Carpentaria

This tidal river snake of flowing mud takes in breaths of a size that is difficult to understand. Imagine the serpent’s breathing rhythms as the tide flows inland, edging towards the spring waters nestled deeply in the gorges of an ancient limestone plateau covered with the rattling grasses dried yellow from the prevailing winds. Then with the outward breath, the tide turns and the serpent flows back to its own circulating mass of shallow waters in the giant water basin in a crook of the mainland whose sides separate it from the open sea.

To catch the breath of this river you need the patience of one who can spend days doing nothing. If you wait under the rivergum where those up-to-no-good Mision-bred kids accidentally hanged Cry-baby Sally, the tip of the dead branch points to where you will see how the serpent’s breath fights its way in […]

It takes a particular kind of knowledge to go with the river, whatever its mood. It is about there being no difference between you and the movement of water as it seasonally shifts its tracks according to its own mood. A river that spurns human endeavor in one dramatic gesture jilting a lover who has never really been known, as it did to the frontier town built on its banks in the hectic heyday of colonial vigour. A town intended to serve as a port for the shipping trade for the hinterland of Northern Australia.

In one moment, during a Wet season early in the last century, the town lost its harbour waters when the river simply decided to change course, to bypass it by several kilometers. Just like that. Now the waterless port survives with more or less nothing to do.

Then came a violent electrical storm when the rain ruined the day anyway—as the town’s sceptics said it would. A taut occasion, despite these dramatic interventions; enough time for the now-deposed State Premier to complete the ceremony of officially changing the name of the river from that of a long deceased Imperial Queen to ‘Normal’s River’. Traditional people gathered up for the event mumbled, Ngabarn, Ngabarn, Mandagi, and so did Normal in a very loud and sour-sounding voice over the loudspeaker in his extremely short thankyou address, although those who knew a fruit salad full of abuse in the local language knew he was not saying Thank you! Thank you! and belly-laughed themselves silly because the river only had one name from the beginning of time. It was called Wangala.

Angel Day always claimed the spot […] was the best place they had ever lived, because all she had to do was walk across the road to the rubbish dump, and there she could get anything her heart desire—for free. She thought the dump was magnificent, as anyone dirt poor would. The way she talked, you would have thought she was a very rich woman, and it was nothing for her to walk back and forth to the dump two dozen times a day to cart back pieces of sheet iron, jerry cans, bits of car bodies, lengths of rope, logs, plastic, discarded curtains, and old clothing. […] Diligently, she undertook the chore of checking for leaks, making alterations, choosing the right bits and pieces from her pile of accumulated junk which she leant, tied or stitched to the original blankets, until she ended up with an igloo made of rubbish.

Everyone began picking up weapons the ancient way, arming themselves with whatever they could lay their hands on. People and children were running around, picking up lumps of wood, iron bars, or else brown beer bottles picked up and broken at the neck. […]

You see, all the alliances had to be weighed up then and there on the spot. People who had been getting on well, living side by side for decades, started to recall tribal battles from the ancient past. It was unbelievable, but Angel Day was standing there oblivious, hugging her statue, and telling people to get off the land. There were little black flies swarming all over her face but she took no notice.

Over the years Elias came to live in Desperance, he would tell many stories about himself that rang true with the strong local beliefs of Uptown explaining how such a person who had been given gifts of prophetic dimensions ought to behave. ‘How else?’ he asked, after trying to intellectualise his own legend of being dispatched like a letter out of heaven into a storm and surviving all the atrocities of hell. But at the end of his high-faluting pontificating, Elias Smith was just like a normal man who found it impossibly hard to believe something special should have happened to him.

In those yellowing pages chewed by defecating vermin lay thousands of blue-inked words describing countless years of hot-collared Shire Council meetings debating imagined threats of invasion. The countless whorled words described numerous incidents of spyglasses snooping along the unguarded coastline of crocodile-infested, mangrove mudflats lacing the northern frontier. ‘Of course everyone on earth longed for such a landscape,’ she wrote. Hoardes of Asians swooping down across the Pacific ocean were screaming, We want it! We want it! And where was the national military? In other countries. Southern states. Pretty good job vermin couldn’t shit on what the Pricklebush had locked up inside their heads.

