Part One.2

 

6: Quatcha

Inside the oven of the Oswalds there is an immense silence. The asbestos-clad lizards slithering among the rocks add to it like the ticking of a clock magnifies the heat and quiet of a room.

I was no longer in pain. Nor was I occupying my body. The carcass lay flat on its back with only the toes of the shoes sticking out from the prickle bush. The mouth was wedged open by the swollen tongue protruding between the teeth. There was no discomfort. Crouching in a small cave just behind the eyes I stared out through semi-glazed windows in philosophic detachment.

A small black beetle crawled out from the top of the trousers and sampled the salt flake as it walked across the vast desert of the stomach. It stopped at the oasis of the navel and dipped its trunk into the salty water. After a while another beetle came out of the trousers, and then another, until five of them stood around the man-made sea and sipped at its oily waters. They were like tiny elephants, about an eighth of an inch high.

Inside the head the slowing pulse rate no longer activated the frontal lobes into desperate reason. The telegraph system had given up transmitting to an unresponsive brain. In calm and peace, mercy fell like the gentle rain. Occasional fountains of memory spurted and died away ... I stood in the schoolyard filling my cap with water and putting it back on my head ... Icy milk shakes in tall glasses sweated on cool chrome counters ... Grass with the blue bloom of super greenness sloped down to a fern-clad river. And on the banks, lined up like stout soldiers in the pale sunshine were kegs of foaming ginger beer ... “Through channels of coolness the echoes were calling and down the dim gorges the streams were falling ...” The final stages of thirst are in no way connected with pain. There is a coma of pure delight.

Manala came back almost at dusk. Strung on his spear were six grey plastic bags about the size of tennis balls. They were the swollen bellies of the burrowing desert frog. These creatures are not prolific but they are extremely prudent, and carry a few years water supply against the likely event of drought. The knobby sinews that protrude like handles from each side of the bag and knot easily around a spear are the frogs’ hind legs.

During the night Manala squeezed four of the bags down my throat. Just before daybreak he sat me up and with a backhand swing slapped me sharply on each side of the head. Manala seemed to know all about the cave in the head and the best method of driving the spirit back into the body. My arms moved to his bidding. He held out a plastic ball on the palm of his hand, said: ‘Drink it slowly.’

To my croaky inquiry, Manala answered with the understatement of the year. ‘Bareega dug the frogs for you,’ he replied. ‘They are not found close to here, so I bring them.’ My loosening throat tightened up again with the weakness of suppressed sobs.

It was six o’clock in the morning when the mail plane flew over. Manala looked up and remarked: ‘Better then walking, eh Irritcha?’

I had my sight set on a stunted gum we had been travelling towards for a long time. My half raised eyes filled with the glare of the sun and quickly turned back to the tree, for fear of it disappearing in the heat haze. I was no longer interested in anything as remote and impossible as an aeroplane.

I would have stayed in the shade of the tree if Manala had allowed it. He tore off a handful of green leaves and crushed them against his lips as we staggered under the low branches. The comparative coolness of the shade was icy to the hellish blast of heat outside. I flopped down with my arms around the trunk in a lover’s embrace; my face pressed against the rough bark. The tree itself was a worthwhile goal; there was no question of going on. Inside my head the rivers and fountains began to spurt and flow ...

‘Get up!’ Manala snarled. He gave me a brutal kick in the ribs. I didn’t turn around. ‘You go on,’ I croaked in the best traditions of the old school. The butt end of a spear hit me a violent blow on the back of the head.

‘Get up!’ Manala repeated; his voice was high pitched and dangerous.

Before I could make up my mind there was a sharp stinging pain in my shoulder as the blade of the spear ripped the skin. Manala’s face was contorted with exhaustion and fury as he jammed the point of his spear against my belly.

I knew he was going to kill me but I only stared in stunned surprise. Manala wasn’t looking at me, he was glaring at the half empty skin bag in my hand. The water that I clutched as a magic charm against death.

