What the critics said about Julie Janson’s work:

“Imagery runs rampant, with delightful cadences … an artistic orgy, bombarding all our senses at once, overall the experience is a delightful and original success”.
James Waites on Season To Taste, Sydney Morning Herald

“There are profoundly relevant and for some, contentious considerations here. Flashes of a long and intriguing history: a rich context”.
Frank Gauntlet on Lotus War, Sunday Telegraph

“Julie Janson’s dialogue combines the right proportion of sacred and profane, the hallmark of good erotica: it hits the theatrical G spot”.
Colin Rose on Season to Taste, Sydney Morning Herald

“Tough and emotional… at the stirring end, the ghosts of the killed move in and symbolically reclaim the land”.
John McCallum on Black Mary, The Australian

“This is true Australian work. What is Australian art? What is it about? No matter how much we might dismiss it, Aboriginal people and convicts, English settlers who are invaders, whatever you want to call them – forged links. And we never get away from that”.
Rhoda Roberts on Black Mary

“Like much of Janson’s work, The Eyes of Marege – which was shortlisted for the Patrick White Award and will premiere in Adelaide before transferring to Sydney – ventures across cultures. Her previous works have included Lotus War and Tears of the Poppy, about Asian politics, while Gunjies and her best-known play Black Mary have dealt with indigenous issues”.
Joyce Morgan, Sydney Morning Herald

Julie Janson was born in Boronia Park, Sydney.
She is of Aboriginal descent from the Darug nation.
A graduate of the University of NSW, Sydney College of the Arts and the University of Sydney.
She is an established playwright with several nominations for awards including an AWGIE, the Griffin Award and the Patrick White Award.
Julie was the recipient of the 2013 Australia Council B R Whiting Studio Residency, Rome.

www.cyclopspress.com.au

A Cyclops Press Book
Published by Cyclops Press, Australia Pty Ltd
www.cyclopspress.com.au

This edition published in 2015
Copyright © Julie Janson 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory provisions of the Australia Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Cyclops Press.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

The author acknowledges the use of the following texts:
Quotes: Trumby song written by Slim Dusty (David Gordon Kirkpatrick) and Joe Daly, lyrics @EMI Publishing; Click Go The Shears folk song written by C. C. Eynesbury; Drinkers in the Northern Territory song written and recorded by Ted Egan; Rock Around the Clock song written by Max C. Freedman and James E. Myers.

Design & typesetting by tonygordonprintcouncil.com
Front cover design by Michelle Ball
Front cover photo by Louise Whelan

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

For the Darug people

PART ONE

NORTH WIND SEASON, FISHING, HUNTING, PIED GOOSE EGGS READY – 1976

This rainy season is lush and green, Jane arrives in Lanniwah country in the midst of plenty. Yams are ready for digging up and roasting. Crocodiles are nesting. The north wind blows, rain is heavy and the lightning spirits are everywhere.

PART TWO

NORTH EAST WIND BLOWING, END OF WET SEASON, PELICANS NESTING – 1976

This is the beginning of the dry season. It is the time for fruiting trees and a cold strong wind. Jane settles into life with the Lanniwah. She learns how to collect fruit and hunt tortoises. Crocodile hatchlings are carried in their mothers’ mouths.

PART THREE

HONEY COLLECTING SEASON, FLYING FOXES FAT – 1976

Stringy bark flowers are sweet smelling, and Lanniwah children are eating sugar bag wild honey. Fresh water swamps are drying out and Jane watches the burning off of grasses.

PART FOUR

NORTH WEST WIND, DRY SEASON, YAMS HAVE GREEN LEAVES – 1977

A year passes and Jane feels at home in Lanniwah country, she is enjoying the cool nights. It is mango season and everyone gorges on the fruit. The Whistling Hawk dives for insects and crocodiles are searching for food.

PART ONE

NORTH WIND SEASON, FISHING, HUNTING, PIED GOOSE EGGS READY – 1976

This rainy season is lush and green, Jane arrives in Lanniwah country in the midst of plenty. Yams are ready for digging up and roasting. Crocodiles are nesting. The north wind blows, rain is heavy and the lightning spirits are everywhere.

CHAPTER 1

Arrival at Harrison Station

Jane Reynolds stared out of the Land Rover’s window. The drive from Katherine was a nightmare, it struck deep into her heart, but she was somehow elated, the craving for change always won. Mercifully, her son Aaron stayed sleeping, perspiration on his forehead. This was pitiless heat, searing forty-degree heat suffocating the flat plains and lime green grass spiked with spindly grey-white trees and red boulders thrown like giant’s toys on a moonscape that went on and on. The Department driver, resolutely silent for hours, managed a half turn of his head then a nod to outside. It was the Churinga Roadhouse.

He climbed out and leant against the car door, ‘How old are you anyway?’

‘Twenty seven’

‘Old enough, I guess. You can get a feed here if you want.’

‘Thanks.’ She nudged Aaron and smoothed his hair.

Together they pushed the restaurant door into sudden noise and movement. At any moment, Jane expected an absurdist actor to set their hair on fire. Someone farted. Ghoulish rodeo clowns in red hats laughed. Dusty men in blue singlets. They chewed. Some toothless hippies picked at tinned peas and pineapple. Bushmen, jackaroos, roustabouts and stockmen hunched over plates of chips and gravy.

