Wild Cat Falling (13 page)

The dream remembered and some long ago reality of a childhood fall — a slip knot giving way from round the high branch of a tree — falling, falling to oblivion. Don't remember hitting the ground. Only the fear and then the waking up with a bandage round my head. Why did I have to wake? Why must the old man recall for me this terrible foreshadowing?

The urgency of my plight comes over me afresh.

“Thanks for the food and everything. I have to go now.”

He dives into his hut and brings out the rifle. I look at it in his outstretched hand. I've got a few slugs in my pocket, but I don't see myself using it now. Only something to carry.

“You can keep it,” I say.

He shakes his head. “It only make trouble for me. I got no gun licence you know.” He looks at me steadily. “Might make trouble for you, too.”

“It's done that already.”

I take the rifle from his hand. I don't want to kill anyone else, but if it comes to the point I might need it for myself. Better to end the nightmare that way.

“Wait,” he says. “You want some water this time of year.” He hitches the strap of his canvas bag over my shoulder. “I got a spare somewhere. Fill it up every chance you get.”

I nod. “Which way's East?”

He motions again with his chin. “Take that old track,” he says, and puts a hand on my arm as I turn to go. “This country knows you all right, son. You keep to the bush.”

At a turn in the track I glance back and lift a hand. The old man is bent to his task again, but the comforting melancholy of his chant reaches out to me as I hurry on.

I don't know where the track is leading, but the bush seems more friendly now. I think how part of me once hunted in this forest of gums and banksias, how I was naked then and swung easily along with my light bundle of spears and boomerangs and the heart inside of me light and free. These clothes I have on are heavy-hot, but I am too soft to throw them away. The water-bag and the rifle are heavy, too, and my feet have no spring in them.

There is a dusty tang of eucalypts and a faint drift of smoke. High summer rings through the hot afternoon. Cicadas and sharp bird notes and a fitful wind among thin leaves and brittle grass. And under it all like the beat of a pulse, the old man's song. It could not carry this far, but he has sung it into my mind for as long as I have left to live.

In the yellow sand of the track ahead a stumpy tail lizard lies inert. I pause for breath and look at it, scaly and fat, its head wedge-shaped, its legs stunted and absurd. It turns, huffs defiance, and flickers out its long blue tongue at me.

“Sorry, brother,” I say and step carefully over it. It is a sort of apology to all the lizards I ever tortured with sticks as a kid, perhaps to all the bush and its creatures for my indifference.

The wind drops suddenly and the cicada note stops dead. I am the only living thing stirring in the bush. I long to rest but my fear drives me on through the furnace heat. I dare not drink more than a sip or two from the canvas bag, for God knows where I will find water in this summer dry wilderness. The country may know me as the old man says, but it does not tell me this.

The bark of a dog breaks the eerie silence. I stop in my tracks, alert. The sound comes from behind. Closer, until now I hear the unmistakable sound of horses' hooves. Run! Get in behind those rocks. Hide in a tree. . . . What's the use? If it's the police, the dogs will smell me out.

I sit down beside the track, the rifle in my hand. Have I the guts to end it here? Why not? There's no hope for me. No future except at the end of a rope. I have told myself so often that I want to die, but I guess it wasn't really true. I've always wanted to live. It was just the God-damn way life always went for me made me decide it was futile and absurd. I tried to stamp out any hope I had in me, but I never really killed it. It wouldn't die. And now when there's nothing to look forward to but the long-drawn-out misery of trial and punishment, I want to live more than I ever knew before. I even feel I might know just a little how to live.

Only yesterday I would have wanted to shoot it out like the big shot movie boys and become a sort of posthumous hero to the gang. Ned Kelly in bodgie dress; but I feel different now. Like I was somebody else. Before I've always tried to run away. Why not stick around and face up to something for a change?

Great thoughts. Swell sentiments. I guess it only means I haven't got the guts to kill myself. I throw the rifle from me with all my strength.