‘Drink it!’ His lips barely moved but the spear pushed a deep dent in my belly. ‘Drink!’ he commanded. ‘All of it!’

I put the bag to my lips and tried to step back from the spear. Manala followed; his eyes were blank and crazy, his throat worked desperately as the water went down my neck.

Even when the empty bag dropped from my fingers, Manala still considered killing me. For a minute or more he kept up the pressure with the spear while he stared at the grey crumpled skin on the ground. He dazedly shook his head and pointed with his lips towards the west.

My memory of the remainder of the trek is like a series of pictures with intervals of grey nothingness between them. For some time I had been vaguely conscious of walking in dust and of the ground sloping away. I was trying to remember if the burning fires of hell were supposed to be up or down ...

A long way off two shadows detached themselves from a burnt tree trunk and came towards us. In the violent light and shimmering haze of heat a stark clarity elongated their thin and wiry bodies. They did not walk the earth but floated a little above the shimmer that bore them on. A peculiar parallel existed with the landscape; with the thin trees; with the patches of wiry grass.

Straight and thin were the ultimates here. Black and burnt the superbly beautiful – plump and curved the grotesque. It was Isaac and Parula.

Some time before nightfall there was a less vivid picture – like a watercolour.

A long line of white ibis, with trailing legs, flew against the pastel pink background of the sunset. Isaac was the central figure in the picture. He stood like a statue carved from the wood of ebony; a boomerang on level with his shoulder. His face was tilted back, the slanting rays of the sun accentuating the squat nose and thick lips; the eyes were deep pits of shadow. In the picture was skull and ape and man and God ...

I expected it to dissolve into farce. I remembered the jeering screech of the cockies. This time it wasn’t like that.

As the weapon left his hand, from Isaac’s pursed lips, came the high piercing scream of an attacking eagle. The ibis bunched and dipped down to escape the expected fury from above. The boomerang was a whirling disc of light as it sliced in amongst them; two white bodies plummeted towards the earth. A few feathers like falling leaves drifted down from the sunset ...

Out of the death-wish; from the darkness that had closed around in an isolating shell, came the light. A glimmer like the hint of dawn between the trees. It brightened into a strangely comforting glow and a few steps later was a flaring flame reflected in rocky pools of water.

Water! But not real-drinkable-cool-clear-water. Bareega squatted near a fire built in a sandy hollow between the pools of illusion. He called a greeting as we came out of the night. Only the mirage had depth and meaning. I stood back and watched with staring eyes as Manala and the other two crouched by the main pool and scooped the reflection of fire into their mouths. The accepted certainty of death was slow to leave; I shuffled to the edge of a shallow, smaller pool and looked down at the mirrored stars. Stretching out a leg I lowered a shoe until I stood on a star. The water closed over my foot, I lost balance and fell forward on my face.

It was like the time before birth; a lying in warm encircling water. I let my head stay under and drank an immense quantity; came up, vomited and smiled at the rush of water from my mouth. Sank and drank again. I chuckled at the sheer exquisite joy of sitting up, pulling soggy shoes off and burying the pulpy flesh in mud like cotton wool. I lay face down, drinking through every parched pore and then turned over with my head on a rock and water lapping my chin. I drank in a mixture of water and mud and stars. Drugged myself with the wondrous erotic pleasure of vomits and two-minute sleeps.

The slimy, mud-covered creature that crawled from the pool in the kananga gorge was of the Abunda; it had nothing in common with Charles Carson. I crawled across the sand to the warmth of the fire and tired voices; bypassed humility and respect, took my place in the squatting circle as a living cell of the Abunda-ulmerka class. I was not particularly grateful to the men who saved my life; the flesh expects the body to heal its sore spots. For its own welfare; for the common good.

The two ibis were cooking on the coals. The feathers shrivelled a layer at a time; burst into flames and shrivelled the next layer. I watched the cooking birds without any real hunger, the acid tang of burning feathers was in my nose. General exhaustion hung like an opium fog, but beneath the blanket weary voices still relived the last few days. Manala, halfway through a sentence, slowly toppled over on his side in deep sleep.