A bald fat man stood over the bain-marie, sprinkling chicken salt on the yellow food: shrivelled dim sims, chips, pies – all shrinking in the heat. A commercial dishwasher started rumbling. At university she’d worked as a kitchen hand, leered at by the rich boys of Basser College. No blowflies trapped behind glass foodshields back there. Her graduation had been followed by unemployment, a year of staring in cake shop windows, a year of hunger and pregnancy.

Aaron’s eyes begged, he held up cans of Coca Cola. She paid the fat man and they got a seat by the jukebox. Kenny Rodgers. The Northern Territory Times, grubby from earlier diners, faced her. ‘Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge sack head of state’; she spotted another headline: ‘Child taken by Croc’. Aaron would not shift from her sight. Vigilance the first word out here, in all things.

She watched the dusty Aboriginal families framed in the greasy windows. Two children blinked with pus-filled eyes in the sunlight. They clutched bright orange Twisties. Their mother stroked their backs in the shade. Single mothers worried about food. She and Aaron had slept next to each other on a small mattress in the share house. No money, no support. Definitely, she must keep hold of this new job.

The fat man pushed an old Aboriginal man in a shredded flannel shirt and no shoes towards the door.

‘No humbug here – you know the rules, Sandy,’ the fat man said. The old Aboriginal man shuffled towards the road. Jane stood up with a sinking feeling, a slight shaking in her voice. Gough Whitlam’s Land Rights speech had barely carried to the Blue Mountains. She urged herself to her feet. She had to speak up.

‘Why are you throwing him out?’ she said.

‘He’s dirty.’

‘So are those stockmen.’

‘He doesn’t want to be inside.’

Jane bent towards the old man. ‘Would you like to sit down in the airconditioning?’ she said.

The fat man held court.

‘Look lady, you’re from down south, aren’t ya? My place, my rules,’ said the fat man.

‘It’s racist. Let him stay.’

There was a boom of laughter.

‘Why don’t you piss off? Go on, away you go.’

Jane felt everyone watching; she took Aaron by the hand and walked to the door. The fat man waddled past her and put down a bag of bottles of Coke, placing it outside the door. The old man, breathing heavily, rested on the step. He pulled the bag to him and looked at Jane, his eyes seemed blurred and sightless. She tried to hold his look. She felt useless. It wasn’t her business, she had to learn to keep quiet and stop trying to interfere. The roadhouse owner, the fat man, had rights. The customers, the paying ones, were always right, weren’t they? She looked back at the faces. Some smirked. Aaron touched the old man’s shoulder.

‘Want me to carry your bag?’ He smiled and saluted at the little blonde boy. Jane assisted the old man to stand, aligning her forearm under his like a tiller to guide him back to his family beneath the tree. The family women averted their eyes. They saw a whitey do-gooder. Aaron put the drinks bag down gently.

‘Yeeai, good boy.’ The old man touched Aaron’s hand and held it for a long moment.

‘You okay now?’ said Aaron. Jane smiled at the quiet scene the two were making.

In the midst of the doom. Her son, the knower. The children under the tree ripped into the Cokes and swigged. Their eyes were blooms of infection. Did she have some ointment that could help? Who was she to think she could help anybody? She was barely able to help herself. Was this somehow her fault too? The guilt and misery etched on people’s faces seemed to go on and on. No one escaped the sense of powerlessness.

Neither blacks nor whites could shake free of how to be around each other. The Department driver was wiping off the windscreen.

To Jane, every broken man on the ground was an incarnation of her mentally ill brother. He would pick up cigarette butts from the streets around Balmain and roll them into smokes with newspaper. He never begged, but suffered the indignity of being thrown from pubs for not having enough money for a beer. His blue eyes and heavy forehead spoke of his Aboriginal grannies. Each tramp was her brother in need. There but for the grace of God go I.

Jane bought a box of oranges from the fat man, carried them to the car. They had a long way to go, hundreds of kilometres. The driver put out his cigarette and called to Jane to get back in. The air was a furnace, no air conditioning. It smelt like a decaying cow. She stared out the window: the blue horizon cut the world in two, and it was vast and uplifting. She felt so alive. This was her new life, transmigrated to Mars. Ghost gums, small reptiles flattened on the road and bloated bodies of dead kangaroos. Aaron began to count the dead while a bustard walked slowly along the road oblivious to an approaching eight-carriage road train.

The car turned off the bitumen onto a bulldust track with holes so big that you could lose a car in them. Rainer River, south of Arnhem Land, was scorched country. They drove through hundreds of kilometres of cattle stations with no fences. Stark grey-green beauty.

On Harrison Station, there were soaring wedge-tailed eagles, egrets, blue cranes and galahs. A mirage shimmered, broken-down bulldozers rusted on yellow dirt, water tanks teetered on wooden towers. A meat house, fowl house, dog house and humpies for three hundred people. The Lanniwah houses were made of paper-bark and tin; some were canvas, with pots and billycans hanging in the trees. Mangy dogs lay in heaps on bare earth and the soil glinted with camp pie tins and broken bottles. Pandanus dillybags hung like fruit on bare wooden poles and precious suitcases jutted from beneath iron bedframes. Lanniwah children played on the hills while their parents sat by small fires.

One bent-over old woman with a stick walked by surrounded by blue-andred dogs. Jane watched her stop and stare at the government Land Rover; she had a magnetic presence. A sense of incredible excitement grew. Jane could see that the demountable school was about four hundred metres from the teacher’s place, and the camp was further off near a hill of stone. The big house for the Boss and his family was very close to Jane’s new home. It was possible to look into their bedrooms, as they had no curtains; it was uncomfortably close. Still it might be better than television. The pretty lilycovered billabong rippled a short walk from where Jane stood.

