The Clay Dreaming (40 page)

A short jog to the west and there are many trees – but in a burial ground, best avoided. A dash northward from there,
mokepille
, not many trees, but the high winds have brought down
murry
boughs. Among them Brippoki finds wood suitable to his needs. He thinks to risk a small fire, and refresh his spirit make-up. Not only a disguise, it helps to ward off evil. A bath of grease and ash better contains the heat of day absorbed into his body.

Returning to his resting place, he builds a tiny, smokeless fire. Crouched over it, he listens intently to the cries of night, and makes ready to run.

Brippoki holds aloft a smouldering fire-stick. He knocks off the charred end with a sharp blow to the brick of the viaduct, performing a few circulations in the air to bring it back to life. The remainder of his campfire extinguished with a kick of earth, he takes up his
waddy
in the other hand, and sets off.

Patches of soft ground are rare, but, when met, he avoids them. If obliged to cut across, he pulls his feet. Clear prints would proclaim his presence.

‘
BRRRAAAH
!
’

In-gna
or
Arlak
, with loud breaths he discourages evil Spirits. Brippoki chants words of power as he runs.

An
Arlak
may take on a man’s shape. They catch stragglers in the night – those fools who separate from their fellows. At any moment black arms might fling out of the dark to seize and carry him off. The best protection against the
Arlak
is fire.

The dark-time cries of the dead are a torture. Melancholy moans come from deep underground. Hollows whistle high in the air.
Mityan
moon at last shows His face, the largest of His hunting dogs faithful by His side. With every passing hour, He shrinks thinner, His light dimming.

At the end of a long run,
Gnowee
, red sun, comes to chase Him away.

One time, the World was only dark – dark-time all the time. The Men, to see, had to light bark torches if they wanted to walk about. In those days
Gnowee
was just a woman like other women. 

One day she leaves her little boy asleep in a hollow in the ground, while she goes out to dig roots. Yams are scarce.
Gnowee
wanders so far in her search that she reaches the end of the earth. Continuing in her wanderings, she crosses over and comes up the other side. It is dark there, and, not knowing where she is,
Gnowee
cannot find her little boy anywhere. She climbs up into the sky carrying a great bark torch. She still walks there, and sometimes under the earth, looking for him.

Or was it that
Courtenie
, the native Companion, had hidden Emu’s egg? The old stories are all mixed up and confusing to him.

Only as dawn breaks does the hot wind finally die down. Virtually all trace of cloud has been blown from the skies. After the long restlessness of night, Brippoki is glad to return to his
balla-duik
.

Forty days, and forty nights – time is running out.

First post brought with it a second letter from the Admiralty clerk, Dilkes Loveless. At Sarah’s request he had ferreted out more documents regarding Joseph Druce, patiently copying them down in his own looping longhand. She rather feared it a labour of love.

‘Dear Miss Larkin,’ he wrote, ‘it is my distinct pleasure,’ and so on and so forth. Sorting through the sheaf of appended papers, Sarah felt herself suitably indebted, if no more endeared. The lieutenant had been in correspondence with one of his opposite numbers: the name Druce was confirmed in ship’s musters for the
Royal Admiral
, East India Company, listed as a convict among ‘Persons transported as Criminals to New South Wales in the
Royal Admiral
in the month of May 1792’. His ‘form’ – presumably, crime – drew a blank, but the date and place of his conviction had been recorded as ‘Middlesex, 14 Sep, 1791’, and his sentence, ‘7 years’.

Further attached were extracts from the log of His Majesty’s Australian Ship
Lady Nelson
, a Royal Naval vessel on which Druce had later served. The enclosure numbered many pages – the gallant clerk indulging Sarah with some irrelevant-seeming background, sentimental notes on the ship’s various voyages and eventual fate – drawing her attention, however, to two entries in particular.

The clerk mentioned a similar incident, taking place on board during a voyage from Sydney to Norfolk Island in 1804, one ‘J. Druce’ punished with 24 lashes for theft. He had apparently sold on the after-effects of a shipmate, drowned less than two weeks previous. Oh, Joseph.