I was too tired to remove the Abunda words from their context by translating them into English. In fact there is no translation possible between the Abunda and the civilised. No way to cross the widening gap. Contact is cut off from people who believe defeat of nature to be a victory. It is merely a death on both sides.

I began to receive the Abunda thought pattern uncorrupted by translation. The message was concerned with the same thin figures in the thin landscape; but now they were not flatly imposed on their environment. They had depth and meaning:

In tune with the rhythmic pulse of the earth. Bareega told of seeking the burrowing frogs. Not particularly to save my life; but more for a cell of the Abunda body that it might not die. His feet walked the endless miles; he rested against trees and knew the dark mystery of the rising sap; horny feet told of tunnelling ants. The ‘all-mind’ spoke to Bareega; the reaching tentacle of the Abunda; the antenna; the man who is on earth as he is in the Alchera.

Isaac and Parula came halfway with Bareega. They waited! Halfway to where? Waiting for what? Bareega did not say: ‘Wait here in the dust. I am going to get some frogs and bring them back to you for Irritcha.’ There was nothing said. Just as the corpuscles of the blood receive the message direct from the brain and rush to defend the body so do the Abunda cells work against destruction. Into dark dreaming eyes comes a memory of rain falling on a parched earth.

In the time of the rains the water frogs fill themselves up like balloons and burrow deep; then they wait for the miracle to be repeated. It is not entirely local knowledge that enables a man to dig them up again and bite off their heads. The frogs are also tuned to the pulse of the earth; at the slightest vibration they dig down faster than the hard packed soil can be scooped away. Besides, there is no external sign of where the frogs are sleeping beneath the desert – none at all.

The aroma of cooking meat made my stomach expand and contract like bellows as I watched the last layer of feathers char away from the flesh. The long trailing legs still stuck out from behind as they do in flight.

I asked Bareega the number of frogs caught. He held up six fingers and my eyes slowly turned away from his hand to look down with awe at the sleeping Manala. I remembered the spear pushed against my belly and the terrible contraction of his throat as he watched me drink.

We of the ulmerka ate the ibis. I tore small strips off the large portion I had been given and forced them between Manala’s teeth. He didn’t wake, but now and then he would give a choking grunt as his throat worked and the meat went down his neck.

I was still sucking at the breastbone of the bird when I collapsed in the sand. By rocking from side to side I could hear the water sloshing in my belly. Just before going to sleep I lay my head on Manala’s stomach and pushed at his body until I heard the comforting gurgle of his water.

 

In the hour before the dawn I must have walked a hundred yards in my sleep. I dreamt a large white bird was shaking me and pecking at my hands; in fact Bareega was doing the shaking and wrapping my fingers around a spear. As the deep fog of exhaustion rolled back, Parula handed me a woomera.

In fuddled contentment I hid in the dry grass and listened to Manala’s whispered instructions on fitting the spear to the throwing stick. The ability to concentrate was improving, but was still restricted to no more than a few seconds at a time. My legs gave no definite promise of support, yet I felt honoured and delighted to be included in the hunt. A sneaking suspicion that my present condition was more suited to lying in a hospital bed, sucking glucose through a glass straw, than hunting kangaroos, was hastily suppressed. The world of ease and comfort had begun to recede and I wouldn’t have willingly swapped places.

Bareega explained that the ulmerka, in addition to surviving the ordeal by thirst, were also required to enter the camp with a plentiful supply of food. The empty handed are never welcome. I thought the conditions reasonable and felt excited at the feel of the primitive weapons in my hands. Even Isaac, boasting of his ability with a rifle and deriding the spear, did not detract from the fitness of things.

Just how many kangaroos came to drink at the pools of the kananga gorge I never knew. I heard them coming. My heart pounded in rhythm to the thump of tails and stopped with each pause in their erratic progress. In one fluid movement Manala was on his feet and the slender shaft in his hands became a whispering blur as it passed overhead. I also jumped up; only to promptly roll down the slope in a welter of spear, woomera and flailing limbs. To me the details of the hunt were vague and confused; but the sequence was not lost. On the same evening the whole scene was repeated in corroboree, as though a battery of movie cameras had been trained on me.

