That Deadman Dance (3 page)

Nitja wadjela.
Your friends? the old woman said, no longer so friendly and playful.
Tjanak!
Devils! Smile to your face but turn around and he is your enemy. These people chase us from our own country. They kill our animals and if we eat one of their sheep … they shoot us.
Baalap ngalak waadam!
The very smell of them kills us.

Not this one with us, Wooral replied. He is our friend. He needs us.

But Menak listened carefully to what was said.

Wooral and one of the other men took turns throwing a spear at a rolling disk of bark, using the spears of different men in the group until the disk began to fall apart. Bobby was surprised; the other man’s spear struck the bark many times. They ate, and Menak, particularly, was given the choicest of what was available.

In the afternoon, Dr Cross and his friends took them to a piano in one of the huts, and the music rose and fell over them like a waterfall, like a wave that kept rising and yet fell so surprisingly gentle and made them feel fresh. The pianist’s hands danced across black and white, and that hand-dance made the music and did not just follow the sound. They drank tea from small cups and sat in their soft chairs, and the talk all around them, the furniture, the spoons and cups: sharp sounds, tinkling. As is only right, Menak and Wooral sang and danced in turn; they didn’t do the Deadman Dance, but. Too special altogether that one, and a dance for home only. Bobby explained a little of what the dances were about and sang some songs Cross had taught him.

Their audience afterwards agreed they had found it very entertaining. The young boy’s command of English was remarkable—a tribute to the good relationships at King George Town—and he was confident and charming, quite precocious, in fact.

Dr Cross’s words passed among the crowd: there is land available at King George Town. Good land at King George Town.

*

Cygnet River Colony was a strong wind blowing all morning from land, the rest of the day even stronger from sea. Menak and Wooral were rowed out to where the anchor-snared ship jumped and pitched like an angry beast but soon the sails fell and swelled and the ship was away on the wind. Shore was windy, too, was grit in your teeth and the terrible glare of white stone. Bobby stayed with Dr Cross and together they followed the long brown river inland among scowling, rocky brows back to the buildings and the horses and sheep and cows.

Bobby, a child-stranger at Cygnet River, saw people looking at him from a distance and caught smiles intended for Dr Cross. Sometimes there was handshaking. Bobby kept at his lessons and stayed in a hut, just as if he was Dr Cross’s own family. Such a closed-in life made Bobby ill, and for a long time he saw the trees and sky only through the frame of a window or doorway. He could not breathe properly, and the wind moaned with a voice that might almost have been his ailing own, circling in his head. He wrote down the sound,
wiirra wiiiirra wiirrn
… Sleeping, his thoughts and breath bounced from the walls. The paper of his lessons was old skin beneath his fingers.

Waking in the night, the darkness all around him was unformed spirits pressing for his attention and reaching, ready to snatch him away to where he’d never get home again. Sometimes Dr Cross’s kindly face floated before him, a lock of red hair hanging beneath his hatbrim, his eyes like tiny pools of ocean, his handkerchief at the mouth.

Bobby heard a repeated call, just two notes: Uh-oh.

*

Eventually, they sailed back to King George Town, Dr Cross’s cough as familiar as the creaking timbers, the slapping sail and rigging, the ocean’s foam and wash. That cough came on the wind, disembodied, like the calling of seabirds. That cough sought out Bobby, wound its way to him within whatever enclosure of the ship he had buried himself.

A man joined them on their return voyage, Mr Geordie Chaine, a tall, stout man with buttons down his chest and belly, and whiskers either side of his face. He had a wife and two children—a boy and girl—who the mother shepherded close. The children and Bobby exchanged glances while Bobby roamed the boat as independent as the first mate. Twins, the boy and girl seemed sufficient unto themselves and did not speak to him.

Compressing his lips, Dr Cross played the fiddle, and Mr Geordie Chaine skipped on the same deck Bobby roamed. The heavy Mr Chaine went up on his toes, lifted his feet and lightly stayed just above the surface of the deck, bobbing. Bobby had no match for it, had never seen a dance like this. He was still learning the rhythm of being on deck, the steps to take as the ship hurtled across the sea’s skin, bucked and fell, tackled each line of swell, was caught and released by the wind, again and again.

The twins held one another, hand to hand, and skipped in circles to the music but they were clumsy, too. And the boy suffered badly from seasickness.

Doctor’s cough kept on. In his sleep Bobby braced himself, breast foremost like a ship’s figurehead against the never-ending swell. And rose each time, buoyed above that persistent barking breath but the long call, the searching wailing of the fiddle remained higher still, somewhere among the clouds the sail or wind or whatever spirit propelled them.

Dr Cross coughed. Dr Cross dabbed his lips. Dr Cross would bring his wife and family across this sea, to live where land enclosed a small part of this vast ocean and people had everything you might need.