Jane lifted her son from the back seat as he woke up. They crawled out of the car; the heat hit them like a shovel. A forty-three-degree haze floated towards her; bleached bones bordered the road. Jane staggered and wondered how anyone could live out here.

Aaron seemed oblivious, and she watched him as he ran around the yard skipping and hooting, exploring their new home at Harrison Station: a large demountable home, a caravan parked on flat orange earth, white painted stones and dozens of shrunken geraniums. Jane took it all in. There was hardly a tree, and the wire mesh fences were falling down – they wouldn’t keep out Brahman bulls or dingoes.

‘See you later, enjoy yourself. I’ll be back after the Wet, maybe five months, with some school supplies,’ said the driver.

‘Hold on, please – don’t leave.’

‘Look lady, it’s a flaming long way back to civilisation and I’m tonguin’ for a cold beer.’

‘Wait, what if I need something?’ she yelled.

‘Like what?’

‘Something.’

‘You won’t be able to call – no phone out here in hell. You had the interview with Mr White at head office. You wanted it. You got it. Good luck, sweetheart.’

He threw their suitcase onto the ground, grunted, spat and headed back to Katherine, a five-hour drive through deep bulldust. Jane watched him go. The hot air choked her and she couldn’t catch her breath. She smiled at Aaron. Yep, everything was just great. Her caravan gleamed with round ugly edges. There was nowhere to hide; she was naked.

The landscape was gutted by the annual floods that washed away the topsoil leaving billabongs with stranded twenty-foot long crocodiles. Jane stood battered by dry wind. Blue-grey clouds pulsed with blinding bursts of sunlight. It was an alien landscape with the silver caravans placed like tin cans covered in dust, waiting to be towed away if the numbers at the school dropped. The Department said the people might move on at any moment, looking for seasonal food and ceremony.

God almighty – what had she done? She found it hard to breathe; the isolation was going to kill her. Jane calmed herself by bending down and breathing slowly and repeating, ‘I can do this. I can do this’. She squatted on the ground. She doubled over, hands on her knees, time stopped; something was caught in her throat, an eternity of fear. She looked at her hands, the trembling fingers. She saw a round white pebble and stooped to take it in her palm. The stone felt solid: it was a message, and she was feeling space and time in a bright light. She put the stone in her pocket; it would protect her.

Aunty Emily, her Darug aunt, had advised her to take this job: take a chance at a new life, get away from poverty and sadness. To get away from the memories of her father Samuel dying. Jane picked up her suitcase. This would be a great new beginning; she would be a wonderful teacher and her son would thrive on the outdoor adventures. It was going to be all right. She could do this amazing thing.

Jane thought about her place, her Aboriginal blood. It circled in her mind, all the way to the Northern Territory. She knew she was of Aboriginal descent; she had grown up with her father being called ‘Abo’. She heard his voice from a distant 1959, when he sat in the backyard of his brick Housing Commission home. “It isn’t smart to call yourself an Aboriginal. Your kids might get taken. You won’t get a government job,” she heard him laugh. He didn’t want that kind of job, but his kids might. Many families had lost children with interference from the Aborigines Welfare Board. Samuel’s brothers and sisters were quiet on the subject: they learnt table manners and kept the secret. She watched him carve her a yam digging stick entwined with a snake design, as his skin went black in the sun. Her aunts said her father’s dark skin was the result of jaundice as a child, but Jane thought that unlikely.

Jane had been called ‘a little white blackfeller’ when she ran fast in school sports. She had long legs and dark eyes, and a thatch of blonde hair, while her brothers and sister had ‘lubra lips’. Jane had known this family secret but it had seemed a distant thing.

She took a wedding ring out of her bag and slid it onto her finger. She unfolded the Education Department appointment letter, ‘You have been appointed for one year to Harrison Station School. This position is conditional upon you being a married woman as the accommodation is suitable only for a couple.’ She scanned the horizon. No, there did not seem to be any prospect of a husband. The gossips might think that perhaps Jane’s husband had run off or never existed.

CHAPTER 2

The Boss

In the distance, six Lanniwah children appeared like drawings in an old picture book: dreamlike and skinny against burning white sunlight. Through squinting eyes, she watched a man on horseback gallop towards them. He whirled a stock whip and cracked it on the ground in front of the children who scattered and hid behind trees. Jane tried to make sense of this scene, to apply her perception of reality to the cowering black children. It was a frightening rush into her deep affinity with her Koori ancestors. Is this what they had experienced? No, he must be playing. He was their friend, surely.

One child had a baby clinging to her back as she crouched with the others behind a thorn bush. The rider flicked the dirt in front of them with the whip. The human shapes were dwarfed against the wide horizontality of barren landscape. He saw her and wheeled the horse around, galloped towards her, jumped the fence to the caravan and dismounted. He was a barrel-chested Chips Rafferty in the The Overlanders. He rolled with a cattleman’s gait and was joined by his rake-thin wife, Edie. They walked towards Jane.

‘Gidday, Mrs Reynolds, welcome to Harrison, I’m Hubert and this is Edie.’ His voice was laconic but direct. Jane felt out of place, out of her mind. Her heart was beating as cockatoos screeched all around in a close burst of noise, jarring in the clicking stillness and heat – the terrible inescapable heat.

Jane stretched out her damp hand. ‘Good to meet you, Hubert, Edie.’

Edie peered from under her wide-brim hat, her red permed curls swinging to her shoulders.

