Kim Scott from Benang

From Benang | 1301

KIM SCOTT b. 1957 Kim Scott has written novels, a biography and a children’s picture book, as well as poetry, stories and criticism. He was born in Perth, and is a descendant of the Noongar people. Scott graduated from Murdoch University. After teaching English for some time in urban, rural and remote secondary schools, including at an Aboriginal com- munity in the north of WA, Scott began researching his family history. This led to his fi rst novel, True Countr y (1993), which, along with Benang: From the heart (1999), explores the problem of self-identity faced by light-skinned Aboriginal people and examines assimilationist policies during the fi rst decades of the twentieth century. In 2000, Scott was the fi rst Indigenous writer to win the Miles Franklin Award, for Benang, sharing the prize with Thea Astley. Kayang and Me, a collaborative autobiography with senior Aboriginal woman Kayang Hazel Brown, was published in 2005. AH/PM

From Benang We Move … I had a new game. I had never been one for games, but I was unusually thrilled, I was giggling like a child with the pleasure it gave me to share this one with Uncle Will. I could see, even within the composure and dignity he liked to feign, that it startled and excited him. At the same time—and this helped his appearance of composure—he was I think stunned, and in awe of such freedom. Previously I had performed it solely for the pleasure of seeing the terror, and—later—the indignation it aroused in Ern. I simply indulged in my propensity to drift. In the mornings I would attach strong fi shing line to a reel on my belt, anchor one end of it to the house and, stepping out the door, simply let the land breeze take me. I rose and fell on currents of air like a balloon, like a wind-borne seed. The horizon moved away so that the islands no longer rested on its line, but stood within the sea, and it seemed that the pulsing white at the island’s tip was not a mere transformation induced by collision, but was a blossoming and wilting at some fi ssure where sea met land. It was indeed a very long time after this—but it may have begun here— that I realised that I had come back from the dead, was one of those few. I may well be djanak, or djangha—so much so that I stumble at what is the correct dialect, let alone how I should spell it—but even then I had not completely forgotten who I am. I fl oated among the clouds, and even with a bleached skin, and an addled memory I nevertheless saw the imprint of the wind upon the turquoise ocean. I remembered the call of quails in the dune grasses, and thought of curlews crying from moonlit chalky paths, and the footprint such a bird would leave. It was as if sunlight told me of the sameness of granite and sand, and—in the evenings—fl ickering fi relight fed the fi re of my life, of my breathing.

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But I was telling of when Uncle Will and Uncle Jack had returned for me, and of when I was accustoming myself to this experience of drifting. I studied the pathways and tracks which ran along the coastal dunes, and saw the white beach as the sandy, solidiﬁ ed froth of small waves touching the coast. I noted how rocks and reef and weed lurked beneath the water’s surface, and saw the tiny town of Wirlup Haven and how Grandad’s historic homestead—as if shunned—clung to a road which was sealed and heading inland. So it was not purely mindless, this ﬂ oating on the breeze. It required a certain concentration, and I chose it not just for the fun, but also because I wanted to view those islands resting in the sea, and to get that aerial perspective. I couldn’t have said why.

The wind ruffl ed my hair as I rode its currents toward the islands. At fi rst I worried when I saw boats or any sign of human life marking land or sea, but such sightings were rare along that isolated stretch of coastline and, after a time, I realised that I could not be seen at all, except by my family. Grandad used to stare in shock. It scared him. I loved that. Uncle Will said he envied my unburdened existence. More pragmatically, he suggested I take another line, and try fi shing as I drifted across the ocean. I liked it best when the breezes were soft, and I watched whales, dolphins, the schools of salmon moving below me. Late in the day the breeze blew me back to the house. The very fi rst time he found me so tiny and out of earshot in the sky, Uncle Jack hauled me in like some sort of airborne fi sh. A sharp tug upended me, and then I was bent double, my limbs fl apping with the force of such a retrieval into the land breeze. ‘Shit, you made a mess of the line,’ I said. He snorted. ‘You fuckin’ silly little shit. What? You kartwarra, that it? You’re something special, you know.’ He was insistent and angry. ‘I tell you you gotta go right back, you got something special there coming out. I can see where you come from all right. You oughta give away that reading and all those papers for a while.’

He wanted to take all of us? Uncle Jack wanted to take us all driving. He wanted to show me some places. We could drive, and camp. We’d take Ern with us. ‘Will?’ Uncle Will nodded. Uncle Jack reckoned that the main roads more or less followed traditional runs; along the coast to where his Aunty Harriette had been born. The roads

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went inland from there, up to Norseton, and back to here. It’s the waterholes, see. They used to follow the waterholes. Rain still falls, water still gathers. ‘Bring your papers with you if you like,’ he said. ‘Do all that. You can even ﬂ y yourself high as a kite, if you like, if you still wanna. No matter.’ ‘The main roads follow a traditional run,’ he had said. ‘And, you know, we showed all those white blokes.’ He looked at Uncle Will. ‘Your father, he was shown by your mother, and her mother. And there you were wanting to be a pioneer.’