Dr Cross coughed.

*

Bobby liked being on deck: the smell of fish-soup sea, wet canvas and rope; the sound of waves slapping, of groaning timbers, and oh his bare feet treading the humming boards as he was buoyed along, looking up and thinking mast and sail cling to them clouds we trail sweeping the sky across.

Sailors looked to the sky and sea, reading.

Bobby wanted to read all things.

Sailors went barefoot.

Bobby liked being barefoot.

Bobby was a sailor.

His language grew and his thinking shifted the longer he was at sea. Gunnels and galley. Thwarts and ’midships. Tiller and keel; shrouds, mast, sail.

Whales and dolphins slipped beneath the surface, waved as they rose again. Land lay like smoke at the sea’s edge, and then was gone. It formed and faded, reformed, rose and sank, as if not always remaining there just beyond his vision.

Bobby learned the swing of a hammock, how to hold a plate or spoon on a table lest they slide across it … and look! The water in a glass made a tiny horizon, tilting with the boat.

And the loneliness?

He attended to his conversation and lessons with Dr Cross, but the older man’s cough kept him to his cabin and with no one to do introductions and help him make his way, few seemed ready to speak with Bobby.

Because he was a black boy?

Bobby pulled his cuffs, adjusted the buttons of his waistcoat. He rolled his trousers to his calves, simply to walk on deck like that.

Cross

Dr Cross sat at his cabin desk, quill hovering. The pen lowered itself to the inkwell, rose into the air, lowered almost to the paper, rose again. Not an easy letter to write. How to tell a wife he had not seen for years that he had retired from service. That he was proposing to make a life for them here in this most isolated of colonies. That he could not promise to keep her as she was accustomed, that she might join him here with their children of an age to begin their careers, because here there were opportunities unavailable at home. He had land aplenty, and to develop it and increase their capital they needed only energy and initiative. And courage. In his letter Cross didn’t say he had those qualities, couldn’t really explain what compelled him to stay.

He heard the sound of quick light steps descending the companion ladder. The door opened, a dark head appeared around its edge, pulled back. The door closed again, and Cross smiled as knuckles rapped the timber.

Come in, Bobby.

Sunlight spilled in as Bobby entered; it must have been some coincidence of the ship’s angle on the swell, a door ajar upon the deck, the placement of sun in the sky. Cross blinked, smiled once again at the boy’s enthusiasm, his bright and cheerful spirit. Bobby scanned the desk.

Later maybe?

Thank you, Bobby. I really must complete this. He waved his hand absently across the desk. Coughed. My wife and family.

The door closed quietly, the quick footsteps ascending. Cross’s hovering pen. This letter to write, then another seeking confirmation of his land grants. He would explain to his wife that he’d resigned as military surgeon once the garrison had been ordered to return to Sydney. He had been granted land as per the capital he’d bring to the colony—thanks to his wife’s recent inheritance—and perhaps having at one time been Ship’s Surgeon to the newly appointed governor had helped.

His wavering pen … There were things he could not explain, even to himself. Past the middle of his life and having survived the war against Napoleon and the many years away from his family, why did he now offer them this risk? His experience and knowledge of the fledgling colony and his acknowledged good relations with its natives only seemed to diminish his personal sense of authority. Now he had encouraged others to come live among them.

Cross listened to the water rushing along the hull. Appreciated the cabin’s low ceiling. Thought he might curl up in a ball.

Ships and home

Oh imagine sailing on one of those very fine days on the ocean. Clear sky, sun and bright air, foam and bubbles at bow and wake, and taut, swelling sails. Bobby felt like a bird, rising on a sweep of air; he felt like a dolphin slipping easily in and out of the wave face.

The deck tilted mostly one way, and its regular beat at that angle put a rhythm to Bobby’s step, a walking-uphill-downhill thing that, even with no music and no one singing out loud, made him want to dance. A flourish of limbs embellished the rhythm and energy of the boat as it fell from wave crest to valley; different steps were needed when it wallowed, or balanced on the peak of a rushing ocean ridge.

Dr Cross had his violin, and while his breath came hard, and he could sometimes not speak for coughing, the violin’s voice soared and swooped, spiralling on and on with no pause. The new man, Mr Chaine, danced. A jig, they said, his feet springing up from the deck again and again, as if he did not want to be there at all. His children laughed and clapped their hands, and jumped up and down, too. And beneath all this the steady accompaniment of the wind, the sea, the boat’s passage.

Bobby grinned, laughed out loud with the joy of it all; the bubbling foam in his blood, the salt air in his lungs, the differing rhythms. And now this jig. The shifting deck made it impossible not to be moving; the rhythm of it set his muscles trembling, gathered energy to show these people, this strangely dancing man and his children.

