The Clay Dreaming (7 page)

First light struggles to penetrate the fug of an attic room, wherein most of the Black Cricketers lie sleeping. Drunken snores reverberate from more than one cot. A sneaking shadow parts the retreating darkness, makes its way towards the empty bunk. As it crosses the Aborigine the whites call Sundown, his eyes shoot open. He wakes with a start and cries out.

The face he meets is a horror mask – upper half white, the lower half black like his own. Dead white skin clotted and misshapen, two black orbs, lividrimmed in scarlet, blaze within. The horror face bids him hush, before creasing into a familiar smile.

‘Brother?’ says Sundown.

King Cole rocks soundlessly in joyful assent. He grips Sundown by the shoulders and shakes him in a fit of breathless exuberance. More than happy to see his dear friend again, it almost seems he had not expected to.

‘
Hnh
,’ smiles Sundown, his broad face creasing, ‘you lucky Lawrence him too drunk to count.’

Fully awake, he makes a rapid assessment of Cole’s outfit – what remains of it. Mud gums the formal black trousers up to his calves. The dress shirt, crisp and white at the start of the previous evening, is blackened and ragged. Collar and cuffs have completely disappeared. Of his evening jacket and shoes there is no sign.

Sundown whistles appreciatively. He is impressed.

The white sediment spreads thick across the upper part of Cole’s face.

‘Worum mwa?’
Sundown asks. ‘Where you go? Some place good, eh?’

Keeping their voices down, they chat in their own native tongue.

‘Out Bush,’ says Cole. ‘Been walking…sending the path out of myself. Went to pay respects to the Old Land. Sing a bit, dance a bit, say hello.’

Cole casts Sundown a sideways glance. A new element of caution outdistances filial ease. ‘The Old Land’ – New Chum Lawrence has used the phrase many times, meaning his England home.

Sundown does not know what to make of it in this context. Perhaps his ears are still asleep.

His sleep-swollen face betrays nothing.

‘An’ you still got your kidney fat?’ he says, only half-joking.

Back in the World, if a stranger should pass through the territory of another mob without first seeking permission, he risked attack. Most likely he would be killed, and
yelo
, his kidney fat, removed – sweetmeats to be hung in a
wadderlikkie
, a small string bag worn at the throat, conferring strength and courage to the wearer.

So the old custom went. The World is changing fast.

As if a cloud passes overhead, Sundown’s lazy smile upends to a frown. He flops back on the bed, and with a liverish sigh stares up at where that open sky should be. He should not have thought of home, not even for an instant.

His voice, when it returns, is slurred and sullen.

‘This country,’ he says, ‘doesn’t suit me. I’m a stranger here. I like to be in my own country, where I was born. I am now miserable.’

King Cole smirks, indulging his kinsman. He has heard this sulk from gloomy Sundown on many occasions during their touring together – the first time, expressed with no less conviction, when the team lodged but two days’ walk from their base at Edenhope. And look at them now!

They left everything behind, two winters gone – two-fellow cold time ago. Sundown’s unhappiness strikes him full measure.

‘
Teiwa
,’ Sundown moans. Glassy with loss, his deep brown eyes fill with yearning. Silent tears fall.

‘
Ballrinjarrimin
,’ says Cole, softly. He strokes his clan brother’s abundant curls. For a timeless time, they sit together in perfect sympathy.

Nestled on the low eaves overhead, a drowsy wood pigeon pronounces the occasional throaty ‘
oom
’. Tiny white feathers, from its downy underbelly, drift, gently, to the flagstone floor.

Done with their sad meditation, Sundown turns to Cole, expression grave. ‘Brother,’ he says, ‘this unsung land…him a dead place.’

‘
Eora
?’ says Cole, brightly. ‘I know! All night I walked along this big place. He’s no end to him! One big stone garden…’

Cole rubs his aching shinbones. He pictures himself, wandering the hollow quiet – street after street, grey rows all the same.

‘Mounds, everywhere. Burial mounds!’ he says. ‘In the dark time, they shut themselves inside…shut themselves in and set fire to everything! Can you believe it? But today, there it is all back again…and they built even more in the night!’

