Matilda's Last Waltz (50 page)

Matilda's spirits fell as she looked at him. He'd seemed old when she was a child, but had become such a part of the surroundings she hadn't really taken much notice of how much he'd aged recently.

Yet, as she regarded him now, she could see his skin had lost its healthy black sheen and was the colour of dust. But then age was catching up with all of them, she thought as she did a rapid calculation and realised with a sense of shock that she was almost thirty-six. How the years had flown. She was older now than her mother had been when she died.

Dragging herself back to the present, Matilda touched Gabriel on his bony shoulder. ‘Don't talk nonsense,' she said firmly. ‘The earth can do without your old carcass for a few years yet. I need you more than the Spirit World.'

He shook his head. ‘Sleep come soon. Gabriel must go back to the earth, meet his ancestors, throw stars into sky.' He grinned toothlessly. ‘You look, missus. One day you see new star.'

‘Shut up, Gabe,' she said sharply. If he left, then so would the rest of the tribe probably. He'd become a part of Churinga, and it wouldn't be the same without him.

‘You're talking nonsense. You still have years ahead of you. Don't wish your life away.'

He seemed not to hear her. ‘Churinga lucky place, missus,' he murmured as he looked out over the parched earth and wilting trees. ‘Rain come soon. Men come home. You need a man, missus. Man and woman need to be together.'

Matilda smiled. Gabe was a past master at changing the subject, but she did wish he'd change his tune now and again.

His eyes were misty as he looked into the distant horizon. ‘In Dreamtime black fella meet black woman. Black fella say, “Where you from?”

‘Woman say, “From the south. Where you from?”

‘Black fella say, “From the north. You travel alone?”

‘Woman say, “Yes.”

‘Black fella say, “You my woman.”

‘Woman say, “Yes, I your woman.”'

Gabriel turned his solemn face towards her. ‘Man need woman. Woman need man. You need man, missus.'

Matilda looked deep into his wise old eyes and knew he spoke the truth as he saw it. There was nothing she could do to stop Gabriel from leaving her, and he was trying to make sure she had someone to look after her once he was gone.

‘Fight it, Gabe. Don't leave me now. I need you. Churinga needs you.'

‘The spirits sing me, missus. Can't fight the singing.' He stood and looked down at her for a long moment, then stepped away.

Matilda watched him crawl into his gunyah and take the youngest of his dozen children into his arms. He sat very still, staring out over the land of the Never Never, and the child lay quietly looking up at him as if communing with his silence and understanding the portents.

*   *   *

Emperor Hirohito's delegate signed Japan's surrender and on Sunday 2 September 1945, the world was finally at peace. For the Australian squatters it had been six long, gruelling years. Afterwards, while Europe laboured over her devastated cities, Australia looked to her land.

For almost ten years not a drop of useful rain had fallen but on the morning peace was declared the skies rolled black and laden over the parched earth. The clouds split and the first heavy drops began to fall.

To Matilda, it was as if Father Ryan's God had held back his gift while the world was at war to punish man for his violence and hatred. But the rain was surely a sign of his forgiveness and the promise of better things to come.

She and the tribe stood out in it and let it drench them in its refreshing coolness. The earth swallowed the downpour and the streams and lakes began to fill. For hours rain soaked into the land, darkening it, turning it into swirling, raging rivers of mud. The animals spread their legs as they stood in the fields and let the cooling water run down their backs and wash away the lice and ticks. Trees bent beneath the deluge, galahs hung upside down from their branches, opening their dusty, mite-ridden wings to the water. As it thundered on the galvanised roof she thought it was the sweetest sound she would ever hear.

Matilda stood on the verandah. She was soaked to the skin but it didn't matter. How sweet the air was, cool and perfumed by the smell of water on parched earth. How willingly the gums bent under the weight of water, their leaves touching the ground, their branches glistening like silver in the gloom. Life was suddenly good. The war was over, the men would return, and the land would yield wonderful, life-giving grass. Churinga's water tanks had just held out. They had survived. Gabriel had been right. This was a lucky place.