It disturbs my clumsy narrative even more, of course, this sudden and contemporary journey. It disturbed me at the time also. I was scared, but seeing the reluctance in Ern’s face convinced me it was the thing to do. We drove for the afternoon, humming along the sealed road. A ‘run’, I kept thinking; we once walked where now we skim? The wind roared outside our small and stuffy capsule. I remembered the little Uncle Will had written—it was not much more than notes scattered among Ern’s well-organised papers. It was all about his father, as, perhaps, is my own. Uncle Will had begun a little history of this region, and of his family. His motivation was the publication of a little booklet, a feeble local history, to which he had taken exception. He had written:

We may see how greatly facts are distorted and these people are most misleading in their trying to put the arrival of their parents in the new ﬁ eld before many others, for the sake of being known as descendants of the ﬁ rst pioneers.

It was incomprehensible to me: Uncle Will, who had been refused ‘Susso’ in the Depression and told, instead, to go to the Aborigines Department for rations; Uncle Will, who had barely escaped being sent to a Mission or Native Settlement. Uncle Will desperately wanted to name his father as among the very ﬁ rst to ‘settle’ at Gebalup, and he scarcely wrote of his mother. Yet it was she who gave him his rights to be here. He was of ‘the ﬁ rst’. I thought of how Uncle Will walked. Proudly, cautiously; like one provisionally uplifted, whose toes barely gripped the earth. Grandad had written very little, yet he had organised and collected an array of material. Uncle Will had written a few pages from memory, and that was all he had. But I saw the evasion, the desire to compete and to say he was as good as anyone and that this seemed the only way possible. In his rather formal, affected language, there was this hint of an alternative:

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Can you understand, dear people, why I’m rather difﬁ dent about discussing the early history of Gebalup as I knew it as a boy? The descendants have given their forebears images which they wish to see and present to the public in their most favourable light. It would be a continual source of acrimony were I to join in their discussions. So I think it much better for me to write all my thoughts down for the perusal and study of my younger relatives.

But then he’d faltered, and after a few hundred words had stopped. My father had written nothing, and had just begun to speak to me when I killed him. Uncle Will was family, my father had said. Even your grandfather. That’s all you’ve got, your family. Even if, sometimes, it hurts to have them. Of course, this was not in any of the material I had read to my grandfather, the so-close-to-smug-in-his-victory Ernest Solomon Scat.

We camped close to Uncle Will’s birthplace on our ﬁ rst night away. It was among ancient sea dunes, and nearby, behind a fence, there was a dam which, Uncle Will informed us, collected fresh water from a small spring. The four of us sat around the campﬁ re, sipping beer. It was a cold night and I was clumsy with the vast bulk of my clothing. I had wrapped a long scarf several times around both myself and a log, partly for the warmth, but also because, as Uncle Jack reminded me, drinking grog inevitably set me drifting off ‘something cruel’.

‘Somewhere here, eh? I was born somewhere around here,’ said Uncle Will, suddenly. ‘It was a hot day,’ he said. We allowed him the authority to tell us of his birth. We assumed the story had been handed to him and not that he was possessed of a most remarkable memory.

When Uncle Will was born the sides of the tent had been lifted and tied to catch any movement of the air. Fanny and old Sandy One arrived at the camp, and then Sandy One went to ﬁ nd the other men and left the three women to attend to the birth.

What other men? Three women? Uncle Will and Uncle Jack had to explain to me who all these people were. Be patient, have patience, their sighs said. Harriette and Daniel? I knew about them, Will’s parents. Daniel Coolman of the missing lip and great bulk who was sown in a mine. Harriette, a shadowy but already powerful ﬁ gure in my little history.

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Dinah and Pat? I didn’t know them. Uncle Pat, they told me, was Daniel’s twin brother. Dinah was Harriette’s sister. Aunty Dinah was the other daughter of Fanny and Sandy One Mason. I worried, as any reader must also do, at this late and sudden introduction of characters. Except that for me it was not characters, but family. ‘Yeah, well, there’s lots all of us don’t know,’ said one of the old men. And then it was deﬁ nitely Uncle Jack who spoke. ‘It’s hard to know where to begin—except with each place we come to, really. Where we are right now.’

It was hot, back then, by the tiny pool, here; the heat snapped twigs from the trees, and they bounced off the heavy canvas roof of the tent. Fanny and Dinah murmured to Harriette. Deep and rasping breaths. The soak’s water is still. Campfi re smoke grows straight to the sky. The women’s breath is very warm, and there is so much moisture, all this liquid pooling beneath the trees. The place’s spirit continued to billow. Fanny felt so grateful. As the wet child took its fi rst breath they heard the leaves above them clacking and rustling. Will was rolled in white sand. ‘This sand is so fi ne,’ Uncle Will said, looking into our faces and letting it run through his fi ngers, ‘it’s like talcum powder.’

When Daniel took the child in his arms the women could not help but smile, he so thick and burnt and gnarled and the baby just a bundled heartbeat, mewing and clutching. Daniel was happy. ‘Now, this is the ﬁ rst white man born here. No doubt about that.’