There were three dead kangaroos stretched out on the rocks near the pools when Dhalja, Bert and Apilquirka came out of the bush. Respectful obedience is the correct attitude of ulmerka to fully initiated men – the proud atua-kurka. In my case general weakness made the head hanging position easy to adopt; I squatted by the kill and took my cue from Manala and the other boys. To my brother’s formal greeting I murmured a polite reply, then watched from under lowered eyelids as the elders walked to the pool and scooped a little water into their mouths. The habitual squat of the Abunda closely resembles the foetal position; it is allied with the ever present Alchera, the proximity of birth and death.

There was nothing to indicate the older men had picked up our tracks and followed us from early the previous day. They acted as if they were merely out for a stroll. The slight aloofness of manner did not necessarily denote displeasure; warriors are apt to be a little haughty at any time. We squatted, staring into space while the atua-kurka drank; Abunda never lie down and blow on the surface of a pool or suck water like animals and other men. There is no particular reason – they just don’t.

Bert examined the kangaroos and commented approvingly on the quality of the meat, Apilquirka and Dhalja also felt and prodded at the stiffening bodies. They seemed a good deal more interested in the food than any hardships suffered by mere ulmerka.

‘You are recovering from your thirst, Irritcha?’ Bert casually enquired.

I nodded my head. ‘You found it more comfortable to carry frogs than a suitcase,’ Dhalja murmured without emphasis.

‘Much more,’ I agreed. I had no desire to answer questions or even open my mouth at all. In queer, light-headed flashes of extreme clarity I saw myself as a blob of weak flesh being grafted onto and receiving the recuperative powers of the parent body.

Nobody volunteered any information, but it was increasingly obvious by the questions that the atua-kurka had read our tracks and knew the facts down to the minutest detail.

As they prepared to leave, old Bert sarcastically congratulated us on the killing and cooking of the ibis. What he actually said was: ‘It is not often we see ulmerka who have the skill to cook like women.’ He sat a kangaroo up on the rock and with minimum effort let it fall across his gaunt shoulders. ‘Having eaten of such a well prepared feast there will be no need to hurry to the gorge of the Alchilpa.’

Manala and Isaac were sitting next to me and they began digging at the sand with their toes, heads slumped down in shame, Bareega and Parula stared at the sky in acute embarrassment. A sense of guilt began to filter in.

‘I ate most of the meat!’ I exclaimed half to myself. The delicate picking of the others seemed strange at the time, the conviction grew in my mind. ‘It was for my sake the birds were killed!’

‘I told you this, Bert,’ Dhalja said with a touch of irritation, ‘Now Irritcha tells you.’

Apilquirka gave a murmur of assent. ‘We agreed the killing of the ibis was to exchange Irritcha’s life for theirs.’

‘The crossing of the burning stones was completed.’ Dhalja snapped. ‘It is a small thing.’

Bert settled the carcass on his shoulders and started to walk off. ‘Another day is also a small thing,’ he replied.

Dhalja and Apilquirka picked up the other two bodies. ‘You need not hurry to the Alchilpa,’ Dhalja said diplomatically. ‘If you come slowly there will be time for the women to cook your kill.’

I watched the swaying haunch of meat across Apilquirka’ shoulder disappearing into the bush. Hunger pains lanced my stomach as I gulped down the saliva that came into my mouth. The others made no comment on the cancelling of our breakfast and dinner. Apart from a few scraps of the leathery ibis they had eaten nothing in five days, yet their silence held more of shame than resentment.

In a vague unthinking way I accepted the ulmerka opinion, it was wrong to eat and drink while cut off from the parent body. The tail of a snake may wriggle after being severed, but it would be a perversion for it to take food or drink.

We scooped our bellies full of water, then walked slowly along the gorge to a patch of larani trees and went to sleep. Late in the afternoon we all had a swim in a bigger pool further up the track. Isaac said standing neck deep in water kept a pressure on the belly and helped dull the hunger pains; I tried it but the extra effort of breathing made me feel dizzy.