‘Your husband not with you?’

Jane felt the first lie rise up like vomit. ‘He’s working; he might come later.’

‘Later, eh? Oh yeah, when?’

Edie shot an alarmed look at her husband, who licked his dry mouth and stuck a cigarette paper to his lower lip.

‘Not sure’, said Jane.

‘So, you reckon you can handle it by yerself? That’ll be worth watching.’ said Hubert.

‘I’ll be fine. I’m a graduate.’

‘Where was it? Oxford University or something?’ said Edie.

‘University of Sydney.’

‘You’d better watch out for wild buffalo. If you see one, climb the nearest tree.’ Hubert grinned.

Jane laughed but the sound stuck in her throat. They were serious. She beckoned Aaron to her side.

‘And don’t stand in the doorway. A mob of blacks could come past and you’d be a sitting duck. They’d shoot ya. They’re not all bad, but give them a whiff of the booze, they go mad. We prepare for attack.’

Jane kept nodding like a toy carnival dog, looking blankly around for evidence of dangerous blacks but all she could see was kilometres of scrappy mulga trees, grey dust and vast nothingness. Hubert looked her over as if she was on sale, coughed, spat a gob of phlegm at a passing red cattle-dog, and then leant back against the fence smoking, tracing the dirt with his boot. There was a long uneasy quiet; no one seemed to know what to say. She sensed some foreboding of a thing that might happen, a fear of the future in that place. It slunk around in grey dirt, a kind of evil.

‘Stick to the rules and she’ll be right’, said Hubert.

‘Yeah sure, perhaps you could write them down.’

‘No alcohol, it’s dry out here. You haven’t got bottles of whisky in that bag, have ya?’

‘I wouldn’t.’ She hoped her bottle of Johnnie Walker hadn’t broken.

‘I would have to confiscate them and drink ’em myself.’ He laughed. Edie gazed at Jane’s Tibetan dress and dangly earrings, and sniffed.

‘Come over later for a cuppa. You can use the old Toyota; you’ll need it.’

‘Great’, said Jane. She eyed the old Toyota’s rough appearance but would later be delighted when the engine started. This car would save her life. She realised that despite first impressions, maybe the Barkley family were solid country people who would take care of her and Aaron.

‘You know, I can’t stand women who talk with a plum in their mouth’, said Edie. Jane was compliant. ‘Nyeah, I know what ya mean.’ She mentally noted that she would have to speak through her nose for the rest of the year. Hubert ruffled Aaron’s hair. ‘Ya can come up and see me gun. Ya’d like that, I bet. Hey, another thing. I don’t want you goin’ up to the blacks’ camp – it’s their place. Ya got that?’

‘You’re the Boss’, Jane said.

‘I’ve staked out the whole one square kilometre for the Aboriginal camp, on the directions of the owners from Singapore’, he said.

Oh, the luxury, thought Jane.

‘The blacks don’t want you. They’re like children. We take care of them. Look, they do it tough in the Wet, so I give the old blokes my best lures. I got time for ’em. We help ’em out, but if they step out of line, I’ll take the bullwhip to any of ’em. Whip ’em good!’

Jane saw his bravado, but he seemed a frightened man: it was all show. He turned to her and winked. No, he was obviously a racist shit and she would have to deal with him. She was mildly terrified but she pictured confrontations.

Edie was a midwife who with two Aboriginal health workers ran a no-nonsense clinic in an old house on the station. The Lanniwah women gave birth there and she had delivered some hundred babies. In her racism, there was also compassion.

‘We know where we stand in the Northern Territory hierarchy. Hugh’s a cattle manager but we’re not owners’, said Edie.

‘The government doesn’t give us much help when it comes to transport costs, even when we’re in drought. The bloody helicopter costs drive cattle prices sky high. It’s tough. You know, actually we’re like social workers out here, eh Edie – help the dark people get their welfare cheques,’ said Hubert.

Jane smiled and kept looking at her dusty shoes.

Edie had married Hubert and adapted quickly to distaste for blacks. She spoke to Jane about her last pregnancy, the adored only boy who was born in Katherine Hospital.

‘After one day, I saw my baby was in a plastic crib surrounded by picks.’

‘What are picks?’ asked Jane.

‘Pickaninies, Aboriginal babies’, said Edie.

‘I took my precious new baby out of that hospital quick smart. Hightailed it back to Harrison.’

Her ‘black girl’, Gertie, washed and scrubbed for little pay, just tucker.

Jane watched Gertie; she looked like her grandmother. She smelt of rose talcum powder. Her grandma had been born to serve, trained by nuns in an orphanage to polish floors on her knees. She had been fed smears of pink watery jam on sledges of bread. Granny had an education in reading, writing, bed making, pot scrubbing, floor polishing and dishwashing. Like the Children of Canaan in the Bible, to be born black was to be condemned to life as a servant. Such children were half-castes – the brood of black concubines and descendants of ex-convicts. A double stain – double shame.

Jane’s great grandmother had her children removed by the Benevolent Society. Benevolent to whom? The English masters and mistresses who received the unpaid indentured servants? Jane had inherited a fear of authority, the police: it had been passed down the generations. There was uncertainty about her place, her right to belong. Jane knew that her family had grown afraid to acknowledge their Aboriginal blood. When her father worked for white people, he had drunk his tea in a tin cup outside their houses on the step, to keep his dark germs away. As a dark child amongst six fairer siblings, he had waited outside the lolly shop, while his whiter brother bought sweets. The sign read, ‘No Blackfellas Allowed In Here’.