The violin stopped. Cross was hacking into his handkerchief, the violin and bow held out in one hand … Chaine was puffing and red-faced. Bobby let his feet take him, let the boat and the ocean beneath it set him in motion. His arms were the sails of a ship, the wings of a bird; his legs lifted him into flight, swooping, rising, swooping. He put his own voice to it.

A lone seabird, white, trailed the boat, following its milky white path from above. A group of whales came close by, each great glistening back a flowing arch beneath its spout of vapour. Bobby felt his own shoulders begin to rise and curve, his own form merging with that of the whale even as his little audience’s attention moved away from him to them.

Over the shoulders of what had been his audience, Bobby saw giants each side of the ship, breathing. Dr Cross turned and Bobby, catching his eye, danced a little of that Chaine jig but there was nothing in it now, no energy. The whales, though, there was energy there, and this was a path they followed, year after year. A watery path that was hard to follow yet was that of their ancestors and his own, too, since he came from ocean and whales. That was why Menak gave him the story and the song that took the whale from east of King George Town along the coast to its very shore. The whales were close now. He heard them breathing, that rhythm.

The blonde girl, Chaine’s daughter, asked Bobby the blackfellow word for dancing. He gave her the word all the sailors knew, from Sydney. Corroboree, he said, laughing. Oh, her very earnest face. The twins, Christopher and Christine. You know, named for Christ. Who died for us and came back from among the dead.

Then the weather turned, and the wind blew them to the shelter of King George where Bobby felt his toes sink in the sand.

*

Dr Cross folded a letter, the ink barely dry. The first recipient of land at King George Town, he was a man endowed with curiosity, compassion and—as was now being displayed, albeit so late in life—considerable ambition. He had written to his old ship’s commander, the newly appointed, inaugural governor of the infant Cygnet River Colony and, having congratulated Governor Steeling on his appointment and foresight, immediately applied for a land grant at King George Town. His application detailed the extent of capital he had recently acquired through his wife’s inheritance and, in arguing that King George Town become an adjunct to colonial headquarters at Cygnet River rather than be completely abandoned, he had outlined the benefits of the place and, in particular, his relations with its people:

They refer to themselves as Noongar … are very friendly and often assist the settlers, several of them preferring European frock and trousers to the scant kangaroo skin and a good house to the cold bush … the person who arrogates to himself the title of King of the tribe, Menak by name, and his brother, Wunyeran, who served more especially as interpreter before his unfortunate death, have often lived with me.

This, his most recent letter, offered advice on the transition from military garrison to colony, and factors crucial to its success. First and foremost was its population, which at present was something over thirty people, fifteen of them soldiers, four with wives and children. One of the soldiers—Sergeant Killam, recently retired from active service—had set up a small public house. It was likely to be a lucrative business. Killam was also pilot and harbourmaster. A ticket-of-leave man—Skelly—had good building skills, and was likely to be in considerable demand. There were two other settlers, and a number of absentee landlords—maritime men mostly. Itinerant sealers had proved a nuisance in the past, but because of the depleted seal colonies there were not so many sealers today. However, there were a great many whaling ships along the south coast, and because the crew of each was greater than the population of the fledgling colony, there was ample potential for trouble.

Cross did not elaborate on his plans, save to say that he believed agricultural development was both inevitable and necessary, and could only be achieved with the assistance of the natives. The real problems of the colony centred not so much on its small population, as on its character. The colony needs people, wrote Cross in a sudden rush, who are willing to explore the surrounding country and able to rise above torpor and timidity so that they might …

aid and assist each other, create a mutual demand and supply, and extend themselves into the interior, or with capital to beat the enormous expenses of first improvement. Security against want, and extravagant prices of the necessaries of life, would do much to attract the labourer, who is of paramount importance.

This Chaine, thought Cross, although no labourer, seemed just the sort of man the settlement required. Again, that cough.

*

Gritting his teeth, Geordie Chaine was already aware of the shortage of labour. Cross had helped him enlist labourers, natives among them, but there were too few, and some had wandered away before they’d even begun. At least his sheep, having swum to shore, had been shepherded to safety. Boxes and chests were still being carried across the white sand to the edge of the grove of peppermint trees.

Watching his cargo pile higher, Chaine noticed two natives, both in European clothing, reclining in the shade of the peppermint trees. He moved his vantage point so that he could keep an eye on the man and boy as the unloading of his property continued. The sun glinted from a wall mirror being carried ashore and the boy ran from his older companion to wait a few steps ahead and waved at his reflection as it went past. He ran a few steps further, repeated the performance and then, laughing and tumbling, came back to his spot in the shade. Chaine recognised him as the boy who’d danced on the ship. And just then his own children, Christine and Christopher, along with another young child—the daughter of one of the settlers probably—ran up to the natives, offering something from their cupped hands. The native boy became very animated and theatrical, made a great show of tossing whatever it was they had given him into his mouth, chewing and swallowing in such an exaggerated fashion that the children squealed and clapped with delight. The little dog barked and might have snapped, but a gesture from the man made it sit quivering on its haunches.

