The Clay Dreaming (35 page)

More advanced than Captain Cook had given them credit for, if not by much, they commonly sheltered in hovels not much bigger than an oven, made from pieces of stick, or bark and grass; and only in the wet seasons.

Direct confrontation and displays of overt curiosity were considered the very height of rudeness, a trait absolutely confirmed by Sarah’s own experience. Almost any line of enquiry would be politely rebuffed, making it almost impossible to establish anything for certain. By the same token, a conversational gambit such as revealing talk about oneself appeared to be as unwelcome as it was uninvited. Aborigines disliked contradiction, so unfailingly polite that they would agree with any argument presented to them – a suggestion Sarah found
most concerning. In consequence, ever since the days of first contact, blacks and whites had continually wrongfooted one another.

The immutability of the otherwise docile savages was widely remarked on. New South Wales governor Lachlan Macquarie – the same – found them to be frank and honest, but he observed with regret that they wasted their lives in wandering. J. A. Turnbull pronounced their habits nomadic in both practice and temperament, concluding the New Hollander physically incapable of civilisation. The Jardines complained at how their unsettled nature presented a very great obstacle: they themselves had nothing to offer. Nor were they much interested in foreign objects, beyond a brief novelty value. This inability to be drawn forth, quite unlike the other native peoples British explorers had thus far encountered, proved a constant source of frustration. Without trade there was little hope of developing a greater understanding, no give, and no take.

Positions eventually relaxed and the white men prevailed on the Aborigines, who took a renewed fancy to comfort goods, pouring into the new towns in quest of tea, flour, sugar, and alcohol.

Sarah felt pleased to read of a possible reconciliation, but greater shocks lay in store.

Chastity was a virtue unknown to them: for a loaf of bread, a blanket or shirt, their women gave up any claim to it, and many were the white men who held out the temptation. Yet according to Westgarth, writing in 1846, the prevalence of illicit intercourse between black females and colonists was a fruitful source of misery to the Aboriginal population, not only from the introduction and spread of disease, but due to the hostile feelings engendered among the males.

Common-law relations aside, intermarriage between the races remained out of the question. No similar repugnance prevailed towards the half-caste children that resulted; they appeared acceptable to either side. Reverend George Taplin reported the Aborigines actually preferring to have white children: since the colonists had greater sympathy for them, they were the least trouble. Complications only presented themselves in later life. At some point, part-blood sons brought up amongst the settlements met with an immovable obstacle: no European woman could be found who would consider a native. Generally despised, they were obliged to go into the Bush for companions. Whether or not they found a welcome there, Sarah was unable to resolve.

She felt curious. What then, if anything, did Aboriginal males make of white females? Surely it must have been known from the start that such an exchange could not be tolerated. Were they repulsed, as the ladies of Europe were? Did they despise?

Among the Aborigines every man was considered equal, and given the opportunity to have his say. They recognised neither rank nor title. In all of their many and various languages, there was not one word for ‘chief’, nor one
for ‘servant’. The only term of respect that might be found signified ‘father’, and was applied to any of their old men. The idea that one man could be considered higher than another proved difficult to get into a blackfellow’s head, and yet local government desired equal representatives to deal with. This led to the institution of the ‘King Billys’: Boongaree, pictured, wore a little tin-plate badge of office. He looked severe but at the same time hesitant, insecure, and quite naked without a beard. The ennobling experiment was a failure. Given no real authority by the administration, the Billys became figures of straw, disrespected in both camps. Many took refuge in the bottle, and could be found sprawled in the gutter, still in their royal vestments.

The name ‘King Cole’, in retrospect, seemed ever less appropriate. Sarah felt glad to have abandoned it.

One custom in particular arrested her attention – their strict code of retributive justice. In the tradition of
Exodus
, the Aborigines took an eye for an eye. ‘He exists,’ wrote the Reverend Wood, ‘in a state of perpetual feud, his quarrels not being worthy of the name of warfare; and his
beau idéal
of a warrior is a man who steals upon his enemy by craft, and kills his foe without danger to himself.’

