Carpentaria (7 page)

You could tell this man might be equated with the Dreamtime world because when his memory was stolen, the mighty ancestral body of black clouds and gale-force winds had spun away, over and done with, in a matter of a flash. The old people said they knew the time this had happened to Elias Smith because they had been awake all night watching the sea, and seen the whole catastrophe of clouds, waves and wind rolling away, off in another direction. Elias was left floating face down in the watery jaws of the Gulf of Carpentaria, and as luck would have it, he grabbed a polystyrene fruit box with a bit of fruit still left inside to eat.
He floated away on the currents heading our way.

The old people who refused to go down and join the watch because white people were there, said no one should go about making a major spectacle out of watching a wretched man walking out of the sea, even if he had walked through twenty-five kilometres of tidal flats full at high tide with the shallow mud waters at the height of the Wet season. Rightly! But that was
town
. Uptown kettle pot was different, Pricklebush whinged, wanting to go too.

While the Pricklebush stayed home, the Uptown people swooped in for the arrival of the stranger like it was something to rejoice about. Call it a phobia about not allowing legends to die. Call it flights of fancy that had driven every man, woman and child down onto the high-tide mark to wait patiently, ankle-deep in the mud, totally abandoning all of their daily jobs and duties, just to relive a familiar old story about their origins. Afar, at the same time, up along the foreshore, way back up the beach away from the town where the old people watched what the white people were doing, the Aboriginal people of Westside Pricklebush started to stir too.

Having heard the commotion, the elders climbed out of their damp bedding on the ground where they had slept through the cyclone, to go see where the noise was coming from.
Someone’s excited today
, they agreed, while settling down again in the long grass to watch. They always watched the goings-on of Uptown with restrained interest, and shortly afterwards, began their memory revisions. This was a daily task, a memory tribunal, undertaken with relish by the old people for everyone’s matter of concern – talking oral history about the sequestrators who owned Uptown. Every now and again, they would cast scathing glances up the road in the direction of the town. But on this day, the ancient owl-face woman, staring up the beach with the others in her company, and who knows what she saw with her eyesight, on behalf of all her people proclaimed sarcastically in a loud disgusted voice, ‘Ha! Ha! Look at us. We are the old people, and we knows
you
not even know where you ares from.’ The ‘we’ she was talking about, were her relations, the blackfella mob from Westside of town, belonging to Normal Phantom, the rightful traditional owner.

The Eastside camp was old Joseph Midnight’s mob exiled from Westside because they wanted to say that nobody else but they were the real traditional landowners where Desperance had been built. That idea originated from Old Cyclone who was Joseph Midnight’s father. They even made up a name for themselves – Wangabiya – and said that their tribe were the real traditional owners, before Norm Phantom’s group which they called the tribe of the
Johnny-come-latelies
came to the Gulf. Well! Even though no tribe on earth existed with that name Wangabiya, you had everyone going around claiming to be a Wangabiya. Lost Wangabiya started turning up in the Gulf from all over the place: Brisbane, Sydney and even one came over from Los Angeles saying he was a Wangabiya, and could speak the lost Wangabiya language. It was the hint of big bickies to be had from big mining that did that. It was unfortunate to have to say it, but those Eastside people of old Joseph Midnight were just a lot of nuisance dogs, which was only natural to expect because they were nothing but rubbish.

They lived among a hundred and one pussycats with pigs. This was how the old people on Westside rubbished those people on Eastside who, they claimed, knew nothing about culture if every one of them had been derived from the genes of trash, from Joseph Midnight. They saw his rubbish blood running through the lot of them so-called Wangabiyas. Even all the pigs you see lying around their yards – all called Aunty and Uncle – can never be shot,
Oh! No! You cannot shoot that good pig, he’s Uncle
. And living in car bodies and whatnot, which was illegal. All of it was part of Joseph Midnight’s extortion racket with the government. This was what he got for agreeing to the mine. The government gave him a lot of money, a thousand dollars, and said,
Go out there and shoot the vacuum cleaners, all of the Hoovers and Electroluxes – all the feral pigs.
Money talks. This was what he got for his Native title rights. Money to shoot all the pigs. He was supposed to exterminate them from the entire Gulf of Carpentaria once and for all but he never did that. He let his useless relatives take all the little baby piglets home for pets and they bred up ten piglets each.

The so-called Wangabiyas over Eastside were also responsible for cane toads, millions of cane toads living in the district to this day. When they heard that the government was paying fifty cents for a cane toad, you could hear them right over Westside talking and talking. They could not stop wishing for the toads to arrive.
Oh! Other people are really lucky they got them frogs
. Well! How do you think the cane toads got into this pristine environment? Joseph Midnight brought them in his port from Townsville, smuggled them in, not that anyone was there to stop him. Now, shine a torch around outside and you will see nothing but a plague of cane toads all over the place. So, this was the type of people they were – unscrupulous, nasty kind of people – even without talking about the land they tried to steal.

What was really offensive to the Westside elders was that those squatter people even had the audacity to open their mouths about somebody’s else’s land.
They forget they never had any land for a thousand years
. And if you see that there are no little native animals around anymore it was because those people ate them. Ate everything. You would think that would be a good case for a bit of serenity around these parts from those people, when they are living on somebody else’s land, and treating it like vacuum cleaners sucking up the wildlife. You would think that, but their loose tongues did not know the meaning of the word serenity.

Over there on Eastside, the thieves talked about nothing all day, and all night long. It was enough to drive people away. These people were so habituated to talking, the drone of their voices drove other people mad, and even some people who had got trapped on Eastside and could not escape because they had no money to buy a ticket out of the place had to be taken away down South on the Flying Doctor’s plane, to be put away in a mental institution.

