the sacred knowledge which these people had guarded so closely? What was the secret of their ancestral links to the land? Perhaps this fascination was just another example of jaded European palates searching for the latest new thing. Perhaps they were like the aristocrats of the late eighteenth century, transporting their noble savages back to the motherland in chains. Perhaps it was guilt, or disillusionment with narrow suburban values. Most likely, it was the next stage in the long artistic search to repair the psychic damage wrought by migration, and reforge a genuine European link with the land.’ The book’s cover was going mouldy now. In just three weeks in this place the pages had stuck together. All the colours in the plates of the artist’s best-known works had run together, coalesced into uniform watercolours of blue and green and grey. The same thing had happened to the other books—Brother O’Gorman’s, and Michael Stoneham’s, which Ulrich had left behind. Whether water dripped from the roof,
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or soaked upwards, or just permeated everything, Jean-Loup did not know. All three seemed likely. In some ways, he liked Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s works better like this. It was as though the gallery presentation, the artificial vividness had been washed down, allowing an older and more natural pattern to appear. They seemed more transient now, more like paintings done on sand or bark, like things that had sprung from the earth. They were all genuine as it turned out, the paintings in this book. Randhawa had begun his forgeries only when Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s sight began to fail her, two years before—when the artist could no longer paint, perhaps, or when Randhawa had decided he had the right to paint for her. In his statement, Randhawa had claimed, variously, to be Valerian’s brother, then his cousin, then Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s son. It was a claim the lawyers dismissed as the ravings of a sick and possibly insane man. Mark Lavazzo knew more than anybody else about the official story now. As Lazarus Johnson’s lawyer he was the only person other than the police and prosecutions to have actually read a transcript of Randhawa’s statement. Two nights before they had been at the club, Lavazzo and Jean-Loup and a junior solicitor. The coroner and the government lawyers had sat through a couple of drinks and then departed. They had paid lip service to solicitor–client privilege, on the way learning all they needed to know. ‘But how did Randhawa get away with it?’ After a few drinks Lavazzo’s voice had grown truculent. The rest of the club was empty. Whether out of respect, fear or disinterest, all the Aboriginal people had taken off to play cards. ‘Obviously, he had certain factors in his favour. Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy didn’t want to live at Mission Hole. She’d been
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brought up there, she’d broken away. She wanted to go back to an outstation, back to her ancestral lands. ‘But it all came to a head with the death of her son. It happened in Darwin, at a town camp called Wallaby Cross. He was an alcoholic, and he’d made what’s called a wrong-way marriage himself. We don’t know the full story on that. There’s accusations of misbehaviour, even sorcery, flying about. We believe Randhawa encouraged, maybe even created, a rift between Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy and her family. Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy had her son’s body flown back to the community. She refused to allow anybody else to see him. Randhawa arranged things with the white authorities and she had her son buried in an old ceremonial place. Since then she’s shut herself away. Moved out of the big house where she used to live, and started eking out her existence in a shack.’ ‘It doesn’t add up.’ The junior was unusually confident for a first-year solicitor. Before studying law she’d worked on an Aboriginal community in Queensland. ‘I mean, Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s work was winning awards, even since the forgeries started. How could the Mission Hole people see the paintings and not know they were forged?’ ‘They couldn’t afford to know,’ said Lavazzo. ‘You’ve got to remember, Randhawa was an extremely skilled artist. He’d been there fifteen years. They would have expected he’d be doing some of the work, the background and the infill and so forth. That’s standard. It happens with many traditional Aboriginal artists. There’s usually a scandal when the general public gets to hear about it. Under Aboriginal law it’s all right, as long as the artist stays in control of the design. As well, Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy was taking her work in directions they didn’t know. She was using different colours, different styles. She was making money, already pushing the
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boundaries of what was considered acceptable. Most of all they had no time. They had too many other things to worry about, just keeping the place above water.’ ‘And what about Parker Gandarrwuy? And Petra? Petra Gandarrwuy didn’t know?’ ‘Parker’s a classic case of turning a blind eye. He took the money into land council funds. He wasn’t going to question where it came from. It wasn’t his clan whose designs were being forged, it was Valerian’s. Parker was feuding with Valerian’s clan, and with the art centre, too. As for Petra, she did know, eventually. Not at first. But you’ve got to remember, she was very junior. She was still a girl, just come back from down south. It took a lot for her even to begin to question her elders. And, of course, she was in a relationship with Randhawa. He told her things were all right, and that’s what she wanted to believe.’ ‘And what about Valerian? How did he find out?’ ‘Perhaps he found a museum catalogue, or an art book lying about somewhere. He recognised his own traditional country. The main thing is, he thought he’d done enough to alert the outside world to what was going on. He trusted people to expose the fraud. When they kept covering it up he got desperate. He knew his actions would get him into serious trouble, but the way he saw it, he had a duty to his country first.’ ‘Well, why wouldn’t the community support him? Why did all the witnesses disappear?’ ‘He wasn’t popular or powerful. There’s hardly any of his clan here at Mission Hole. Henry and Maisie are the only ones now, and they only came here after his death. When the white law came in, people were scared.’ Even when he was guessing, Lavazzo still maintained his authoritarian tone.