It was time to come out and own her heritage, to stop apologising for the distant Aboriginal ancestor. To say loudly that the Hawkesbury was her country, that her grandmother was born there, and her great grandmother, and her great great grandmother. She was a descendant of the Buruburongal clan of Freemans Reach Blacks’ Camp near Windsor, a member of the Kangaroo Skin People. Jane had been tired of being told it was not her land, no such tribe – she didn’t exist – by a mob blown in from the North Coast.

‘Are you okay? You dreaming or something? You’re miles away.’ Edie said.

‘Just thinking about something.’

‘Gertie’s a house-trained domestic so she’s valuable, and she knows her place. Gertie can do your washing if you like.’ Jane shook her head and kept her eyes down.

‘We run the power with a generator and we got a two-way radio, but you can’t use that. You come to us for maintenance of the water supply, mail, fuel and food. Any questions?’

‘No, all good.’ Jane began to move away but Edie whistled her back.

‘People in Sydney don’t understand what we go through. We lie awake at night wondering if we’ll be murdered in our beds. You don’t understand how we’re stopped from getting rid of the fear. They’re a real problem; one day they will all die out. It can’t come too soon.’ Jane nodded, speechless: if she spoke out now, she would have no choice but to leave, to go back to the mattress in the share house. To poverty. She felt gagged, full of polite meaningless phrases. She would have to wear it.

Jane sat with Aaron on a small hill overlooking the billabong at Harrison and a jabiru, all black and white, lifted off from bright pink water. A kind of ecstasy descended. Hubert drove by in his cattle truck with a perplexed look on his face: What the hell are they doing out there?

The next day, Jane shooed the curious Brahman cows from her door and led Aaron over to the Boss’s house. Edie licked her cigarette with her pink tongue, and welcomed them.

‘Get Missus Reynolds a chair.’ Gertie stopped washing a pile of dishes and dragged a plastic chair to the table. Edie was attractive in tight white moleskin pants, like Annie Oakley. She had two girls and a small boy – pretty, pale children. They were curious and looked longingly at Aaron. They soon had him under their collective wings, and giggled and played on the floor amongst clattering Lego pieces.

‘Elisha, get a coffee for the teacher.’ Edie puffed another cigarette. The eldest girl held a mug with Pablo instant coffee under the hot water tap at the sink, mixed in a spoon of sugar and powdered milk and gave it to Jane.

Jane sipped. ‘Lovely.’ She looked at the house: corrugated iron and fibro on steel stilts, broken flapping fly-screens. There was poverty in the dirty white walls and plastic chairs. A Laminex table and bench with the School of the Air radio and piles of battered books sat against another wall, and a Hammond organ with sheet music, and flypaper that dangled near her face.

‘It’s a relief to have a woman to talk to. Gertie doesn’t count, she’s black and thick as two short planks’, Edie said. Gertie gave a vicious slam to the wet clothes. Jane looked out the window and saw Hubert over by his tractor with a young Aboriginal girl sitting on his lap and he was tickling her.

‘So, how long you been teachin?’

‘One year.’

‘Experienced then.’ Edie nodded and smirked.

A pink galah flew through a window, perched beside Edie and bent his head for a scratch. Jane felt helpless, like a child, possessed by the older woman. She shook her golden hair. ‘You’ll have to tie that hair up, the kids are crawling with nits.’ If Edie had suddenly thrown the coffee mug out the window and screeched like an orang-utan, it wouldn’t have surprised Jane.

Jane knew nothing about the Territory; her experience as a student teacher had been at Leichhardt Boys High School, dealing with boys from the Mediterranean – hairy, dark, with gold chains. ‘Hey Miss, you got nice boobs’, When they saw their new student teacher, the boys in tight grey shorts had almost taken out their dicks and beaten them on the desk. She learnt to throw boys from the classroom. To pinch ears and throw chalk.

‘Will your children enrol with the Lanniwah tomorrow?’

‘No, my kids do School of the Air’, said Edie. Jane nodded in blank relief. She called Aaron but he wouldn’t come. Edie watched as Jane tried to pull Aaron away from his new friends. It was a struggle of wills, but the child won, so Jane went back to her caravan and suddenly felt very alone.

Hubert opened the corrugated iron store twice a week. It was a large building with a small flap that opened for a shop window. Hubert towered over the women, his ledger ready to record each debt. The women queued for hours in the heat for Western cowboy clothes, plastic toys, jeans, cassette players. Hubert had no competition, and robbing Aboriginal people was a sport in the Northern Territory.

‘These people, they can’t get their unemployment money without us filling out the forms – they can’t read.’ In reality, Hubert took it all and ran it through his expensive store. He stood at the window and wrote down every item, the powdered milk, packets of tea and flour, a tee shirt, and Donald Cook’s baby carrots.

As Gertie hung out washing, Jane handed her some pegs. ‘What do they pay you Gertie?’ asked Jane.

‘For one week, might get ten dollar. Enough for bingo. None left for save’, said Gertie.

‘You win much?’

‘Yeeai, lotta prize’. Jane mentally calculated the small fortune flowing from two hundred unemployment cheques and child endowment. Someone was being ripped off.

Lanniwah women walked past her caravan and waved to Jane. They went the long way around the Boss’s house to avoid the snarling cattle dogs. The Boss had trained these dogs to only attack dark skin. Away from the dogs, the Lanniwah children ran and cartwheeled with joy. Jane could imagine running amongst them with Aaron, everyone laughing, just in the fun of being alive.