In an observation made decades earlier, David Collins was perhaps more precise on this same point. ‘They are revengeful, jealous, courageous, and cunning. I have never considered their stealing on each other in the night for the purposes of murder as a want of bravery, but have looked on it rather as the effect of the diabolical spirit of revenge, which thus sought to make surer of its object than it could have done if only opposed man to man in the field.’

Blood-debts sometimes festered for many years before a ripe opportunity presented itself. Sarah recalled to mind Sergeant Padraig Tubridy’s uncharacteristic fear of dusk, legacy of the many grudges held against his badge of office.

Pitched battles were not unknown, but, in the case of a killing, an oddly formal punishment seemed the most common settlement of any dispute. The accused must take his chances, submitting himself as a willing target for the spears of the aggrieved. The relatives of the deceased, as if they too were somehow implicated in the affair, would then be compelled to undergo the same trial. Sarah had seen the exact stunt performed at the Oval cricket ground, and then again with cricket balls substituted for their spears.

Nor were their vengeance killings limited in scope. According to the Aboriginal philosophy of revenge, if the accused were beyond reach, any associate of theirs would do. In one given instance of a sentry shooting an escapee, relatives of the dead man made reprisal not on the white man who had fired the shot, but on a native he was on good terms with, killing him instead. An entry in naturalist John MacGillivray’s
Narrative of the Voyage of H.M.S.
Rattlesnake suggested that
the killing of Mr Gilbert was just such an incident – revenge on an innocent for outrages committed by others of his party, the two blacks belonging to the Leichhardt expedition having seized on a local tribeswoman.

When interracial conflict broke out, it was sheer, bloody and protracted, a vicious cycle of killings. Woodland imps became the ‘sable terror’. If the European party were weak, the natives would rob and murder them; if not, then the whites would commit wholesale butchery on the natives: survival of the fittest, in all its gory colours.

Evening comes down like a wolf.

South of the Thames, a mile downstream from London Bridge, sundown brings a second twilight to Jacob’s dark Island, carbon copy of the first. Hearts hollow and bones weary, the shades of day unpeel themselves from the brickwork where they have idled away the hours between low tides.

The young girl from the coal-barge kicks over the remains of a campfire she finds abandoned. Her brother tries on some clothes, discarded there in a pile, his brief nakedness a patchwork of ghost-white flesh and black dirt.

The tide, newly turned, will not wait; they wade into the foul waters, enough receded for them to resume their scavenging.

As the last lick of sun scorches the timbers of the surrounding wharves, the little girl strays near to the outlet of St John’s Great Sluice, a great black hole in the flaming wharf wall. On the threshold of the storm drain she half-turns, frozen in fear. A monster black shape rises up before her, hair matted and greased.

Screaming all the way, the two siblings slip and slide across the mudflats, falling up Horselydown Steps in their haste to escape. The boy shoves the girl on ahead of him. From the end of the alleyway he checks behind, attention fixated on a sliver of red, all that remains of the day. All at once there comes a loud cry from Pickle Herring Stairs; in the other direction, over Island-way, all the dogs set to howling. An almighty bang from the Tower echoes and re-echoes along the waterfronts.

Framed alone on the near horizon, in the welter of a dying sun, stands the dark outline of a man.

Brippoki sees it too.

Sarah sorted through the vegetables in the larder. Rather than throw anything out, she pared off the black parts and made a large soup. She ladled out a fair portion and then set the rest aside to congeal. Whatever her father could not finish she would have for herself, but no more. The soup would have to last them until at least Monday.

Lambert hunched forward in his bed, kissing at the spoon. After twenty tortuous minutes he laid the bowl aside. Sarah, realising that she was glad to see
it half full, swore on the instant to spend their remaining funds as and whenever necessary, to make the most of life until it was gone – until the money, she meant, was gone.

Lambert Larkin patted his lips with a napkin. ‘I know you are suffering,’ he said. ‘We must keep faith. The Lord will provide…’

Sarah hated herself all over again for not better masking her emotions. ‘There are many,’ she said, ‘much poorer than we.’ She refused to suffer exclusively. Her pity encompassed the world.