The clear day into which Mozzie Fishman’s convoy traveled was so different to yesterday on the southern edge of the Gulf of Carpentaria when a dust storm suddenly appeared in the plains country. It rolled down from the skies, darkening the land, howling like dead people in the night, and swallowed up the weight in the heavy minds of these spiritual travellers while they slept with backs against the wind, so they could be released from the bonds of months, even years, on the road, dedicated to religious duty. This was the story for the journey passing through this part of the country. No one in the convoy had been surprised; the dust storm was expected to appear before they reached home.

No one imagined Norm Phantom rushing out, carrying the fatted calf on his shoulders as soon as he got the news that his son was coming home. There was no use for some angelic child rushing to tell the patriarch, See, the prodigal son was coming, walking if you please, through the spinifex, over the rise. ‘Yep! Time will tell,’ Mozzie sarcastically quipped. ‘And pigs have wings.’ Will would reach Desperance in his own good time, so let the light burn in the house where a fully grown man only had time to recognize six of his seven children. The house with a slogan: A man gets sick of running for his kids—I run for none of the buggers now. ‘It’s like that is it?’ Mozzie mouthed the words, remembering asking Norm when he heard news of the rift between father and son. What did he say back?

See! Well none of that. That never happened to Norm and he passed all of that on to Will. So! Will has a good way with nature, and all of the natural things, except he is not too good with human nature. That boy was in one hell of rush to throw fuel on man-made adversaries. If it had anything to do with mankind, he had the knack to rub it hard, right up the wrong way. His father was like that too. And if you thought the falling out with his father was not a good thing—you are wrong about that. It was a blessing compared to what he had gone around accomplishing in his life to date. Oh! Poor me—what a history. This lad was writing memory with a firestick that made lightning look dull.

It was just no use trying to feel remorse or letting others carry their war, his war, an inheritance that belonged to him, as much as he belonged to it. He could only give a clinical glance at the proudly worn combatant scars of his relatives when they boasted of the battles in the middle of Desperance. Will carried no scars, only the dark brown birthmark straight down his left leg. The old people recorded the reappearance of familiar old family scars in the newborn, so that four hundred years worth of events could be remembered in stories of ground battles, sea battles, and not forgetting the air battles either, they claimed. […]

They said Will’s scar came from such a battle that took place in the skies with sea eagle spirits over the Gulf sea, long before he was born.

Men such as Norm Phantom kept a library chock-a-block full of stories of the old country stored in their heads. Their lives were lived out by trading stories for other stories. They called it decorum—the good information, intelligence, etiquette of the what to do, how to behave for knowing how to live like a proper human being, alongside spirits for neighbors in dreams. In the local stories handed down through the generations, the sea woman was a death angel. She appeared from nowhere in her endless search to take men back to her dark, empty world in the deep waters at the bottom of the ocean. Norm knew what this world looked like because he saw it in his dreams.

[Norm] looked over the water and saw the […] gropers swimming together […] As each group moved upwards, they surfaced loudly in volumes of water, raising their bodies high out of the sea […] The creatures did not stop when they reached the highest level they could before falling back into the sea. Norm wiped their salty spray from his face, as he studied them swimming through the ocean of air, to ascend into the sky world of the Milky Way. They became specks in the sky until they were so far away in the distance, they were a cloudy blur in the celestial heavens of stars and spirits.

[…] He knew at once Elias was up there with them. Gone thank goodness in another form than the old hunched-back dead man who would have gone off to heaven carrying the basket cases of Desperance along with him.

‘My Mum,’ whispered Bala. ‘Well! Her name was Hope and me Dad is Will Phantom.’

Norm stopped eating. He placed the fish back into the bucket. He looked hard at the boy. He did not know Will had a child but then, why would he know anything? Who told him anything anymore? Of all the things Will had to go and do to the family. ‘I am going to kill that bastard when I see him.’ Yes, Norm decided on the spot, Will had gone too far this time. The old hostilities jumped from his heart into his head. Instantly, there was no sign of Will in the child anymore. Only the family resemblances from the other side stood out, clear as day, he was surprised he had not seen it straightaway. […] He was staring at the child as though he was looking Old Midnight in the face.

Thinking about Bala, Norm grew more positive about his own circumstances. How could he explain Bala? It occurred to him that Bala was in the realm of God’s providence. And he suddenly realized why. Of course. His fingers snapped automatically: an action of forgotten years which surprised even him at his age. He knew it. He would have to look after the boy because the boy was alone, there was no Will and no Mother either. He now understood why the child kept coming by himself and avoided answering any requests to bring his father. He saw the child’s face looking out to sea, something of Will in his face, something unexplainable, the look of fortitude which belonged in the faces and eyes of seasoned soldiers.