The log excerpts supplied indelible proof of his wretched character. Joseph Druce, a.k.a. ‘George Bruce’, was confirmed a deserter – a deserter and a liar too.

A convicted felon, he had been pardoned and employed as a sailor in His Majesty’s Navy, yet – as Sarah well knew – remained a thief, drunkard, rustler, fugitive from justice, and swindler, embezzlement merely the latest addition to an entire catalogue of his crimes.

Dilkes went on, ‘I relay this material to you as a private matter, rendered in the strictest of confidences, and I beg your utmost discretion in this regard.’ And all of this great favour, she was led to surmise, fell due to impressions made during ‘the very pleasant afternoon’ of their ‘all-too brief’ acquaintance. ‘Any further assistance that I might furnish,’
etcetera
.

As ever, he tried that little bit too hard. If Dilkes expected some sort of reward for his efforts, then heaven help her.

Last and by no means least, he forwarded a full transcript of the letters that had tipped her off to Druce’s alias, including the text of his pleading
Memorial
to the Colonial Department. Its opening sentence flourished a most extraordinary, entirely new assertion, and bare-faced lie:

Hideous scars distort the willow’s bark, across the water. The tree whispers foul curses, and droops its limbs.

Brippoki’s flimsy
gunya
has collapsed in the night. He rebuilds it, introducing a few improvements to see him through another day. The earth within he beats with a large flat rock, to make it level. Any loose stones, protruding roots or grass stems, he removes. The wind having died down, he gathers up dry leaves, spreading them across the smoothed earth to make for a comfortable couch.

The air is chill. Brippoki relents: he will build a daytime fire. He clears another patch of earth, just in front of his new shelter, scooping out a shallow trough at its centre. He thinks of
Gnowee
and her lost baby, and then goes in search of more wood.

Taking out a metal barb that he keeps up his nose, he begins to bore a hole into the bigger of two fire-sticks. A quarter-hour of patient exertion, and his fourth attempt to ignite a tiny flame meets with success. He lays the fire
seedling on the cleared ground and feeds it more dry grass and then, finally, bundled twigs.

A piercing cry overhead makes him leap for cover. As loud war-drums beat, he buries his face in the dirt and quivers with fright. The terrifying sounds soon recede. Peace prevails, but Brippoki stays rooted – much like the storybook ostrich, believing that it may not be seen even as its posterior waves in the air.

Almost immediately, the almighty commotion repeats. He fears that he must find a new camp. Lifting his head at last, Brippoki discovers his mistake. Train services have resumed across the viaduct above. In fact, he feels greatly reassured: such deafening noise may well daunt the real demons.

The frequent passing engines are soon enough of little consequence. If anything, the regularity and tremor of their progress becomes more soothing than alarming. Brippoki still freezes every time the whistles blow, a black statue, carved in an endless variety of poses.

Lulled, content, he returns in his mind to the sheep runs of Western District, Southern Australia. He works the flocks there, and dwells on Brippick Station – drives sheep, plays cricket, and dreams his mysterious Dreaming.

He has, the last eight years or more, been a shearer and a herdsman. Having given up his sad wanderings, he settles down, wearing the costume of the stringybarks, the croppy one whites, eating same food, smoking some pipe. His talk turns to whitefellow talk. New skin.

Restless, he once in a while takes off into the Bush, wanders a bit. There aren’t any longer the great gatherings to head for. Every summer, the fires in the hills are fewer.

His Dreaming is as strange and remote as it has ever been. In the end, he no longer bothers with his Walkabouts. When the quiet times come and there is no work, he sits by his hut and gathers dust.

Sarah looked in on Lambert. He was awake, sitting up in bed and reading intently. He only spoke in answer to her, and then in monosyllables, not looking up at all. She had no time for sulk or silence, and so did all that she had to do and then left him to it. Swiftly but surely she dealt with all her various chores around the house, and then shopped to replenish their stores.