‘Quite so,’ agreed Lambert, ‘and poorer by far than we could ever become… yet they do not suffer as you do, dear heart. They are not so sensitive, or else would have long since bettered themselves.’

‘Why do you say that?’ asked Sarah. ‘Because they do not know God?’

Lambert was surprised at the edge of contempt in her voice.

‘Though we might consider them the poorest of the poor,’ he reasoned, ‘many are found to be content with their lot. They languish outside of the church…literally, sometimes, outside the church…strangers utterly to religious ordinance. As irreclaimable as the heathen savage, yet not half so clean.’

‘Even without God he has a soul,’ she insisted, ‘he still has feelings!’

Sarah became guarded. She did not wish to sound quite so specific.

‘Any poor man,’ she continued, ‘any poor man under his lot, suffering. His feeling is infinitely higher than in a man who knows comfort. Of any sort.’

She meant faith, of course. Lambert pondered. Did she dismiss it?

Sarah saw herself back along Ratcliff-highway, in Chancery-court.

‘How?’ she demanded. ‘How can pious feelings be expected of anybody in the absence of dignity…their daily bread so dry, it needs a thorough soaking before it can be eaten!’

Stunned silence. She realised she had been shouting at him. At
him
!

Lambert looked at her then with something akin to paternal pride.

‘You are…a wise child,’ he said.

His expression suddenly altered to one of infinite sorrow. Sarah was horrified to see him well up with tears. Unsure if she had been complimented or insulted or something else entirely, she fled in confusion, guilty only of having spoken out of turn, and, in an excess of feeling, in tears of her own.

A little later that same evening, recovered from her pitch of sentiment, Sarah returned to her father’s bedside. He appeared to be sleeping. She dimmed the light, and, stomach growling, retrieved the remains of the soup. Not even bothering to warm it through for herself, she drank it down.

She lit the candelabra in the parlour, and sat reading through her notes from the day. Study as much as fear had inspired her outburst: she read through the jottings again to excuse the truth in what she had said.

Seven decades past, David Collins had written of the Aborigines local to the first settlements, finding them living in a state of nature, that which must have been common to all men prior to their uniting in society and acknowledging but one authority. No country had yet been discovered without there being some trace of religion: Collins pronounced Australia the exception. The natives, he said, worshipped neither sun, nor moon, nor star. However necessary fire might be to their survival, they did not adore it; nor did they venerate any particular beast, bird, or fish. If any conception of an afterlife existed among them, it was not connected in any way with religion, for it had no influence whatsoever on their lives and actions; he never could discover any object, real or imagined, that might impel them to the commission of good actions, or deter them from perpetrating what we would deem crimes.

‘They have no idea of Divine Being’, ‘no words for justice or for sin’, ‘no object of worship, no idols, nor temples, no sacrifices’ – the commentary of all observers tended towards the same conclusion – ‘nothing whatever in the shape of religion to distinguish them from the beasts of the field’.

According to
Nahum
, one of the smallest books in the Bible, there once was a place called No, ‘situate among the rivers, that had the waters round about it, whose rampart was the sea, and her wall was from the sea’. Brippoki, it appeared, came from the veritable land of No.

Obscure in their beliefs, the Aborigines yet appeared terribly afraid of visions and apparitions. Considering the manner in which Brippoki had most recently departed, Sarah felt this was obvious in itself.

After every page or two she would look up, searching hopefully out of the sash window.

The star constellation known as the Southern Cross, unique to the night sky of the southern hemisphere, must have been of desperate comfort to the earliest settlers. Against such great odds, and flying in the face of indifference, they had made it their mission to spread the gospel; to include this lovely, dreadful, Godforsaken land of No within His Kingdom, His Power, and His Glory. They would make of it the New Canaan.

Thus was paved the way to hell, with good intent.

For the Aborigine to be redeemed he first had to be converted. And yet, before attempting to save souls so blissfully unaware that they were lost, the colony’s spiritual enforcers should have looked to themselves, and put their own house in order. They had taken an unpopulated paradise and made of it a penal colony. By their behaviours, the convicts, escapees, and emancipists – men like Druce – put to shame their men of light and leading.