A woman appeared, grabbed her child’s hand and hauled her away. The boy from the ship turned to the approaching Chaine and shrugged his shoulders. Surprised that his attention had been noticed, Chaine was surprised a second time when the boy held out his hands, palms up and with his fingers closed. Chaine paused. His children held their hands clasped before them and could barely suppress their laughter. The native boy opened one hand. A golden beetle sat on his palm. Looking Chaine in the face, the boy put the beetle into his mouth, and swallowed. Christopher and Christine shrieked, Oh Papa! Giggled. Then the boy opened his other hand and offered Chaine the second golden beetle.

Chaine swallowed it with barely a grimace.

Man and boy grinned. Geordie Chaine gave them a nod, took his son and daughter in hand, and walked away.

*

A day, two days passed and still the unloading of the Chaine family’s belongings had not been completed. A horse cantered past as Chaine strode away from the harbour, and he cursed the boy who’d been riding to and fro most of the morning with just a basket or small bundle under one arm.

The horse lifted its tail, and Chaine altered his path ever so slightly.

There were only a handful of buildings in the settlement, none could be called substantial, and Cross’s hut seemed ready to collapse. Two lengths of rough bush timber propped up a flaky wall and Chaine, concerned at its frailty, hesitated as he was about to knock, and instead called out.

Dr Cross!

The man was barefoot. Without embarrassment, Cross explained the hut’s construction: layers of white clay worked into dry twigs of wattle shrub formed the walls, while the roof was made of slats of local timber. They had used bark initially, he said, but she-oak—
casuarina
, in an aside—was more permanent and quite attractive. Chaine agreed it had a humble charm; the roof had weathered grey on the outside, but inside remained a warm, honey colour.

This fireplace, said Cross from the hearth, was built from bricks manufactured on site and local granite. My friends among the natives sleep here, he said, hands opening and indicating the hearth and adjoining floor almost as if he were scattering petals.

It must at times be hard to maintain your feet, said Chaine, for the room was small.

Cross smiled.

There was something of resignation in his smile, thought Geordie Chaine. Something of regret?

They have entrusted me with a child, a boy, Cross continued, although in truth the boy comes and goes as he pleases. He is family, so Wunyeran told me, but whether nephew or some relation more distant I do not know. Almost everyone seems related, in one way or another. Even to birds and animals, and plants and things in the sea.

The boy aboard ship? asked Chaine. I’ve seen him since. He’s helped with my stores.

Cross nodded. It’s their custom to have uncles (though they use the term more liberally than might we) oversee a young boy’s education. Wabalanginy is the name he goes by, although my tongue cannot do the sound justice.

Chaine did not attempt to say the name. And it means? he asked.

Something to do with ‘all of us playing together’, so far as I can tell. He is a creative boy, of that there is no doubt, and I suspect has wider talents still.

Quite suddenly they shifted to the problem of labour, especially acute now the prisoners were gone. One, whose term had expired, remained. They would have to pay for his labour.

He is a skilful worker, said Cross. Though there may be other possibilities. The natives are happy to bring firewood and will accept food—ship’s biscuits—as payment. They like rice, too. And treacle.

They serve as labourers? asked Chaine.

In time, I believe.

As he took his leave of Cross, the cheerful nod and hello of an approaching native caught Chaine by surprise. The man was quite elegantly dressed, despite his bare feet, and he and Cross greeted one another with the warmth of long acquaintance. Chaine hurried away, and then, remembering he had previously met the man, turned his head to look. The two were already deep in conversation, and had no interest in him.

Menak handed his clothes to Cross, took on his kangaroo-skin cloak and hair belt and, walking along the path which led from the settlement, paused where a couple of men were widening an old and narrow path. As he studied their work one of the men clicked his fingers, trying to entice the dog. The dog looked to Menak, who gave the men a nod, and continued on his way.

Feeling their gaze on his back, Menak smiled. His thoughts flitted from one thing to another; the phrase ‘Man Beetle Ate’ recurred again and again, and he played with the sounds and the structure. He thought, too, of his brother, Wunyeran, now dead and gone, and of his good friend Dr Cross. In his heart he was glad there were no longer men in chains.

Ex-Sergeant Killam saw Menak halt, and the little dog wheel around and run to him. It slid to a stop on its haunches and then, at a gesture from the man, leapt into his arms. Killam and Convict Skelly met eyes. Skelly had yet to assert the importance of his labour to this little annexe of a new colony, and Killam was still in the habit of commanding him. Killam lifted his chin, and Skelly lifted the shovel.