CHAPTER 3

Identity

On her first night in the caravan Jane was restless. What if no one turned up for school? Would the older women take to her? Make her feel welcome? Jane could hear strange rasping howls. She got up and checked the door. Small trees reached out and ran their branch fingers along the aluminium … Semitransparent geckos’ eyes twitched. Urgh. She pulled the sheet over her head, wanting to sleep, to be ready for school but the night air suffocated as sweat pooled in her belly button. Forty degrees with just one small fan, and no air conditioner, no television, no communication, not even a radio.

She hated being alone, like herself as a lonely fourteen-year-old girl with her father dead, mother absent, brother mentally ill, sister far away. She stewed and tossed under the plastic ceiling. Maybe someone would report her for being unfit to teach. She thought about her Aboriginal blood. She wondered if the Lanniwah would accept her.

She woke up at dawn; the cattle station was awake. She heard men rounding up animals. Jane looked through the window of the school caravan.

Jane and Aaron swam in the fresh billabong; it was exquisite. It was like the place where her Darug great granny had been born. Great Granny had called her land nullaburra country, the wood duck place at Freeman’s Reach … Running fresh water was in the family blood, but it was the salt water that had called her father. He went fishing with the long fishgig he had made of bamboo. A Ned Kelly rig. It was a fantasy that they were a functioning family. It was all dysfunction really. Kooris who fought with each other and other mobs. Jealousies, old burning resentments, feuds with other mobs. Girls raped by cousins, some uncles stinking drunk. Children who looked suspiciously like another man’s child. Not nice people. However, generous – they’d give you anything you wanted. Grandma Reynolds cooked roast lamb dinners for thirty, all welcome. She would yell out for them to come, booda, eat! The girls would wait on the men of course. Playing jokes on each other, grown men flicked rubber-band pellet guns and shot each other with potato slug guns, kerpang, right on his ear, gotta laugh! Playing harmonica, or for heaven’s sake a gumleaf, her Dad’s lips would be pursed against the green. It sounded just like a violin.

The Aboriginal Teaching Assistant opened the school, she watched him as she walked up the hill to school. She wanted the first day to be full of promise; she would show them all that she was competent and capable of being head teacher – there were no other teachers. This was a new life and she would forget about the past

Jane stopped at the tin door to the school and the Aboriginal Teaching Assistant was waiting for her. Jane gulped. His thick rich eyelashes – like those of all the Lanniwah people – fluttered downwards as he twisted his fingers nervously. He was handsome, looked fresh and relaxed in his blue checked shirt; he smelt of Old Spice. He had beautiful hands with pale palms. Around his neck, he wore a shark tooth on leather and on his wrists were coloured strings and beads. She could see his shirt lay open to reveal some small raised scars, cicatrices, marks of manhood. David watched her; she felt his eyes on her, and she blushed. She couldn’t imagine how he would place her in his microcosm. He smiled at her hippy image, her long neck and slim body, her brown eyes and cascading golden hair, her silk batik kaftan.

He introduced himself: ‘I’m David Yaniwuy. I’m the Teaching Assistant’.

‘I’m not like the Missus Boss. I am not here to order people about. I am a teacher, I will be learning as much as the children will learn. I am pretty ignorant about Lanniwah culture. You will have to teach me … I hope your people will accept me as a friend’, said Jane. David smiled and he searched the floor for some answer to her strange speech. She felt his unease at her closeness as he manoeuvred to place a desk between them. There was a long silence; Jane straightened the pencils. He coughed and finally spoke:

‘I only had this job for one year, that how long Harrison Station school been here. Last teacher got bit by a King Brown snake. Nearly finished him up.’ David said.

‘Maybe you can show me how not to get bitten by a snake or run down by a buffalo’.

Jane watched him walk over the hill to the camp and call the kids. He had the gait of a man brought up horse riding, with bowlegs and a subtle swagger. If his eyes ever met hers, there was a fleeting something, that flickering recognition of a mutual frisson. This was dangerous. Oh, look out. Jane pushed it aside, she would have to work with him and she didn’t want to jeopardise his position with the Department of Education, or her own. Yes, she would be an upright moral woman, very, very professional – that sounded right.

Jane’s main worry was that she had no training in teaching basic literacy. She saw bright-eyed children peeking in at her from outside. Several had snotty noses and running ears; all had scabs all over their legs. Jane piled boxes of tissues on her desk.

Aaron yelled, ‘Look, the kids are here!’

She went to the door. ‘Come on in and say hello.’ The Lanniwah children crowded in. Jane smiled and asked their names. Shirley was fifteen with dark, thick lashes. She stood out from the others with her gold skin, curly blond hair, and a confidence that glowed. Her shyness seemed to be copied from the other girls. The boldness in her stance was magnetic and she obviously had a white father. She held a heavy old book with a gold embossed cover. Jane read the title: Arabian Nights. The girls pored over the plastic covers with their intricate silver decorations of Aladdin. Shirley turned the pages of another book – Sand and Sea by Norman Lewis, the pages worn with looking.

‘Did you bring these lovely books to show me?’ asked Jane.

‘Yeeai, my daddy book from Borroloola library.’ Shirley said.

‘We can read them later.’

‘We go school one year; dey not readem yet, I can read.’ She was a bright teenager, desperate to learn.

‘You teachem me read more words, Missus. I love it. My daddy teachem me.’