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‘They knew, and they didn’t know,’ said Jean-Loup. Both Lavazzo and the junior stared at Jean-Loup. It was the first time he had spoken in half an hour. Increasingly he had found himself overwhelmed by a sensation of the oddness of their presence here. In their evenly weighted words it was as though they were talking about a chess game, in which the black pieces moved according to the same rules and strategies as the white. Most of what Lavazzo was now saying Jean-Loup had told him himself, and yet Lavazzo had adopted it, stolen it, without acknowledgment—made it more his own than Jean-Loup’s original words. ‘I’m sorry?’ said Lavazzo. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m not sure I could explain. You’d have to be here to understand.’ Lavazzo turned back to his junior. They resumed their discourse, lazily tossing back and forth. According to Lavazzo, Randhawa almost certainly had been embezzling money for his own purposes. He couldn’t understand why else Randhawa should have kept two sets of books, why else he should have resorted to murder. The junior thought otherwise. It was a pity, they both agreed, that the papers should have been wrecked. They were crucial to the case, and with a little care (and here, they were careful to avoid looking at Jean-Loup) they could so easily have been kept dry. They moved on next to the possible collusion of the police. It appeared that, although Sergeant Jack had for a long time been buying Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s paintings, there was no evidence that he’d been involved in covering up for Randhawa, or in framing Lazarus Johnson. It was the scapegoat mentality, that was all. There was a murder, and they needed an arrest. The voices of the two lawyers, at first aggressive in dissent, were growing softer and closer. In the clinking of glasses, the
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rattling of ice in specially prepared drinks served by the piratical bartender with an unaccustomed smile, Jean-Loup could sense the impending announcement of a truth. He recognised this truth. He had seen it before. It was something regal and comfortable, something that had flown in for a visit. It had briefly and benevolently emerged into the heat from its air-conditioned legal offices, and it was already looking forward to getting back next day, wrapped in its black velvet and silk-lined robes, satisfied with a job well done. Not black and white, not absolute and mathematical, but a negotiated truth. ‘Why do you think Randhawa did it?’ asked Jean-Loup finally. ‘He played for high stakes and he lost,’ said Lavazzo, glancing at his companion. ‘We’re not sure, yet, whether he was making any money out of it himself. That’s got to wait until we finish looking at his personal financial position, including the house and land down at Byron Bay. Even if it wasn’t money, his whole reputation was bound up with Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s. He wanted to take her higher, further. He wanted her works adored across the world. He just couldn’t reveal the fact that she was an old lady whose sight was failing, and who was broken-hearted about her son.’ ‘There’s more to it than that,’ said Jean-Loup. ‘Oh, yes?’ ‘I think he wanted Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy out of the way. That way, her myth could grow. He came to believe that he had the right to paint as Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy did. It’s a difficult thing to explain. The way Aboriginal people see it, the painting is the land. Things aren’t divided, one thing from another, they way we usually do it. Randhawa began to take on, more and more, the way
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Aboriginal people see the world. In his mind, when he began to paint, he was Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy. When he told the people at the art awards that Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy had painted the work on display, he truly believed it. After all, hasn’t it ever occurred to you? Think of “Guy Randhawa” and “Gandarrwuy”. They’re almost exact anagrams. When Randhawa first came to the community, that’s what he decided to call himself. That’s what Valerian meant when he said to me: “The artist is a thief.”’ ‘Randhawa was here fifteen years. That’s long before Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy became well known,’ said Lavazzo coldly. ‘It doesn’t add up at all.’ ‘Yes it does. Gandarrwuy’s a common clan name, not just Margaret Thatcher’s name. He was probably already calling himself Rainbow Guy. He must have noticed the similarity between Guy and Gandarrwuy, and decided to take the rest of the letters for himself.’ But Lavazzo had turned away. He was only interested now in what his junior had to say. Clearly he believed that all human behaviour, even the most lawless, was governed by rules whose scope it was the lawyer’s peculiar gift to define. ‘What, then, is Aboriginal art?’ Jean-Loup read, back in his retreat. ‘Where does it fit into the great pantheon of modern and post-modern Western art? Some critics argue that it requires a completely new aesthetic, that it can never be judged by Western standards. Others argue that “separate” is code for “inferior”, and that if we ghettoise Aboriginal art we might as well return to the days when it belonged in the ethnology section of the museum, alongside the primitive stone tools and skulls. ‘It is my contention that Aboriginal art, like Aboriginal
