Landscape of Farewell (16 page)

‘My grandfather took me to live with him in his caravan to the south of our town, in the country of his Old People over there in the valleys that lead up into the Expedition Range. There were few of his people living there at that time but he got me a place in the school in town because of the respect in which he was held there. In my first year I was required to fight the white boys in order to keep my place, but I was a good fighter and had no fear of them, and in time we made our peace and friendships grew up between us that have remained strong to this day. I still have many friends down that way, white and black, men and women. That was how it was when I was a boy. After we fought we became friends. Now things have greatly changed and we live in a time in which enmities endure. My grandfather was a contract fencer and when I was fourteen I left the school and went to live with him in his camp, and he trained me in the skills of fencing, which was the trade I followed most of my life until I took on being a cultural adviser and an advocate for our people up this way. Such things as cultural advice did not exist back then. No doubt my grandfather was already an old man in those days, but he did not seem old to me. He was youthful and strong and, despite living alone for many years since the death of my grandmother, he had kept his sense of humour and his love of
life and nothing would have amused him more than to see me being who I am today and giving out so-called cultural advice to the whitefellas. Also there was an eagerness in my grandfather to work that is usually found only in young men. I loved him greatly and believed he had always been as he was then and that he would live forever and never change but would endure as Gnapun, my grandfather. He was gentle and kind and did not permit me to be in awe of him, but often asked me for my opinion and shared his thoughts with me, as if he believed me to be his equal.’

Dougald fell silent and sat looking at the creaking embers of the fire. I think he had forgotten I was there. But then he recollected himself and he turned to me and stood up and said, ‘We’ll talk some more tomorrow night, old mate. It’s late. You need your rest. Once I start, I’m as bad as Vita.’ He stood a moment, hesitating, as if he would say more, then he leaned and picked up the empty wood box from beside the hearth. At the door he paused. ‘Vita asked me where you’d buried her goat. I told her you’d buried her high on the bank where the floods won’t reach her.’ He turned to leave. ‘I’ll bury the old nanny tomorrow. Goodnight, old mate.’ He turned and went out and closed my door behind him.

As I lay there in my bed in the silence after he had gone, listening to the moaning of the wind in the scrubs and the creaking of the embers of my fire, his voice was still sounding
in my ears. I wondered if Vita had told him that our inability to memorialise the deeds of our fathers was an affliction he and I possessed in common.

Sitting by the fire in my bedroom one evening soon after this, Dougald told me the story of his great-grandfather, the warrior Gnapun. It took him little more than an hour to tell me the story, but it took me ten long nights of arduous labour to produce a version of it I was prepared to let him read.
Told
the story to me? Well no, he placed his story in my care, and might have been giving his only child into my trust. It was a responsibility for which I felt myself to be unfitted. ‘I am not Henry James,’ I said to him when he finished the story that night and asked me if I would write it for him. ‘I am only a journeyman historian. I think you need a poet for this.’ I reminded him of Nietzsche’s conviction that the work of the historian is devoid of the creative spark. But he would hear none of this and impatiently dismissed
my objections. ‘You’re not that fella. You can do it, old mate,’ he said. I was certain he did not truly appreciate the difficulties of the task he had set for me. I did not appreciate the true extent of them myself.

After Dougald left me that night, when the fire in my grate had burned down to a few embers and the silence was punctuated by the call of a mopoke deep in the great scrubs, I took up my journal and began at once the labour of composition. I did not want to fail him and knew myself to be unprepared for the task. I hoped to catch his tone and so wrote while his presence in my room and the sound of his voice were still fresh in my mind. His manner had been gentle and intimate, as if he placed the precious hoard of his story in my safekeeping, his presence in the quiet room lending to the images from his great-grandfather’s time something I not so much heard in his words as observed in him—in the small gestures of his hands, in the firelight seeking the folds and crevices of his dark expressive features, his eyes indeed
looking
his great-grandfather’s country into the room with us as he spoke.