Sundown looks entirely sceptical, but Cole is sure of himself. He leans in, words barely a whisper. ‘I been walking in the footsteps of the Ancestors!’

‘
Atpida
,’ Sundown says flatly. He won’t accept it. ‘You are mistaken. Not here.’

‘Even here,’ nods Cole. ‘Here especially!’

Sundown almost gets up, before huffing and settling down again.

One land cannot be changed for another. And it should remain untouched, just how it was at the time of Creation. The scarified country around Malling town, much altered by the hand of man, was bad enough. London City is far worse – an unimaginable hell.

‘
Worum mwa?’
Sundown repeats his question, almost abruptly. Eyes narrowed, he searches the face of his friend.

Cole takes a cautious look around. Everyone else in the room is laid flat out.

‘Tjukurpa
,’ Cole says.

The word hisses out from between his teeth. They shake their heads vigorously, and place their hands before their mouths.

Tjukurpa
, ‘Truth’ – the Dreaming. Sundown is scandalised. King Cole struggles to excuse his words.

‘You know, brother dear, my Truth has always been…different. I cannot explain it,’ he says. ‘But this is my Truth.’ No longer able to contain himself, he exults. ‘
Deen, Deen! Eora
,’ he cries, his voice a thin reed. ‘My Truth…it is here! This place, this “London”, One Big Ant-hill Creek.’

‘
Na
!’ says Sundown, startled. ‘What?’

‘This dark time, I saw my Truth. I walked it, as I always walk it. But now it is around me in the bodyworld too!’

Cole’s second skin cracks, part flaking away, resulting in a shower of white powder. He grips the edge of the hard wooden pallet that serves as Sundown’s bed.

‘I see it and I
know
it!’

After a lifetime of confusion and concealment, he has at last the freedom to be himself, to know himself.

‘I think,’ says Cole, exhilarated, ‘I got my call…to go to the Big Place…swap songs around the campfires of my Ancestors!’

The
Nurrunbung-uttias
! Sundown looks skywards.

‘Songs, old and new, to be sung here,’ Cole enthuses. ‘Much to be explored… understood.’

The city he sees in his Dreaming is both the same and different.

King Cole smiles.

‘What else is there,’ he declares, ‘but to know one’s Dreaming.’

The room is very quiet.

‘But…here?’ Sundown asks, aghast. ‘This dead place! Why here?’ Eyes wide, he searches each corner of the room, seeing beyond the bounds of the bare stone cell in which they squat – reviewing, in that same instant, the unceasing horrors without.

When, finally, he speaks again, Sundown’s voice fills with portent.

‘This is not the World!’ he warns. ‘We are outside of the World… These men…they are no brothers of ours!’

Cole remains silent.

At Sundown’s touch, Cole’s dried clay mask crumbles all away to dust. Delicate wisps, sent up like smoke, circulate in a ray of sunshine high above their heads.

‘Bunjil-nullung,’
Sundown calls him. ‘Mister Mud.’

In his soft, rich voice, Sundown begins to recite a favourite story.

‘There is a boy…a very stupid young fellow. On his Walkabout, the boy comes to a lagoon. Wide body of water there…and the day, he’s mighty hot. This boy, he goes to wet his body in the lagoon. And the great brown snake that lives there eats him up, the stupid boy.’

The Great Serpent uncoils in Cole’s memory.

‘
Bimeby
…’ starts Sundown.

His clan-brother laughs, unsettled.

‘By and by,’ Sundown repeats, ‘that great brown snake, he shits out the stupid boy. But the boy not blackfellow any more…

‘Him a
GRINKAI
!’

One of their companions grumbles in his sleep. Both hold their breaths, until his loud snoring resumes.

‘When I wake,’ Sundown says, face to half-face with his errant team-mate, ‘I think
you a grinkai
, come to kill me.’

Among themselves, the Men often jokily refer to whites as
grinkai
. Their pallid, pulpy complexions resemble nothing else quite so much, in their experience, as a flayed corpse – the dead body peeled and pink, once the outermost layer of skin has been removed.