To confirm my suspicions, I asked Bareega: ‘What was wrong with eating those ibis? Are they taboo?’

‘We are not of the ibis totem,’ Bareega scoffed. ‘That Bert is an old dog! He just wanted a bone to growl over.’

I had left my shoes back at the pool where we killed the kangaroos and sat on a rock washing the sand out of the scabs on my feet.

‘Ulmerka are not supposed to eat until they have supplied meat for the atua-kurka. ‘Manala explained in a casual offhand manner. ‘It saves them the trouble of hunting for themselves.’

‘In the old days the way of Lartna was more difficult,’ Parula spoke seriously. ‘Only the strongest ulmerka lived to became atua-kurka.’

I had strong doubts as to my worthiness to become a warrior; it now seemed right that the weak should be eliminated before they could continue their bloodline. Although a little less than a week previous to this I would have been horrified at the barbaric idea.

In gratitude I mumbled the first serious apology I have ever made in my life:

‘Sorry I cracked up.’

Manala laughed and pushed me into the water. ‘You smell like a boong now, Irritcha. All the white man stink has melted out of you.’

Isac staggered around the edge of the pool, his mouth hanging open, and with handfuls of water pretending to wipe the gushing sweat from his forehead. ‘Christ, it’s hot,’ he mimicked. ‘Let’s sit down. Let’s have a rest.’

I joined in the laughter; elated and absurdly pleased with the acceptance.

When it was almost sundown we began to walk the last couple of miles to Alchilpa. My pants were left bundled in a ball near the pool. I still carried the nine-foot spear Bareega had lent me while hobbling on sore feet. Gnawing stomach pains causing moments of faintness. Yet a sense of freedom and exhilaration went with me as I walked naked into the mouth of the gorge. I came back to the Alchilpa as I came in – I was born there ... Happy birthday! ... My mother was the first Abunda women to enter the country of the Warrumunga ...

 

Baleeta carried a foetus across a great desert. For five incredible months she walked the harsh barren country. The grey flat shale of the land crunched under her horny feet; in unfaltering rhythm skinny shanks drove like hammering pistons against the immensity of the Gibson Desert. A swollen belly with stick-like limbs protruding from it inched with fanatical determination across the hot palm of Numbukulla’s hand. The life within Baleeta fed from her starving carcass; her hair dried and died and fell out of her shrinking skull. The growing embryo stirred and sucked greedily at the meagre bloodstream; until the lifeless skin hung like charred paper from Baleeta’s skeleton. She had no buttocks. The ball and socket joints of her thighbones were clearly defined, ceaselessly turning knobs beneath the brittle skin.

The time for the birth came and went. The bag burst and the wasteful flush of water was lost in the desert dust. Still Baleeta held the pains back; locked the steel wires of sinew in her groin against the red-hot lances of fire that pierced her belly. Held back the birth while she climbed ridge after jagged ridge in search of life – lizards, ants, rats, beetles – anything that moved. The scrabbling fingers turned over millions of rocks, and skin and nails wore away; no insect or reptile in the path of Baleeta escaped her ravenous jaws. She shared none of her finds with the tribe; husband, brothers, sisters were all forgotten. They were not important against the stark fact beneath her eyes; breasts that hung from the rib cage like broad strips of shrivelled leather. On the flat sandy stretches, where there were no rocks to turn over, Baleeta’s bloody fingers squeezed cracked nipples in hopeless yearning for one drop of milk to appear; a sign that her child might live. On the days when she was lucky enough to find a lizard her eyes would automatically turn down to her breasts; even as the perfect teeth sank into the reptile’s throat, Baleeta would be looking for the sign of the surge. When the sliver of flesh and the thimbleful of blood had been gulped down she would begin to look up; her hands pressed against her stomach to keep the pains driving inward and prevent the bearing down. Her fear-crazed eyes would leave her breasts and turn to the north; the next ridge; the heat-hung curtain of the horizon.