The rain fell for three days and nights. Rivers broke banks and the earth turned to mud, but the sheep were safe on high ground, the cattle well away from the creeks. Ten inches of rain meant new, strong grass. Ten inches of rain meant survival.

On the fourth day the rain petered out and a weak sun peeked from behind dark clouds. A green fuzz could already be seen over the paddocks, and within a couple of weeks, the first plump plumes of grass began to rustle in the breeze. Life had begun again.

‘Where's Gabe, Edna?' Matilda had just ridden into the yard after a long stint in the pastures. ‘I need him to take a work party up to the north field and mend the fences. The river's run a banker, and about three miles of posts have been ripped out.'

Edna looked up at her from the top step of the verandah. Her eyes were wide and untroubled as she rocked her baby. ‘Walkabout, missus. Singing take him.'

A jolt of dread made Matilda unsteady as she climbed off the horse. Although she was desperate to know Gabe's whereabouts, she knew Edna would only become mulish and tight-lipped if she shouted at her. Sick with worry, she tried to keep her voice calm.

‘Where's he gone, Edna? We got to find him quick.'

‘Out there, missus.' She pointed at some vague spot in the distance before climbing down from the verandah and ambling back to the camp fire which always seemed to be burning.

‘Bugger it.' Matilda rarely swore, but she'd been around men long enough to have quite a colourful vocabulary. ‘Damn and blast the lot of you,' she yelled into the faces of the men and women who seemed unfazed by the fact their leader was dying out in the middle of nowhere. ‘Well, if you won't do anything about Gabe, then I bloody well will.'

Leaping back into the saddle, she galloped out of the home paddock and began the long trek towards the water hole. The knot of trees stood at the foot of Tjuringa mountain where the water trickled into a pool from out of the rocks. Ancient paintings marked it as a place sacred to the Bitjarra. She hoped Gabriel hadn't chosen somewhere else to die. If he had, then she would have to return to the homestead and get the men together for a more concentrated search further afield.

For twelve long hours she searched all the ancient sites she could think of, but without help from the other tribesmen knew she could go no further. The caves were empty, the rock pools deserted, there was no sign of Gabriel.

She turned her horse towards home where there was no word of him, and finally, reluctantly acknowledged she couldn't spare the time or the men for another search party. If Gabriel didn't wish to be discovered, she knew no white man – or woman – would ever find him.

The Bitjarras were stoic in their acceptance of his disappearance. She would find no help there. It wasn't laziness on their part, they cared for the old man and respected him, but it was a part of their tradition that when the time came, death was for the person who had been sung – it didn't concern the rest of the tribe.

And as Gabriel had said, you couldn't fight the singing.

Three days later one of the boys, who had been out in the bush as part of his initiation into manhood, returned to Churinga. Matilda had seen him come back and had watched with suspicion as he headed straight for the elder. She couldn't hear what he was saying but recognised the bull roarer he had tucked in the kangaroo hide around his waist.

‘Come here, boy,' she called from the verandah. ‘I want to speak to you.'

He looked at the elder, who nodded, then came reluctantly to the foot of the steps.

‘You've found Gabriel, haven't you? Where is he?'

‘Over Yantabulla way, missus. Gone to spirits.'

Matilda looked at him in amazement. ‘Yantabulla's over a hundred and fifty miles away. How on earth did Gabe manage to walk that far?'

He grinned. ‘Take three or four turns of the moon, missus. Gabe good runner.'

Matilda doubted Gabe had been capable of running anywhere, but the fact that he'd died so far from Churinga lent credence to this statement.

She started as a terrible wail began outside the gunyahs and they both turned to watch the extraordinary sight of Edna on her knees by the side of a long-dead camp fire, beating her head with a nulla nulla and slashing at her arms with a knife.

‘Why did you leave me, husband?' she wailed. ‘Why did you leave me, husband of mine?' She bent and took the dead ashes from the fire and smeared them over her head and body.