It was late morning by the time she reached the library and recovered the manuscript. She got straight down to transliterating another chunk of Druce’s life story. The copy of his
Memorial
, just received by post, showed the date 1813. Her own efforts at his chronicles lagged by perhaps a decade.

It took Sarah only a short while to get back into the swing of deciphering the illiterate scrawl, her patient efforts soon rewarded with interest. She very much hoped Brippoki would pay her another visit, come the evening.

By lunchtime the Reading-room had filled considerably.

Sarah overheard an article of gossip: that Benjamin J. Jeffery, the junior assistant who had been so helpful to her, had been let go. The unofficial story ran: improper advances towards a female reader, advances being returned, and on the premises too. No official version existed. He simply wasn’t there any longer. Sarah felt sorry for him, whatever the truth of it.

She checked the time. In another hour or two she should return to the house, make sure Lambert had eaten his breakfast, and perhaps even find his mood improved. She returned the manuscript to the shelves, patrolled those surrounding it, and let her fingers be her guide.

The noonday sun pulses overhead. Brippoki’s mouth is dry. Motionless, he sits.

He cares little for his time on Brippick Station, nor relishes the work, but no other choice exists. If he wants to eat, he must work. The land
walypela
leaves to them offers no means of support. The old and the sick receive their handouts. Everybody else has to do whitefellow work. The borrowed clothes, wet in the rain, do not dry. The old sicken until buried in their new skins. The white life is no life for them.

The young men live, the old men die. Learning is forgotten. As lines of kinship turn to dust,
Warri
the wind blows them away. Few traces are left. The loss of life means that the Way is lost. And loss of the Way is the loss of life. Not many new children are now born. No childhood for them.

Brippoki is just one among the many lost and lonely. He works the station. Life lacks meaning.
Tchingal
squats overhead, a giant black patch among the constellations.
Waa
the crow turns Argus.

‘God’ introduces himself. He ain’t much cop. Just another bloody shepherd.

Seated in the midst of the white man’s Dreaming, Brippoki crosses himself – just in case.

The lost generation, they are the last generation. No people no more. No kin.

These unhappy thoughts are nothing good. Don’t go there.

The cricket is a way out. He takes it. Up
Bring Albit,
down sandy spring, Billy Hayman and Tom Hamilton learn them how to play the game. Wills a good one. Lawrence too. When playing there at Pine Hills, balls go in all four lagoons. The team come from all over – Benyeo, Hynam, Struan, and Fulham – come to Bringalbert Woolshed so they can beat the whites. Speaking in many different tongues, their speech abrupt, hard to understand, from stations all over, they come – Lake Wallace South, Mullagh, Rose Banks, and Brippick. Some of them, liking their drink too much, are gone now.
Murrumgunarriman, Pripumuarraman, Hingingairah
, Jellico.

Travelling immense distances, passing through the territories of a great many rival mobs, they adopt the white man’s naming to ease their passage.
And that is the only meaning of the name he has been given by the
guli
not his brothers, not his kin. The men and women of
balug
soil, the
Wudjubalug
clan of the
Wergaia
, the ‘No’ people, all are gone now, no more No. He is the last of his motherline, the last of his tongue.

Bripumyarrimin
means ‘The one from Brippick Station’.

He hasn’t any other name than that, a name without No meaning. No true name. No true name for which he is qualified. He is the one from Brippick Station, a man without a name. And a man without a name isn’t any real sort of man at all. Unfit for ceremony, unfit for company, only fit to be ignored, he is still considered a boy –
tji-tji
, a child – a child in a man’s body.

Team all gone now. No more cricket. Nowhere left to run, to hide.

He is the last.

Boraingamin
, all is ashes. Brippoki’s fire has no heat in it, only sadness. Back and forth the trains scream past, back and forth.

To cheer himself Brippoki plans for a feast of
joogajooga
, fresh pigeon, served on a broadleaf platter with a side of lily root, and, as an appetiser, baked tadpoles on grass.