I was kept in bed still with my badly twisted ankle and when he brought in my breakfast the following morning I did not tell him I had begun the work. I was too shy and too uncertain of what I did. I laboured at the composition secretly and at night. His manner of telling the story had suggested to me the expansiveness of an epic.
Egil’s Saga
it might have been, the way he told of the
exploits of his great-grandfather. But how to capture such effects and give them permanence on the page? As I began my work that first night it was with a feeling of regret that the writing of a story cannot be as its telling is, and even while I strove to put down only Dougald’s words, and to rigorously avoid a distortion of his story with my own additions, I was conscious that the spirit of his story had been contained as much in the shapely vessel of his telling as it had in the sequence of its narrative.

Indeed, I soon found it was not possible to keep myself entirely out of it and, as I began to live more deeply within the events over the following nights, the spirit of Dougald’s story and the spirit of my own story merged in my imagination and became one—until I
was
Gnapun the warrior and
he
was me. It was no longer the exploits of Dougald’s great-grandfather that I wrote of, but became the deeds of an imaginary and heroic self—none other than that same brave good man whom I had longed to become when I was a boy peering anxiously through the hole in the wall of my bedroom! And it was of that same great battle that I wrote now; that old struggle within us all to be good and just and to do no evil, a struggle which finds its final resolution in our death. It was only when I at last conceived the story in these terms that were intimate to myself that I was able to compose a version of it that at all pleased me. The question of whether it would please Dougald, however, or dismay him, remained undecided and was a source of great anxiety to me.
In making his story my own, I feared I may have betrayed him, as a poor translation betrays the work that inspires it. Or had I—this faint hope in my heart—by giving his story a voice that was intimate to my own voice, found the only means by which I might offer him, in a written version of his story, the illusion of the intimacy of his own interior voice? It was a conundrum and I did not attempt to resolve it. I read over my story many times but could not answer this question to my satisfaction. When I finally handed it to him it was with my doubts and worst fears intact. His reading would have to give me my answer. Nothing else could. I titled his story ‘Massacre’. It was a true and apt title for his story, of this I have no doubt. But it was—and I alone knew this—also a title closer to my own history of failure than any other title or subject that I might have chosen to speak of from my own experience. When I finished it, I felt I had at last written my own book of massacre.

To choose the moment of his own death. There was a nobility in that. The vision had been with him even in childhood and had persisted. Towards dawn in the escarpment high above the valley a disc of silver slid between the trees, touching the rocks with its aluminium light. When the cold light reached him he stirred in his sleep. A few moments later he sat up and tossed aside his cloak and rose from beside the ashes of his fire. Leaving his possessions in his sleeping place within the overhang of the cliff, he began the long descent by the light of the moon to the camp of the messengers. He carried only his favourite spears and travelled alone. An hour later the sun struck the peak behind him, but he did not turn to look back at the gilded mountain. He knew who the messengers were.
He had known long before they arrived that they would come into his country and wish to speak with him of their troubles. He reached the wide meadows at the base of the valley and walked without haste between the black trunks of the great ironbark trees, the ground mist breaking before him, as if he breasted a pale tide in his nakedness, his body shining with the vigour that was in him, his limbs strong and well-proportioned, his long stride assured and full of purpose. He met no one, and as he advanced through his country he did not look about him, for he knew what lay to his left and to his right, but kept his eyes always to the front, his gaze touching the ground where he would tread. The sun was well up when he paused at the river to drink.