They are blackfellows who think themselves sophisticated, poking fun at the beliefs of simple Bushmen, fathers and grandfathers dead and gone. Yet the web of many lifetimes still ensnares them. Doubts, deeply rooted, persist. As they sailed away from the World they knew, all certainty drowned in their wake; their ship’s course inverted. At the end of their long journey, who can say they have not travelled to the Spirit World across the oceans?

Is this the fabled land of the dead?

Are these white men dead men?

Are these dead men kin? Or are they even men at all?

‘Are you a
grinkai
?’ asks Sundown, pointedly.

King Cole hesitates. He suddenly collapses, his body disappearing below the level of the cot. Sundown gasps and scrambles up to look over the edge. His brother’s body lies inert on the cold stone flags.

He is only playing possum. In a trice Cole pops back to life. ‘Lay down black man, jump up white man,’ he mocks. ‘Plenty sixpence!’

He jangles some loose coins in his pocket, and they both fall about, laughing recklessly. As skilfully as Dick-a-Dick parries a fast-ball, King Cole’s jest has turned the tricky issue aside.

‘Good on yer, mate.’

Sundown takes up his clan brother’s hand and presses it between his own. Cole has spoken unwisely, of an impossible advent. It goes without saying: what has passed between them stays in this room.

All around, the other team members begin to stir and rouse.

As far back as Cole cares to remember,
Ballrinjarrimin
, whom the whites call Sundown, is the closest to a companion he has known – his only true friend and confidant. Looking deep into his eyes, he shows him a brave face.

‘Min-yelity yarluke an-ambe, Aly-elarr’yerk-in yangaiakar!’
smiles Cole. ‘What a fine road is this for me, winding between the hills!’

‘Baal gammon,
blackfellow,’ says Sundown. ‘
Budgere
you.’

King Cole takes great solace in this blessing.

The World is anyway lost to him – willingly, he gives it up.

‘I think,’ he says, ‘to go…into whatever Dreaming lies ahead.’

Following Derby Day, the team was returned to the Oval for a day of Australian Sports. Handbills promised ‘a thrilling exhibition of Aboriginal athleticism’. On normal match days, native displays directly followed close of play, and always drew a larger gate than any ordinary game of cricket.

The English crowds still attended in force, gratifying the tour’s organisers. Events began modestly enough, with some running, jumping and hurdling – feats billed ‘pedestrianism’. The athletes appeared in outfits anything but.

Matching trunks complemented their individually coloured caps. Beneath these they wore long tights, fleshings dyed an approximation of their skin colour, underwear the English press delighted in dubbing, ‘Oh-no-we-never-mention-’ems’. The garments were intended to represent, as near as decency allowed, ‘the light and airy apparel of the native Australian’ – in other words, no clothes at all.

The ‘One Hundred Yards’ Flat Race’ opened the show. Then came the various jumps and hurdles. The winner of each contest received a cash prize and a warm round of applause. Thereafter followed ‘Vaulting with Poles’, ‘Throwing the Cricket Ball’, the ‘One Hundred Yards’ Backwards Race’, and the ‘Water Bucket Race’.

Fidgeting in their seats, idly chatting amongst themselves, the crowd grew restless. A nice enough excuse for a day out, it was generally agreed, but nothing special.

The best, however, was yet to come.

At the far end of the ground emerged a curious little figure, wrapped in a blanket. With measured step, he processed towards the middle of an otherwise emptied playing field. Attention gradually fixed on his slow and steady progress.
An expectant hush fell over the heaving stands. Only once the tiny performer had reached the centremost point did he let the blanket fall. A loud, collective gasp preceded an ‘ooh’ of appreciation.

Painfully thin and black as pitch, Charley Dumas stood no more than five feet four inches in height; the extraordinary costume in which he was clad, however, added immeasurably to his stature. Long, straggly hair covered his limbs, head and face, a doublet of animal skins worn over his hose – not kangaroo skin, but opossum. A broad plaited band of cabbage leaf encircled his brow, a head-dress surmounted by a crest of plumes from the impossibly colourful lyre-bird. The feathers of an ordinary wood pigeon filled these out, the unfortunate creature, captured that same morning, making for a fine bush-tucker breakfast.