Looking past reality, Valance saw another landscape transposed on his mind, a perfect world he had temporarily created, although it did happen. The hinterland people were saying, ‘Yes sir, listen to the bell, the angelus bell, Angelus Domini,’ and walking like pilgrims, like the holy folk would, coming into town.

Praise men of ambition who strive for newfangled ideas like reconciliation in old Australia, for Valance with his pricked conscience used every opportunity as town clerk, to make town campers feel like they were a part of the broader community. Even though Gordie was not their neighborhood watch, Valance considered the community service was available for all folks. Yet, the longer the bell rang, the more people on both sides of the Pricklebush wars were declaring from their respective sides of town, how they were going to destroy that bell once and for all one day, as soon as they got the chance.

Truthful said he thought the house looked like a shrine or a grotto, which was very strange, because he did not think she was a religious person. Statues were the kind of thing his Mother had in her house If they had come when she was home, they would have known she had left behind in those silent walls, a barrage of abuse to the petrol-sniffing sons who hid themselves from her, every time she wanted them to do something. The statue dominated the house, and the eeriness for them felt too serene in its total silence. It was as though someone had died.

The atmosphere of religious piety felt disconcerting, so, being thorough, in case of some deception, some trick of the eye, they broke the house.

‘You mob,’ old Midnight said, following Will in his readiness to cast off, ‘talk all the time about some kind of new, contemporary world. New world—Blah! to that. What contemporary world? It’s the same world as I live in, and before that, and before that. No such thing as a contemporary world.’ Why should someone old like himself comprehend Uptown having reason enough for killing and burning amongst their own jellyfish white people? ‘I understand our mob having a go at each other,’ he said, referring to the old wars. ‘We got to fight each other until one day we might git sick and tired of it.’ What he really meant, Will knew, was that one side must give up and go away. It was ultimate solution that neither side could resolve. Which would be the loser? It was the only way the fighting of the last four hundred years would finish.

This was kingfisher country. A lone, deep-sea blue kingfisher dashed across the sky in fright. Will watched its path across to the hills. Its flight was part of the larger ancestral map which he read fluently. He does not have to speak to ask the spirits to keep the birds away from the mines. See! Mine waste everywhere. The grounds were covered in contaminated rubble. Make them go back to the river. Will had always been puzzled why the birds flocked to the mine.

Whenever he saw so many birds around the mine, it raised a lot of questions for him. When would they realise the hazards of going there? How many evolutions would it take before the natural environment included mines in its inventory of fear? He and Old Joseph had sat in the hills and watched the water birds flock to the chemical-ridden tailings dams, where the water was highly concentrated with lead.

Fate and precious moments are tied up together, and as the saying goes, What goes around comes around: the yellow-haired man tripped. Instantly, his head was split open at the temple by a rock that had, up to that moment, lain on the ground, embedded in soil that was thousands of seasons old, untouched by humankind since the ancestor had placed it in this spot, as if it had planned to do this incredible thing.

Rock and roll, it was unbelievable to have seen what happened. Will had been so close, waiting to take what rightfully he claimed, and the man was running straight for him, and only Will saw what was about to happen, saw the rock was ready, waiting for this moment. Instantaneously, it was as natural a reaction as you would expect, but he felt cheated you know.

Sometime during our precious time on earth we could have asked a deaf person what it was like to not hear the sounds on earth anymore, before we go around deliberately destroying our own good hearing on wildness. Oh! But there was no going back because no one was going to reverse where the rotten hand of fate was leading. So, even though we were shaking in our old work boots, thinking we go busted eardrums, we watched the fire rage like a monster cut loose from another world. It might even have come from hell. Even the devil himself would have least expected us weak people to have opened the gates of hell. But we watched full of fascination at the fire’s life, roaring like a fiery serpent, looking over to us with wild eyes, pausing, looking around, as if deciding what to do next.