A lot of people wanted to know what Eastside talked about? Well! Nothing much. They just talked about anything that popped into their heads. Mention a word. Mention horse, and they would talk about horses all day long. Mention shopping, and all night long they would talk about shopping. Mention fighting, and they would go out after dinner and half murder someone. Westside old people accused those people of being so full of madness, they said it had to be punishment from the spirits for disgracing the country not rightfully theirs, in any case.

So there it was: fringe camps sandwiching Desperance, and nothing better to do with themselves than to sit about watching white folk of Uptown going about their business. It was hard to imagine something being so ingrained it cannot be scrubbed away like ink stains on the carpet. It was like blood stains. This was exactly what it was like.

So, the ‘edge’ people, all of the blackfella mob living with quiet breathing in higgily-piggerly, rubbish-dump trash shacks, all popped any old where in the prickly bushes, all along a cobweb of dirt tracks running crooked, left, right and centre outside of town, sat back and watched this spectacle of the snow man taking place on the beach. It was the beginning of the story of the day the spirits of the seas and storms mixed their business, and sent Elias from out of oblivion into Desperance with good reason. This was the story about Elias Smith which was later put alongside the Dreamtime by the keepers of the Law to explain what happened once upon a time with those dry claypans sitting quietly out yonder there for anybody to look at, and wonder about what was happening to the world, and to be happy knowing at least this was paradise on earth, and why would anyone want to live anywhere else.

It is important to say straight up that it was no good at all for Elias coming in from the sea empty-handed like he was, and no good being anywhere with an empty head with even less than ten cents worth of the richness of his own memory anymore. If you put an empty shell in struggle town, or Uptown like the prickly bush mob called it, expect a ton of bad things to happen. His was a lethal combination, he would have been better off being an ant under a leaf if he had zilch left, not even his memory for a bit of a trade.

Little towns belonging to the white folks are like this. You could hear the town struggling to survive, to make good of itself, crying out –
Save me! Save me!
But who listened? This was the old, unanswerable question: how the heck were they going to keep themselves out of the water? And, with no disrespect, it is expedient to say at this point, that such little towns are apt to do one thing right, and this was how a town like Desperance shared a slither of similarity with others. You know, it too sought glory in its own legends. A single, important legendary lore of place developed over a century or two:

impossibly hard to reach by land or sea,

it cast a spell on those who came,

planted them like ground rock,

and because there is a measure of love in acts of permanency,

they found it too hard to leave.

Oh! Fashionable city people, Southern people who like noise would say that somewhere north of the Tropic of Capricorn like Desperance, was just a quiet little town, but if you listened hard enough, you would have heard the silence screaming to be heard. Noise was everywhere, and if there was an original God who had come along with all the white people, who created everything for them, then this place was where he made his music. There could not be a more windy town anywhere in the world of tin flapping, like an orchestra growing louder with age. And they never knew it, or realised, but that music drove those town people half mad. You should watch the wind music for it is the undoer of a man’s toil.

The winds. Well! The winds blew over the claypans from other places in the world with no respectful acknowledgment for a town having been built
good and proper
in its path. Over time, the whirly- whirly local winds composed much of the new music for the modern times. The winds squeezed through every crack and hole to loosen sheets of corrugated iron for the salt in the air to rust nails that went pop, until all those old pieces of tin whined, whistled, banged and clapped. Every day, all day and all night sometimes, the town jammed jazz with bits of loose tin slapping around on top of the mud-stained fibro walls to pummel the crumbling, white-ant-ridden, honeycombed timber frames, until one day, only paint held up those buildings.

This indescribable concoction of rhythms escaped into the atmosphere, and was spirited away across the continent to somewhere else more fraught with modernity than Desperance. There, wafting into the minds of modern day composers like lights of stardust, inspiring them to create weird, unfathomable orchestral music which the old people now heard on the radio and recognised as the uncontrollable airs of Desperance. What a fright! They turned the radio off.

The coming of Elias Smith generated an era of self-analysis not seen in the Gulf for a very long time. The truth was you had to think about Uptown more carefully, for those people had more than one legend about how they got to belong to a place. Uptown whitefella mob was full of people claiming they had no origins. They usually met one another on the street with greetings like:
Hey! stranger, where did you come from?
They said that they were not strangers because they had originated from nowhere. This was the reason why they contrived the waiting for Elias into an honest act of homage to the comings of their forebears. The occasion revealed through this unusual disembarkation of a person from the sea how people like themselves had also once, turned up, appearing from out of nowhere.

True Desperanians were those blue-eyed, blond, nervy, skinny, freckled types belonging to the old families whose origins in town stretched back several generations, not Johnny-come-latelies – no way. On request, these descendants of the original residents could rattle off from the top of their heads the who’s-who in town, and who went six foot down and under in the local cemetery. They could trace back the family line on a sheet of paper or a line drawn with a stick on the ground just to prove they could reach the point of infinity to show they did not exist.
Told ya!
they would say. Their original forebear, a ghostly white man or woman, simply turned up one day, just like Elias. On the scale of things, their history was just a half-flick of the switch of truth – simply a memory no greater than two life spans.

There were other little secrets about Uptown. The town was marked on no map. The Uptown folk had a dogged nature, and through their own sheer perversity had over many decades become unnaturally acclimatised, withstanding the tropical humidity at heatwaves so extreme in summer, their fair skin dripped like a tap. They marvelled open-heartedly at having bred a stoical population of backbone which made them a
cause célèbre.
And what of? The Pricklebush mob took a good look at themselves. The old people gave the little kids whom they had sent into Uptown every day to get educated, a job to do.
Go
, they told the schoolkids,
search through every single line of all those whitefellas’ history books
.