The dogs come first, they leap and yelp around me as I stand against a tree like a cornered kangaroo. Sharp teeth clamp on my trouser leg and rip my skin. I am real scared now. Almost glad when the horsemen show up and call them off. One of them walks up to me and shows his badge. He asks my name and charges me with attempted murder.

The meaning takes a while to register. Attempted murder. Attempted. I haven't killed him then. Relief surges and recedes. But he might still die. . . .

“How bad is he?” I ask.

“Bad enough.”

“Is he going to live? I didn't mean to Toll a man. It wasn't in my mind.”

The copper is tall with a stern face. He looks at me and I look back at him. I have never found or expected any kindness or pity in a copper's face. Is it possible there is a hint of humanity in this man's eyes? And why now when I have done the worst thing in my life?

“He'll live,” he says, and snaps the cuffs on my unresisting hands.

 

Foreword by Mary Durack

When Colin Johnson left Western Australia for Victoria early in 1958 it seemed hardly likely that he was to become the subject of a curious success story. We saw him off at the Perth railway station, a long, lonely streak of a youth in black jeans, black shirt and flapping overcoat, playing down his apprehension of the big strange city on the other side of the continent. He was nineteen years old and part Aboriginal, though his features would not have betrayed him and his skin colour was no darker than that of a southern European.

At the time he professed to know little and care less about his indigenous heritage. He had tried, in fact, by seeking white companions, to remove himself from the shadow of the native dilemma, and yet it lay upon him as heavily as upon the rest of them. It had darkened his youth and was driving
him
now, against his every natural instinct, into alien territory where whiteman letters of introduction did not guarantee hospitality as had the message sticks of his Aboriginal ancestors.

These forbears had been members of the big Bibbulmun tribe whose boundaries embraced the fertile south-western triangle from Jurien Bay, 120 miles north of Perth, to the southern port of Esperance and which, in 1829, had welcomed the first white settlers as the spirits of their dead returned.

On the west coast both newcomers and Aborigines made sincere efforts to come to terms, but the end results were much the same as in other Australian colonies where the races engaged in mutual hostility. By the end of the century the tribe had more or less disappeared, leaving a people of mixed white and native blood. Some became assimilated into the white community, but the majority continued to breed among themselves or back into the Aborigines from other parts of the State, resulting in a drifting coloured minority caught in the vicious circle of a lack of opportunity and their own lack of stamina.

The situation that had developed over the years is shown in the circumstances indirectly responsible for my meeting with the writer of this book. These concerned a group of south-western Aboriginal children whose distinctive art work, produced under the inspiration of their teacher, Mr Noel White, had been successfully exhibited both at home and abroad. The demand created for the young people's work gave them an incentive and prestige that augured well their future and that, it was hoped, would draw attention to the lack of opportunity offered to many such naturally gifted children. Instead it was turned to their disadvantage. The publicity drew attention to the conditions in which they lived and the Department of Native Welfare, embarrassed by lack of funds and staff problems, closed the settlement pending its transfer to a private missionary body. In the interim the children became scattered, mostly returning to the outskirt camps of their relatives.

I had previously collaborated with Mrs Florence Rutter, staunch friend and promoter of the young artists' work, in a book
¹
telling something of their background and the development of their talent. After their dispersal, their former teachers and a few other friends had tried to keep in touch with the youngsters, help find steady jobs for them, and encourage them to continue with their art work. Many of the girls, however, drifted into prostitution, the boys into casual or itinerant labouring jobs on farms, timber mills, orchards, or on vineyards where, in fact, they received part payment in wine. Before long most of them had served prison sentences on minor charges of drinking, receiving liquor for the elders
²
, or petty theft. From first offences that, in the case of white boys and girls, would have been dismissed as mere peccadilloes, it became very difficult for them to avoid being returned to jail. They were constantly under the surveillance of the police, some sympathetic and helpful, others seeking native convictions as easy stepping-stones to promotion.