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culture itself, requires an expansion of our ways of looking at the universe. We must begin to recognise that Aboriginal art can be both there and not there at the same time; that it can be both the same and different, universal and microcosmic, original and unoriginal, authentic and fake, according to the function which it plays in the culture at that time. In quantum physics and in our most recent explorations of the outer reaches of the universe, science is beginning to uncover these truths. We must learn to reapply them to social and spiritual reality, as Aboriginal people have always known how to do. This may not mean the breakdown of Western civilisation but its best chance for new growth. It is the psychological, the spiritual and the human which constitutes truly the last frontier.’ Jean-Loup closed the book. Directly under it was the faded title of Michael Stoneham’s book from sixty years ago, Up North. It made him wonder whether, if at all, things had changed. Randhawa, waking up in hospital, had claimed that he truly was Aboriginal. Perhaps would still argue it, if it ever got to that in court. He wasn’t, of course, not according to books or on paper. Perhaps he was setting himself up for an insanity plea. If he really was mad, it was madness with a peculiar method. Jean-Loup was wondering now whether Randhawa had wanted him to find the truth about Mission Hole, whether he had carefully placed each successive piece of the puzzle in his way. Why else would he have introduced Jean-Loup to Petra? Was he implying, in each of his apparently random discourses, that he was the thief? Jean-Loup had been wondering whether he, too, might come to be considered mad. He had been sitting up here now for over twenty-four hours. Down on the plain, he could see the open space of the Mission Hole airstrip, with its two tin
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sheds. One was the mechanic’s shed, with its smart new iron, its barbed wire perimeter fence, and its Commonwealth government ‘Prohibited Area’ notice. The other was the rusty place that served as a passenger terminal, with its handpainted, misspelt sign. Two or three times he had seen the familiar yellow ute drive up, the one Valerian had used to pick him up on his first night in Mission Hole. Now he could see it quite clearly through the trees. It was having some kind of engine trouble. Exclamations of smoke crackled from its exhaust. When, finally, the driver managed to start, it kangaroo-hopped forward and began to judder down the long stretch of dirt road, its gleam through the dust like the coat of some rare beast. He was considering staying on at Mission Hole. For a while, anyway. Parker Gandarrwuy had hinted that there might be some book work at the land council there for him, although it wouldn’t be well paid. He had even suggested JeanLoup could go and stay in Randhawa’s old house at the Kundalini Dome, which the council was going to take over now. Jean-Loup didn’t know if he wanted that. Everyone else on the community was avoiding the place. But on the other hand, Petra was considering staying on at Mission Hole, perhaps even as the new art centre manager, and that, for JeanLoup, counted for a lot. He might stay up here for a while. He had food and water. He could probably live here for days. He had read about the initiation of young men in many of the traditional clans. They had to live for a certain period out bush, in an inhospitable part of the country, often not being allowed to hunt certain foods. At the end, as part of the ceremony, they might learn the whereabouts of certain tjuringa, or sacred objects. JeanLoup’s books were his sacred objects. In them was contained
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the knowledge he might need to live in this world. The catch was that, until he had lived in the world, the knowledge would remain inaccessible, incomprehensible, like a mathematical formula to which he had not yet learnt the key. Before coming here, Jean-Loup had never read much that he didn’t have to. He had been turned away from books by his father’s reverential attitude towards them, by the coexistence in his father of great knowledge of the past and almost total ignorance of human emotion. Jean-Loup knew something about human emotion, but he did not know about the past. He had only been able to get the information he needed about his past from books: from Brother O’Gorman’s diary, from the Ford Foundation report, and then ultimately from KARU, the Aboriginal adoption agency in Darwin. They had records of Duchess, and of her mother, taken from the Retta Dixon Home. Duchess must have been able to visit her mother back in Mission Hole before she died, they told him. From her mother she must have found out Jean-Loup’s father’s name, and perhaps other bits and pieces of information, and from there, somehow, she was able to trace him back to Byron Bay. It was all a long time ago, of course, that long search and the rejection she received—back in 1974, when Jean-Loup was just a child. He watched a plane take off. It was like a tiny white fish rising from an ocean floor of forest-green weed. In the drone of its engines was a certain comforting grammar of normality. Last time out of here the pilot had told him a story about a wet-season storm in which the world had turned dark, the instruments went off their dials and the plane plunged one hundred and fifty metres. He had smiled, staring dreamily out of the window, thinking of the Biggles books he had read as a child. He was part of that landscape now: a white dot in a
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child’s drawing scribbled with wide brown rivers, with mudflats, mangroves and the glinting sea. The drawing was by an Aboriginal child: a Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy or a Duchess, perhaps, of the future, just now lost in a dream.