Lizzy with her huge brown eyes and crown of spun gold, was another young beauty, tall and curvaceous, always smiling. These children gave out a magnetic energy and love.. She cooed: ‘We love dis school.’

‘Do we have a school cook or cleaner?’ asked Jane. David moved to the window and called out in Lanniwah language. A middle-aged woman walked into the schoolroom.

‘This one, she works at school too. She Margie. Her daughter Mayda, she oldest girl in school, she eighteen, marry soon.’

Jane smiled and shook Margie’s hand; she might like to have a Lanniwah woman friend. Margie held her head low. She was tall and thin, her face round like a brown moon; her eyes stared at the ground. Jane was too talkative. ‘Lovely to have such great staff. We will make it a wonderful school’, she babbled as silence and uncomfortable shyness sat in the humid air.

David helped Jane unpack boxes of textbooks and sharpen pencils, and they put up alphabet charts and multiplication sheets. Children clustered around a Women’s Weekly magazine; they touched the picture of roast lamb with a dessert of apple crumble garnished with whipped cream and strawberries. They mimed eating it. They licked their lips and put the picture on the wall. It was a beautiful classroom. She looked with pride at ‘her’ school. This Aboriginal school.

‘Later, you might be come up the camp and meet the headman. He Old Pelican.’ David’s eyes never met Jane’s as he stood awkwardly by a plastic chair and creased his hat.

‘I’d like that.’

‘I go to Batchelor College near Darwin; getting my certificate soon.’

‘Wonderful’, said Jane.

‘None of these kids can read or write, not even eighteen-year-old ones.’

Jane was not expecting this kind of revelation; her training had been for high school English.

‘We can make big books of stories. They can read if we practice enough.’ He smiled and kept unpacking resources. David’s shyness kept him quietly working in the background at school. She watched how the children adored and respected him. He was a fine Aboriginal Teaching Assistant: his own reading and writing skills were outstanding.

Jane cut oranges into quarters, while David arranged the orange segments on plastic plates. Children appeared in a great mob, giggling and pushing around the school table. David pulled eighteen-year-old Ricky forward and put him in charge of organising the children. The boy was a leader; his dark skin was dusty and he had shining white teeth.

‘Ok, line up. When you bin get your fruit, tell Missus Reynolds your name so she can write ’em down’, said Ricky.

David gently pushed the smaller children, barefoot and in ragged but clean tee-shirts, into a long line. Four-year-olds squirmed and pushed, queuing with hungry eyes for their little piece of orange, their eyes big as they stared at the fruit.

‘They don’t get fruit, except wild plum. They love you for dis fruit’, said David.

Shirley, with her little cousin clinging to her side, edged slowly up the line. She had never tasted an orange and she watched the boys who already had theirs mince the skin. Fifty pairs of eyes watched every piece. What if it was all gone? Jane knew what that felt like, to feel hungry. She took her piece and saw that there was almost none left. Shirley looked behind her at the two remaining children.

‘Here, Veronica, eatem up.’ She gave her piece away and Aaron took his piece from his mouth and handed it to the last child.

‘I’m sorry kids. I haven’t any more.’ Ricky nodded.

‘No worry bout that; we eatem stew for lunch maybe?’

‘Yes, plenty of stew.’

The women appeared around lunch time with their hungry toddlers, pushing them gently towards the line of children with their plastic bowls. Hungry eyes. The salted beef hung green from a meat hook at the school camp kitchen. It looked grey and greasy, but Margie made a good dinner with damper for the children’s lunch. She added packets of dried vegetables, curry powder and lots of salt. It was beef called ‘killer’.

‘Back at camp, not much tucker’, said David.

Lizzy put her arms around Jane’s shoulders. She whispered, ‘David, he likem you Missus – you not lonely nomore; and Robert like Shirley.’ Shirley punched Lizzy.

‘Don’t you talk about it – you bad, Lizzy! Shame’.

Jane laughed and kept on working but she was strangely elated. Later, David stood at the school door, but he waited for her to pass and go out first before he lifted down a box of sport equipment. He had manners and as she passed by, she felt the heat from his body, an intake of breath, a sweet exchange of essence. A pulse of attraction so light, barely there but irresistible in her imagination. She let out an inaudible sigh.

Margie was assertive and magnificent and had a smiling face but muttered angrily when Jane attempted to show her how to clean the school equipment and floors. The toilet was overflowing and appalling. Jane guessed that the whole clan used the school toilets. She had made a cartoon poster with all the jobs drawn in hilarious detail. Margie crumpled the drawing in disgust.

‘You whitefella alla time bossy.’

Jane sighed, she would clean after the cleaner went home. She asked herself when would colonialism recede? It was embedded in her fairer skin. Incarnate. Her skin would have to be flayed from her flesh, and then she would be the same as them underneath.

At home, a beige turd sat in the caravan toilet, unflushable. Margie had left another calling card. The children nibbled gypsum all day to ease hunger pains, but it bound up their stomachs and made white hard shit.

School days were full. Jane established a routine of alphabet singing, numbers, counting and pre-reading and writing, and David sat patiently with the older boys as they learnt to hold pencils and trace their names. There was something strange about Lanniwah children – they were quiet, they listened in class and it was unbelievable.

The children told Jane stories about their lives, how they hunted goanna or wallaby and stories about their grandparents’ time. She had an idea to teach reading and writing by making big books with the children’s pictures. She would ask them to tell their story then she would write it down for them and help them learn to read it by rote.