The resplendent savage stood, poised, a length of carved wood curving forth from one raised hand, before, returned to his blanket, squatting down on the ground. Propelled without visible effort, the implement moments before seen in his hand now hurtled through the air, high above the heads of the crowd, whirling so rapidly that it appeared a semi-transparent disc. Having completed a circuit of the entire stadium, it returned, with uncanny precision, almost to the same exact spot.

The boomerang, or
callum-callum
, looked to be about the size of a man’s arm, but quite thin – a strong, curved lath cut from a very solid wood, convex on its upper surface, and flat on its underside. Retrieved and thrown rapidly forward, it cut through the air with a loud whirring sound, advertising to one and all its deadly potential.

One end striking the ground, the wondrous device shot up, like a startled bird taking flight. Presenting its flat blade to the eye and then its sharp edge, the weapon turned invisible in the brightness of the sky. Appearing again as its plane of rotation changed, it began to glide rapidly about, first in one direction, then another, as though guided of its own volition. Sailing like a swallow, circling like a pigeon, spinning and twirling at a great height, it continued to gyrate in a most extraordinary manner. On its third throw the boomerang suddenly ceased in mid-flight – hung high and immobile as the lark – then swooped downwards to bury itself among the margins of the crowd.

The applause was thunderous.

‘Cracking!’ the crowd cheered. ‘Bloody marvellous!’

A bright spark commented, ‘That’s the nearest to a gun that shoots round corners I should ever hope to see!’

Thus began the main event, ‘Throwing the Boomerangs and Spears, and Kangaroo Rats, by the Blacks’.

Likewise adorned in possum and lyre, fur wrapped around their loins and a sort of fur cap on their heads, various others of the Aboriginal team joined
Dumas on the field. They walked with a proud and elastic swagger, notably in contrast to their former modest gait. In the laying aside of their ordinary clothes they underwent a positive transformation, as if they had thrown off disguises that rendered them commonplace.

In their skilful deployment of arms, the native Australians enthralled the baying crowd. Dextrously, they manipulated the
weet-weet
, or ‘kangaroo-rat’. Made of whalebone tipped with wood, from a distance the device resembled a huge tadpole. Gripping it by the end, the Aborigines would swing it backwards and forwards so violently that it bent quite double. Taking a short backward run and then wheeling around, at the last they gave a quick underhand jerk and let fly. The low-flying slingshot cut the air with the sharp and menacing hiss of a bullet. Properly thrown it struck the ground more than once, a movement approaching the long leaps of its namesake; English observers were put more in mind of a skimming stone at ‘ducks and drakes’. A skilled throw could send the ‘kangaroo-rat’ completely across the Kennington Oval: Dick-a-Dick repeatedly scattered spectators on the far side, striking the fence beyond.

Half a dozen warriors proceeded to stage a mock battle – three living targets, at a distance of nearly 300 feet, completely hemmed in by the accuracy of spears thrown by the other men.
Dará or teipa
, six or seven feet in length, each hardwood shaft was tipped with reed so as to fly point-foremost. The butt was fitted into a wooden pin then expertly whip-lashed, launching the spear into its terrifying trajectory. With leverage more than doubling the power of sinew, the wielder was able to propel his spear with unprecedented force and accuracy.

Bloodthirsty and warlike demeanour rendered the drama even more acute. Before throwing, each warrior hoisted his spear aloft so as to make it quiver, the loud clashing vibrations seeming to excite his fury. Menacing the foe with trembling spear, the aggressor would leap and yell, raving like a madman.

Each spear, thrown, gracefully writhed through the air, a thin black snake undulating – beautiful, and just as deadly. Unless their living targets dodged aside, they were certain to have been impaled.

Ethnographers present kept frenzied notes, enjoying the display for its own sake. Sports pundits expressed an equal satisfaction. Echoes of cricket within these arts of war went some way towards explaining the Aboriginal team’s fine out-fielding and throwing-in, the accuracy and rapidity with which all able Australians threw the ball being much admired. Sure at the bat and deft at blocking, their wonderful quickness of eye and precision of muscular movement greatly enhanced their game.