‘What's going to happen to her?' Matilda whispered to the boy.

‘One full turn of the moon and she will make a clay cap. After four seasons of wearing this, she will take it off and wash the clay from her face and body then put the cap on the burial place of her husband. Then she will look to her husband's brothers for protection.'

The news of Gabriel's passing spread quickly through the tribe and the men began to paint white circles and lines on their faces and bodies. The women gathered feathers and bone necklaces and draped them around their men's necks. Spears were taken out and sharpened, shields of stretched kangaroo hide were painted in bright tribal emblems, and heads of all but the widow were coloured with red dye.

The men moved slowly in regal procession away from their camp and Matilda and the women followed them out into the plains. After many hours they came to a place where the grass grew around ancient stones that were adorned with totem symbols.

Matilda and the women sat in a circle a mile or two away, forbidden to take part in the ceremony. As they listened, they heard the mournful sound of the didgeridoo. Bull roarers sang as they were spun through the air, and the dust began to rise as the men began their ritual dance.

‘I wish I could see what was happening, Dora. Why aren't we allowed any nearer?'

She shook her head. ‘Forbidden for womens, missus.' She leaned closer and whispered, ‘But I tell you what's happening.'

‘How come you know if it's forbidden?'

Dora grinned. ‘I hide when little, missus. See what mens do.' She shrugged. ‘Not really interesting.'

‘Never mind that,' Matilda said impatiently. ‘Tell me what's going on over there?'

‘Mens dress up in feathers and paint, carry spears and bull roarers. They make music and dance and dance. Each man has spirit animal inside him. He do the dance of his spirit, make same dance as kangaroo or bird, dingo or snake. But in silence. He must not speak so that spirit can come out and carry Gabe long and long to Dreamtime.'

Matilda stayed with the women until the light was gone from the sky then she returned to the homestead. The ceremony would go on for days and she had work to do, but at least she had been able to mourn Gabe, she thought wearily. The Aborigines might be considered heathens but their ceremony today was very like an Irish wake she'd once attended years ago – only there was no drinking, and the whole thing had been performed with dignity.

She climbed the steps to the verandah and came to a halt. There, on the floor was a stone amulet – a churinga. Who had put it there was a mystery but as she picked it up she knew she would always treasure it as a reminder of Gabriel.

*   *   *

The men began to return from war but too many would never see the grasslands of home again. Apart from Billy Squires and Tom Finlay and his sons, there were other casualties. The local policeman would never leave hospital in Sydney. Shrapnel had severed his spinal cord and he lay in a coma that would finally finish what the enemy fire had started. The publican's boy had survived, but he would always walk with a limp and have terrible nightmares. The storekeeper's two boys had died at Guadacanal, and their parents moved back to the city where the memories were not quite so sharp.

The face of Wallaby Flats was changing. New people came to take over the pub and the store, the old church was restored, the streets metalled and a commemorative garden planted. There was a bustle about the place that had been missing for too long, and along with this bustle came the rush for cheap land.

Curtin's Labour Party looked at the great tracts of land inhabited by a minority of people and decided that the thousands of men who had come home should be given the chance to work their own stations.

It was an old solution to the problem of what to do with the sudden influx of war-weary men – one that had been tried after the Great War and had proved to be a failure. For what did these men know of the hardships of the squatters life, or of the endless battle to survive? Men and women had struggled for months, sometimes years, at their new lives, but had mostly given in and moved back to the cities. The outback had a way of separating the men from the boys, and only the strong survived.

Howls of protest and argument could be heard from the Gulf of Carpentaria to the shores of Sydney, but the government went ahead and put compulsory purchase orders on thousands of acres of prime grazing.

The biggest land owners were the ones to feel the pinch. Squires lost sixty thousand acres of his one hundred and twenty. Willa Willa forty thousand, and Nulla Nulla forty-five.

Matilda had moved quickly once peace was announced. She remembered what it had been like when her father came back from the Great War, and knew that if the government forced her to sell Wilga, they would pay far less than it was worth on the open market.