When the explosions stopped, the Fishman’s men picked themselves up from the ground. They agreed that only the greatness of the mighty ancestor had saved them. It was a miracle they were still alive after the earth shook so violently underneath them, they had thought it would go on forever. A heavy red fog of dust and smoke hung in the air as they moved away, their visibility limited to just a few metres. The fine dust fell slowly, and when it settled on those men who were trying to regain a sense of the enormity of what had happened, they took on the appearance of the earth itself. One by one, camouflaged by dust, they began spiriting themselves away, quickly, carefully, as dust covered their tracks, back to the lagoon of the dancing spirits.

The mobile phone screamed instructions into Graham’s ear and his face whitened. Strange how a skyscraper in New York could cast spells like magic. It could keep a whole floor of workers occupied with knowing whether every single switch was up or down on every last monitoring device on Gurfurritt operations, in the spinifex mind you, on the other side of the world. It could cast a security net over the whole social reality of Desperance, keeping tabs on how much food was in the fridge, who had just replaced a light bulb in town, or monitor the pulse rate of Kevin Phantom lying in a hospital […] it could rock the town this way or that to make stories. It could burn the Council office down, bun the Queen’s picture, to gauge the reaction.

[…] Will Phantom gained a reputation as being a violent person. Someone who would strike another as would a virus, was how Will Phantom was interpreted through the bat and dog story. The retelling of Will in Uptown was as vivid and as crystal clear as hearing that original, fatal Thud! on the dog’s head, through those reliving it all again. And again: It sounded just like this, Thud! Will remembered when he was a kid how he responded to the talk of the town. It made him feel destined to be out of kilter with the neighbors but he loved his persona. For fun he ran up and down Uptown singing ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.’ So, whatever he was suspected of, and suspicion fell on him far too easy, it was because he was always seen through eyes tainted by this one significant story.

‘So how come you’re still here?’ Will asked, clearly puzzled by the barman’s seemingly clear-minded decision to stay, then, seeing the ropes tied to the bar, he understood. It was actually true, Will thought, remembering the women who told love stories about Lloydie worshipping a mermaid locked in wood. They said it was a true romance and he thought they were joking. Of course, he was staying with his mermaid. Will looked at the wooden planks, then he had to look away. Had the wind affected his vision? For some strange reason, he saw movement inside the wood. There was a full-grown woman inside the wood, moving like a trapped fish, as though she were trying to swim free.

People say when a humble man really listened and looked past the obvious, then he might fly with music into the unknown. Norm’s voice rolled on like waves themselves pouring out of the tales of what he had seen at sea and his fathers before him. So, Will’s ear by the wall heard it was alright to die a lonely death at sea because a cyclone will always show you the way home. Those lost souls lying down there in their lonely watery grave, many fathoms deep, were thrown up from under the sand, like seaweed plucked from the floor of the sea in a giant waterspout of the ancestral serpent.

Remember the real people of the Gulf, those poor black souls living on heartbreak and worries in the Pricklebush because they know all about cyclones, unlike those copycat Uptown dolce vita type of people sitting in comfortable armchairs expecting to acquire their ancestral ties with the sea by sitting on their posteriors watching television programs, and never going out to sea on any occasion to pay their respects, like the old people who were the backbone of the Pricklebush who did not mind paying their dues, and will tell you cyclones don’t come from nowhere, because there is plenty of business going on when cyclones come onto the country out of the rooftop of the world, like what is going on outside now from the most powerful creation spirits, who come down out of the skies like a tempest when they start looking for Law breakers.

And Will Phantom was right to think he was lucky, leaning his skinny body out of the building, barely holding on to the doorway, and not caring if he fell, because any second he knew he could simply let go, with full certainty of falling straight into the destiny he had prescribed for himself. He had not figured fate, when the top floor under his feet suddenly moved. The floorboards had been shaken so violently, he was sent flying into the floodwaters. He hit the water hard, went under into the billowing yellow waters, where he rolled blindly in vacuo with the dead of the deep, before being returned in a frenzy of breathlessness to the surface.

Somewhere, as he walked, Norm realized that he could only hear his own feet slurping through the mud, and he knew that she was gone. He almost paused, almost stopped to look around, but he walked on. He wanted to call after her—demand she come back. Tell her she was stupid. He nearly let his temper fly. Every muscle in his body ordered him go after her and drag her back. But each time he turned to go back, he was blinded by the sun. The intensity of its white light hitting the water, reflected back in his eyes as though a shield had been put up between him and Hope, forced him to turn back toward the land.

[…] He knew he could not interfere with other people’s dreams. […]

It was at this point he started to believe in her […]