Their team captain, too, entered into the spirit with ‘Lawrence’s Feat with the Bat and Ball’, an impressive balancing act
à la
Tommy Dodd on the London stage – Lawrence appearing to catch a ball, thrown by Bullocky, on the narrow edge of his bat.

Dick-a-Dick, natural showman that he was, had delighted many with his antics, winning the backwards race by a few good lengths. His return to the field met with loud cheers. The programme described the next feature attraction, ‘Dick Dick Dodging the Cricket Ball’.

Carrying in his left hand what appeared to be a short, thick stick, he stood out in the centre of the ground. The audience adjusted their binoculars: seen in close-up, he held a small shield, no more than four inches wide and decorated with carved designs. A curved wooden club, his
leowell
, extended from Dick’s right hand – a formidable-looking weapon that should raise a nasty bump on anyone’s cranium.

‘Throw ’em ball!’ he cried, beckoning. ‘Throw ’em ball!’ Screaming out his challenge, Dick-a-Dick cheekily invited all comers. Three burly fellows leapt forward, to be supplied with a heap of hard cricket balls. For the benefit of their audience, Lawrence loudly instructed they throw these at the ‘human wicket’ from a distance of less than fifteen yards, at will, all at once if they liked, and as hard as they possibly could.

The volunteers dutifully began to pelt Dick-a-Dick, using nothing less than lethal force. A flurry of activity broke out among the crowds, odds laid and bets taken as to how long he might survive.

Taking no notice of any ball passing more than an inch or two away, Dick baffled every straight ball with a keen intuition. As if blessed with sixth sense, he foretold the precise direction of each attack. Blows accurately aimed at his head and body, he parried with the shield; those on target for his legs he struck at using the club. Sometimes, throwing his club and shield to the ground, he would drop down on one knee, or simply dodge the balls with an elegant sidestep. Those sure not to hit he treated with contemptuous indifference, merely lifting an arm or moving his head a little to allow that the ball might pass, though it ruffled his hair in doing so. Whether standing still or dancing, his attitudes remained at all times picturesque. Jumping, ducking, falling now and then, parrying with the
leowell
, Dick-a-Dick defied all three throwers until they were completely exhausted.

Not a single ball had found its mark.

He had worked himself forward almost under the very noses of his opponents. Pulling grotesque faces, he grinned and yelled for victory. Excitement grew very great; his impudent assurance incensed and amused the crowd in equal measure.

Amidst the din of cheering, a rough element, their blood up, began to pour out onto the pitch. The entire ground erupted in chaos, and Dick-a-Dick fled.

Sarah Larkin sat high on the stands. Furies screeched all around her. Strangely cool, she lost herself in thought.

She had not told her father of her plans to attend, although, ostensibly, she acted on his behalf. An ardent cricket-lover, Lambert would have welcomed eyewitness reports of a day’s play, especially as an unexpected treat. She really should have paid more attention, and come on an actual match day. If only the idea had occurred to her earlier.

Sarah wasn’t sure what to make of the exhibition just witnessed, even less what her father might think. And, were she completely honest, her presence was owing to no account but her own. Why she felt the need to see the Aborigines again, and quite so soon, she was sure she had no idea. A mild curiosity, that was all.

Thus absorbed in the general mêlée, she was overtaken by a somewhat stranger sensation.

Out on the playing field stood one of the Aboriginal players, immobile as a statue, though wild figures on every side ran to and fro. Hard to tell at such distance, but Sarah thought him the one they had called King Cole. And he looked straight at her. Not around her or through her but right into her. She stared into brilliant black orbs. From beneath a brow broad and severe, pupils black as jet returned her looks. It wasn’t possible: he couldn’t have singled her out in this vast crowd, let alone recognised her. No, she was mistaken.

She blinked and shivered. He stood too far away after all. Hard to see how she might have made out the finer details of his face – and so pin-sharp – let alone meet his eyes.

And then he was gone. There were just blind bodies, rushing back and forth across the grass, and everywhere tumult.

She would remain in her seat until calm once more prevailed, and then make her way quickly home.