He caught a drift of the perfumed smoke from their fire among the leafy river gums before he saw them. They were camped on the sandy spit beside the long waterhole where he and his people had left for them the sign of welcome. There were four of them. He stood on the bank above them, and they quietly rose and looked at him, but did not utter a single word. He stood a while, neither moving nor greeting them, but permitting the morning stillness to settle around him after the disturbance of his arrival; giving these supplicants occasion to consider their position, allowing them a little time in which to wonder if he may not have come to them alone after all, but had his warriors concealed
nearby. Standing above them on the high bank of the river he saw, in the nervous glances they exchanged with each other, how they travelled in their uncertainty to the scene of their own imminent destruction and looked with longing to where their weapons were concealed. He saw too how filled with anxiety the long night had been for them, for they had burned a great deal of wood during the hours of darkness, and had surely risen with the moon, having already breakfasted on several roasted ducks, the abundant remains of which were scattered around their sleeping places.

He called a low greeting to them then and, laying aside his spears on the grass, he went down among them. They were moved by his trust and returned his greeting eagerly, all speaking at once and complimenting him on the waterhole and the plentiful fish and duck, and thanking him for his generosity in providing such a camp site. Soon they had begun to relax and to smile and even to make a few jokes, the tallest of them saying, with cheeky bravado, ‘Well, boys, what say we come and live here and fetch our families with us?’ The others looked uncertainly at Gnapun when their lanky companion said this, and only laughed when they saw that Gnapun himself was amused.

Their laughter broke the tension of the morning and they tossed more wood on their fire and at once gained greatly in confidence. They sat together, watching the new wood take
fire and begin to blaze noisily. And soon the tall man who had made the risky joke began to speak with animation of the trouble that had caused them to leave their families and had brought them three days through the empty scrubs of the miserable brigalow country from their own valley to speak with him. As he spoke of their troubles this man became increasingly agitated, gesturing wildly with his long skinny arms, and shouting unnecessarily loudly into the morning, his eyes shining like the eyes of a madman, until one of his companions was moved to lay a hand on his thigh and to advise him softly, ‘It is better if we are calm, or our friend will not understand the gravity of our situation.’ The tall man apologised and calmed down for a minute or two, but soon grew agitated again and started shouting and flinging his arms about just as before, which made his account difficult to follow in its detail.

Gnapun said nothing but observed the man’s three companions—who evidently left the talking to their excitable friend because it was not possible for anyone to silence such a man for long. But his shouting and his wild jerky movements were a kind of silence in themselves, for they left the others at liberty to reveal their feelings in the private expressions that remained unguarded on their troubled features. Watching them, Gnapun saw that their fear was real, and that there was a deep panic in their hearts that they did not wish to let
him see in case he judged them to be cowards and unworthy of his help. But he had seen this panic before in other men and it did not trouble him, for he knew the means by which frightened men can be made brave. At last he turned to the tall man and reached to lay his hand on the man’s shoulder. Startled by the touch of Gnapun’s hand, the man fell silent and stared at him, his eyes wide with astonishment and expectation. They waited anxiously for Gnapun to speak. It was clear he had made his decision.

He kept his hand on the tall man’s shoulder and watched a pair of black swans that just then sailed fearlessly to the centre of the waterhole from the concealment of the rocks. Seeing the direction of his gaze the others turned and looked. ‘It is time for us to leave this waterhole to the swans,’ Gnapun said. ‘I will return with you to your country through the brigalow and I will meet these strangers. When I have met them, I will decide if anything can be done about them.’

With great emotion the four men thanked him. The tall man wept, standing and turning away, shamed by his helpless tears. The others laughed at him gently and slapped each others’ arms and apologised to Gnapun for him with their glances.

Gnapun said gravely, ‘This is not the first time I have seen a brave man weep when he has reason to.’ The tall man looked at him with gratitude for these words, and in that moment
he became Gnapun’s faithful follower and wished only to prove his courage to him when the time came for him to do so. Gnapun glanced to where he knew their weapons were concealed, which was his permission for them to retrieve them. ‘We have a long way to go,’ he said. ‘We should leave at once.’ A few minutes later they set off, carrying their long shafts at their sides and walking in single file behind the tall man, each careful to step into the footprints of the man he followed. Soon they had left their camp site far behind them in the possession of the black swans.