Uncle Jack was smiling at Uncle Will, teasing him. So where was Uncle Jack born? He said he’d tell me that later. When we got back to the other side of Wirlup Haven. He hadn’t been lucky enough to know his parents like Will had.

Harriette, Daniel, Dinah and Pat had come across from Dubitj Creek way (as you can imagine, I spent a lot of time consulting a map as we drove), where they had been carting goods to the goldﬁ elds. There’s water all through there, the old men told me, and it was true that my map showed many small and temporary waterholes to which the main road clung. But a new railway line from the capital city had depleted the need for teamsters, and there was various troubles to get away from.

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They tried roo shooting which—in those days—gave them enough cash for what they needed. The truth is, the Coolman twins were happy. It was a decent life. Moving slow; hunting, drinking. There was always the chance of gold. They had wives who knew the country; who found water, food, a place to camp. The women could do everything. They could work like men, feed off the land, embrace their men and make them strong. And Sandy One Mason, their father-in-law, that enigmatic fellow they laughed at between themselves, was known by people all around this way; pastoralists, old miners, carriers, all of which could prove helpful when and if they needed to get work again. There was no fear of attack, as was prevalent with some travellers. When the Premier Man John Forrest had come this way less than thirty years before, he and his party had kept a rostered watch each night. A publication of 1900, In Darkest Western Australia, devotes several pages to the threat of attack by the blacks. But when Daniel and Pat met any who were not like themselves they stood close behind the women. It was what Sandy One had advised them. Their faces would echo the expressions of those speaking this peculiar language, as they half-listened and tried to understand. They gathered kangaroo skins. Or rather, the women gathered them. A trip back to Kylie Bay every few months meant they were making money. Do you wish to hear how they suffered; of their endurance, hardship, deprivation? In fact it was almost too easy a life. It was practically a relief to run out of grog and so they purposely deprived themselves, brought less of it with them—and even that they sipped with their wives. They moved between the coast and the goldﬁ elds; between the old and the new telegraph lines; between the railway to the north and the ocean to the south. Finding where they could take a heavy cart. And, always, there might be gold. Drinking. Fucking. They wandered, following gossip and getting Harriette and her sister Dinah to take them as far as the goldﬁ elds, where they thought they saw their women’s people slumped in the dust, rotting from the inside out. The women brought them back, always, to no further than a day or two from the ocean. No gold. Then suddenly you needed a licence to sell roo skins. They found themselves ‘Gebalup’ way, near the outer limit of the women’s country, and fell in with the Mustle and Done families. The landed gentry of this story.

The four of us sat around the ﬁ re until late in the night. Perhaps it was the beer, but I felt very heavy, as if burdened. Old people surrounded me. ‘Listen to the voices in the trees,’ said Uncle Jack. In the ﬁ relight the three men looked exceptionally old, ancient beyond their years. Grandad’s face glistened with the tears which now so often came

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to him. Uncle Jack and Uncle Will’s arrival had given him some protection from me, and I had not harmed him for months. The intervals between Grandad toppling, and being propped up again, grew longer. The eyes of my uncles reﬂ ected the ﬁ re. I remember noticing my own hands, and being frightened at how old they looked in that light. 1999

MICHELLE DE KRETSER b. 1957 Michelle de Kretser was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and migrated to Australia with part of her family when she was fourteen. After a successful early academic career, including gaining her master’s degree in Paris, she returned to Australia and worked for some years as an editor for Lonely Planet Publications. She was also a founding editor of Australian Women’s Book Review. Her ﬁ rst novel, The Rose Grower (1999), was critically well received and her second, The Hamilton Case (2003), won a number of major awards, including two prestigious international literary prizes. Her third novel, The Lost Dog, was published in 2007. De Kretser is a sophisticated thinker and witty stylist whose novels reﬂ ect her own international background, speculating and meditating on the nature of exile, dislocation and postcolonialism and their effects on different people in different places. KG

From The Hamilton Case Part III [. . .] For Maud, each day discharged an identical freight of loneliness, monotony and long, voracious mosquitoes. Hardest to bear was the heat. When she lay in bed, the air was so heavy she felt its weight upon her. Her skin grew damp beneath its touch. The house was dwarfed by its backdrop of trees, so that it appeared to crouch low on its haunches. In fact it had ceilings eighteen feet high, designed for coolness. Its walls were inset with lattice, its verandahs screened with rattan tats that could be lowered against the sun and sprayed with water. These were stratagems that presupposed currents of air, since an island race is fated to take its bearings from the sea. But the breeze that rufﬂ ed the coast was strangled by leafy ropes as soon as it ventured into the hinterland. The air was not air at all, thought Maud, felled on the verandah at ten in the morning, but a woven yellow haze. Spiders and green-veined orchids lived suspended in its honeyed weft. She began to unpack a trunk and reached a layer of photographs in pokerwork frames. Ritzy failing to look sinister with a cutlass between his teeth. Herself at the same costume party, a slave girl whose gauzy attire displayed tantalising traceries of ﬂ esh. Claudia unsmiling on her wedding- day, Sam authoritative in a morning suit. Was it chance, wondered Maud, that

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