Early in 1958, I was asked to find accommodation for a boy who was coming to a job in the city. I expected to see one of the youths we knew but he turned out to be a complete stranger with little of the familiar coloured boy's willing-to-please manner. In fact he showed little obvious trace of native blood, but he had, what most of the darker people have lost, the proud stance and sinuous carriage of the tall, tribal Aboriginal.

As it turned out the “someone” who had promised him the job had regretted the impulse and it did not materialize. Other contacts had likewise grown wary of coloured boys and Colin did not go out of his way to ingratiate himself with prospective employers. “Who knows?” he would retort, when asked whether he would diligently apply himself to a job in question. It was a sort of last ditch stand for his right as an individual to speak the truth as he knew it, no more and no less. How, in fact,
could
he guarantee he would stick a job of which he had no experience? “Why not?” he would ask of a suggestion to which he could express no immediate objection. It was an honest enough question and left it up to you.

We gathered that Colin had been born in the farming town of Narrogin, 120 miles from Perth, in 1938. His mother belonged to that district and he had brothers and sisters scattered about the State. He had never known his father, who had died soon after he was born. He had been baptized a Catholic but had since dismissed all Christian denominations as hypocritical. In the process of a broken education, partly acquired in an orphanage, he had attained his Junior Public certificate, a qualification all too rare among coloured youths. He had at some stage belonged to a Bodgie group, but although he clung to their mode of dress he had finally rejected this cult as beneath his intelligence.

At the time of our meeting he had hoped to get a city job and study for his matriculation at night school. This seemed well within his capabilities, for we soon realized that, from whatever odd combination of genes and circumstance, the boy was a natural intellectual. He was an omnivorous reader and had somehow acquired a surprising general knowledge of the classics and more than a smattering of psychology, philosophy and comparative religions. He was also interested in drama, art and music — particularly jazz. His hunger for knowledge was matched with a retentive memory that my own children were quick to exploit — one of them to provide points for an interschool debate on the merits and demerits of automation.

An above average I.Q. could, however, have been more burden than advantage had he inherited the typical instability of the out-camp people. We observed that Colin was not apparently lazy. He found jobs for himself about the place and did them well. He also had a sense of time and he began to seem — was it possible? — even dependable.

He had hardened himself to expect failure and rebuffs but had none the less enough conceit of himself to believe that he could somewhere make his mark if given an ordinary chance. Before long he had the offer of a steady clerical job, but he now had his doubts about living in Perth. Some of his former associates had got into trouble and it was difficult, in a small city, to avoid running into them under the watchful eye of the law.

An alternative was offered by the Reverend Stan Davey of the Aboriginal Advancement League in Victoria, who had helped many young people similarly placed to find jobs in Melbourne.

“Why not?” Colin asked, when the proposition was put to him. Melbourne would be sink or swim — a genuine test of stamina.

Despite the confidence we had in him, it was not without misgivings that we watched his train move off. It might have been to his advantage had he been more conspicuously of native blood and with more of the endearing Aboriginal trustfulness and obvious will to please. Would the people “over there” have time in their busy lives to recognize the qualities we had found under his veneer of toughness and indifference? Would he now disappear, to be next heard of in jail, as other young friends had done despite protestations of faithfulness and promises to go straight? Somehow we thought not, although Colin had protested nothing. He had not, I think, even promised to write.

Before long we received a letter describing his journey, his quite unexpected, perhaps Aboriginal, reaction to the desert, and his impressions of Melbourne. A little later he returned the money for his fare and basic equipment and thereafter continued writing at fairly regular intervals, telling about his job in a filing department, his attendance at night school, and his continuing search for some truth that would be “valid” for himself. He began attending Buddhist meetings which impressed him so much that he decided to “give up meat for ever”, along with Rock-and-Roll and ballet. However tempted towards these pleasures,
“Mara”
,
he wrote,
“shall not prevail”
.