After several days of practice, the children could stand in front of the class and ‘read’ their story. They showed enormous pride. Soon they could form the letters and copy out their stories. They were writing and publishing their own histories. The big books were the most cared for of all the books and children clustered around the books pointing out their own story.

One day, Shirley walked into the school with Raymond and his friend, Burnie. This old man was well dressed in cowboy shirt and jeans, his face was full of kindness; he touched all the books reverently, then he smiled at Jane, his eyes on hers. The children nudged each other, this man was important. The girls were whispering.

‘He your new daddy, Miss Jane.’

Raymond was a white man who had ‘gone native’, ‘living combo’; his home was a shed in clear view from Jane’s caravan. He was old and softly spoken, his arm was tattooed with one winding blue mermaid. He had a pile of old books in his home that were oddly marked ‘From the Carnegie collection in the USA’. Jane sat with him and Burnie on his old metal bed-frame outside his shed.

‘I come from Queensland but got done for cattle duffing. It was a mistake, just a few cleanskins from Brunswick Downs. Black Angus … nice beasts’, he said.

Jane saw that Burnie was measuring her character; she was shy with him staring, he seemed to know her already in an unfathomable way. It was like a new world opening for her, this acceptance, it was exhilarating. He kept nodding at her and laughing quietly, then he drew a picture while the others talked. Jane watched an amazing bright flat landscape emerge from the coloured pencils: it was laden with figures of men on horseback and they had guns. He was an extraordinary artist. She leant down to admire it and he tried to push the paper away, he seemed embarrassed. Burnie’s head slumped forward. Then he pointed to a hill in the scene; he watched her, then drew a group of black people running away. White men with whips drawn against yellow earth. He pushed the picture towards her. He watched her take it in. She didn’t know what to think, to feel.

‘You keepem dis picture yerself yeeai? Dat special place, one day, you seeum.’

The mysterious picture was placed carefully in a drawer, she closed it and turned back to Raymond. Later, Jane would look at it, try to make sense of it.

‘I was in the lock-up so much at Borroloola that I read through their library. I like a book with meat in it, like Plutarch, Herodotus, Emerson, and Karl Marx.’

‘Are you married to Gertie?’ she said.

‘Yeeai, it was the convention that whitefellas could have intercourse with native women but not marry them. Well bugger that, sorry. We got married in a church. You know about this country? That East Africa Cold Storage Company killed thousands of Aborigines to set up for cattle. Those overlanders, front line troops in an undeclared war. But I never hurt anyone. Did I, Burnie?’

‘Good whitefella, Ray, not hurtem any fella.’

‘Burnie, he’s an important old man, he will take care of you, any problem you can ask him.’

‘I’ll give Shirley some ice cream for you’, she said. Ray nodded a toothless grin.

‘Boss gives her plenty of extra tucker, she’s his pet.’

‘Okay.’

‘I like metho better, White Lady. We ran out of Bollinger, eh Burnie. No, you’re all right.’

‘No good Ray, you gibbit up’, said Burnie.

‘Jokin’. You know, if anything happened to that little girl I’d neck meself.’

In the late afternoon, the sun was setting and red sparkles bled onto the billabong, Jabirus flew off into the sky. Jane needed companionship: she would be brave. She walked the hundred metres to the camp. Leroy came up to Aaron: he was his best mate; he was eight and wild and cheeky.

‘You play wid me, come play near my house’, said Leroy. Aaron rushed off.

The heat was unbearable; Jane walked boldly to the edge of the Lanniwah camp and stood still. Some people were afraid of the Boss; she should go away, but she saw David watching her. He seemed amused at her confusion; he beckoned and guided her around the camp. It was spare. Tin shacks and humpies made of corrugated iron and canvas, cardboard, paper-bark, flattened kerosene tins – anything to shelter from the rain and sun. Dilly bags hung from tree poles and mangy camp dogs slept everywhere. Sunshine powdered milk tins were the billycans. Jane saw small fires burning and women squatted before them cooking dampers.

‘Children hungry; sometime they get tucker like beef, or might be camp pie.’ David sighed.

They walked past Raymond’s corrugated iron shed. Shirley and Mayda sidled up to Jane and leant against her shoulder. Mayda had flowers tucked behind her ears; her skin shone like cocoa butter; she had a full woman’s figure. She whispered to Jane:

‘You likem Lanniwah place?’

‘Yes, it’s your home, your wonderful country’, said Jane.

‘You missem that Sydney? You miss your mummy?’

‘No, we live here now.’

‘Lotta handsome fella in Sydney? Dey like Lanniwah womans?’ Mayda said.

David motioned to her to be quiet, pursed his lips to indicate that she should move away.

‘Maybe, but you just study school now, okay?’ said Jane.

‘You leave teacher look around.’ David walked ahead.

‘We got promise husband; all Lanniwah got dat. We not free, I not need readem.’

‘How old are you?’

‘I eighteen. I married soon. I run away before dat.’

‘Just come to school; you can help me,’ said Jane.

‘Burnie adopt you for him daughter now. You Lanniwah. Find your skin and family. Burnie mob now, eh?’

‘Okay, for Aaron too?’

‘Yeeai’, Mayda said.

‘You got mothers, fathers, daughters, you aunty for me.’

Shirley squeezed her arm and ran off. Jane caught up with David and they strolled past a group of women her age who were making bread, but the Lanniwah women looked suspicious of the new teacher. She was too young. Their eyes never met hers. They turned away and laughed when she and David walked past. Whispering followed their walk.

Someone yelled out:

‘Teacher got new blackfella boyfriend!’