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sources
Many of the details of early mission life referred to in the novel have a documentary basis. The spear-fight on p. 67, and the fist-fight between Fr McCleery and the Aboriginal native on p. 68 are referred to in Bro. John Pye’s history of the Port Keats Mission, The Port Keats Story (Kensington, 1973). The story of the large Aboriginal man at the barge landing (p. 62) is based on a story recounted about the life of the CMS missionary, the Rev. Alf Dyer: see Keith Cole, Oenpelli Pioneer: A Biography of the Reverend Alfred John Dyer (Church Missionary Historical Publications Trust, 1972). The story of the ‘priest with fifty wives’ on pp. 67–8 is based on the well-documented life of Father Gsell at Bathurst Island: see F.X. Gsell, The Bishop with 150 Wives: Fifty Years as a Missionary (Angus and Robertson, 1956). Other details with a historical basis include the ‘Donald Tomlinson collection’ of Aboriginal art on p. 97, based on the Donald Thomson collection of Aboriginal artifacts at the 281
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University of Melbourne: see D. Thomson, Donald Thomson in Arnhem Land (Currey O’Neil, 1983). The experiments of the Ford Foundation expedition to Mission Hole on pp. 186–7 are similar to experiments described in Charles Mountford, Records of the American–Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, volume 2 (Melbourne University Press, 1956). The story of the ‘Ragged Thirteen’ referred to on p. 213 is based on the ‘Ragged Thirteen’ who participated in the gold rush to Wyndham in Western Australia, described in Michael Terry, Hidden Wealth and Hiding People (Putnam, 1931). Some of the details in the life of Fred Heisner on p. 246 are based on the life of former pearler and founder of the Umbakumba settlement, Fred Gray: see Keith Cole, Fred Gray of Umbakumba (Keith Cole Publications, 1984). Some observations of contemporary Aboriginal life are also taken from books. Certain details of a murder investigation on a remote community, including the red and white police tape on p. 31, are based on Eric Venbrux, A Death in the Tiwi Islands (Cambridge University Press, 1995). The idea of a traditional Aboriginal man burying a tool (such as a knife or a wheelbrace) for later re-use (see pp. 157–8) is also taken from Venbrux’s excellent book. That a traditionally based Aboriginal person might eat tinned store food to avoid sorcery (see p. 241) is from Basil Sansom, The Camp at Wallaby Cross: Aboriginal Fringe Dwellers in Darwin (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1980). Finally, the sentences at the top of p. 70—‘Selfdetermination now is the stated policy. Let us hope it works and does not destroy all previous efforts by becoming selfextermination’—are nearly identical to observations made at the conclusion of Bro. John Pye, MSC, The Port Keats Story (see p. 49).
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ALSO FROM ALLEN & UNWIN Love and Vertigo Hsu-Ming Teo
WINNER OF THE 1999 THE AUSTRALIAN/VOGEL LITERARY AWARD ‘For the first time in my life, I saw my mother in relation to her family, and I didn’t recognise her any more . . . These Singaporean roots of hers, this side of her — and possibly of me too — were unacceptable. I was determined not to belong, not to fit in, because I was Australian, and Mum ought to be Australian too. The tug of her roots, the blurring of her role from wife and mother to sister and aunt, angered me.’ On the eve of her mother’s wake, Grace Tay flies to Singapore to join her father and brother and her mother’s family. Here she explores her family history, looking for the answers to her mother’s death. This beautiful and moving novel steps between Singapore, Malaysia and Australia, evoking the life, the traditions and tastes of a forceful Chinese family as well as the hardship, the cruelty and pain. Written in a fresh, contemporary voice tinged with biting humour, this is a story about resilience, a story about migration, but in many ways it is a story about parents’ expectations for their children. ISBN 1 86508 278 3
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The Water Underneath Kate Lyons
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 1999 THE AUSTRALIAN/VOGEL LITERARY AWARD ‘They dragged her out of the lake at dawn. No jaw, one eye socket like some strange fish. The water was closing and closing, the centre blank as the tissue of a scar. Then, in a place a thousand miles from the ocean, they found something which might have been a seashell but which they knew was not. The lake gave birth regretfully, washing her up in slow burps.’ A young woman and her baby go missing in an isolated Australian mining town. Two decades later human bones wash up in the local lake. The only clue is that a man driving a truck wearing a hat did it, in a town where every man wears something on his head. Twenty years later, Ruth returns to the place where she was born and where her mother was ostracised. Over that time an unexplored territory of guilty secrets centres on one man, Uncle Frank, whose silence has protected him but has also inflicted inconsolable wounds. The Water Underneath, told through the eyes of three women, separated by time, skin colour and allegiance, but united by their love of Frank, is about some of the conflicts which divide Australians, in the past and to this day.
1 86508 418 2