For the last month Baleeta travelled alone; she outstripped the tribe. The sunken eyes of the skeleton horde were behind her as she forced the murderous pace by day and night. She outran the greed she had seen appear in the eyes of the women who knew her time was on her. The hunger for the baby-meat that would be taken and cooked and eaten before she could rise from labour.

I was born in the Alchilpa gorge, because Baleeta crawled out of the desert six hours ahead of the other survivors. The skin was completely worn from her fingers and only raw sinew held the bones together.

Bert said: ‘She crawled on elbows and knees and the swollen curve of her belly raked the sand and made a track like a giant snake.’

Baleeta saw the water of the pool but made no attempt to reach it. Under the shade of a gum, sixty yards from the water, she squatted; prodded the searing pains into savage life and bore down against the tearing agony. The baby came quickly. Even as the membrane sack fell from Baleeta’s body her eyes filmed over. She was dead before she fell back in the sand.

Nelly said: ‘Baleeta did not hear the sneeze as the infant cleared its nose nor the first mewling cry coming from between her stiffening legs.’

A perfectly functioning animal needs no midwife. The valve automatically closes with the first breath and the cord begins to wither and shrivel up in the dry air. Ants by the hundreds crawled over the drying baby and the dead woman. They were large, reddish brown ants that specialised in cutting down grass and storing the seed. Baleeta knew where the grass seed-eaters live no meat ant would dare to come. The hundreds of kangaroo tracks leading towards the pools must have been an assurance to Baleeta – when the tribe found her child they would not be hungry.

Nelly was two years younger than her sister. This would make Baleeta about sixteen years of age when she died.

Perhaps the memory of the embryonic struggle lingers on. The greedy sucking at a vitamin-deficient bloodstream sets up a pattern of avarice precisely equal to the early effort. An ambition to succeed that is part of the instilled hunger. Perhaps not.

Nelly spoke of: ‘A round child, deep creases in arms and legs, heavy jowls on cheek and buttocks.’

For three months I was the only suckling the tribe possessed and had seven foster mothers. None of them had much milk for the first couple of weeks, but all had some. The supply increased day by day until I could have drowned in mothers’ milk. My foster parents had no babies of their own – they had eaten them.

 

Several large fires had been lit towards the north end of the gorge, away from the family campsites, and most of the tribe were gathered around them. Whole kangaroos, fur and all, cooked in the flames while goannas and a variety of smaller game roasted on the coals.

The return of the ulmerka was the excuse for the feast, although it would have been bad form to say so. We waited in the shadow of the cliff, with rumbling stomachs and studied aloofness, for our invitation to come from the atua-kurka. It was comforting to note that except for a few string girdles being worn by some of the women, the rest of the tribe had also discarded their clothing. The relief was tempered by a new fear.

My previous experience of naked women was confined to pictures in magazines and pornographic prints smuggled into high school; even these had been enough to catapult me into a sexual frenzy. I wasn’t anxious to find out if the genuine article would send me yowling over the cliff tops or not. Rather than take any chances I turned my eyes away from the pendulous breasts and potbellies around the fires. Exhaustion and the relative age of the visible women made the chances of an erection unlikely; but the recent shedding of my pants had left me vividly conscious of nudity. Both hoping for and dreading the appearance of curving hips and hard round breasts, I asked Manala where the girls were.

‘They are in the lukwurra and will not be invited to the feast of the ulmerka. ‘He grinned and pointed with his spear down the gorge. ‘Between us and those with breasts like boab nuts all these old dogs sit down and growl.’

‘Tonight the eagle will have the eyes of an owl.’ Parula put a spear between his legs and capered about like a handicapped bird in flight. ‘He flies down the gorge and swoops over the lukwurra with claws and worra-paira extended.’

‘This cheeky bird flies clumsily,’ Bareega remarked of the rampant eagle. ‘The stiff worra-paira upsets his balance, a boomerang or spear will easily bring him down.’

In the general laughter and murmurs of assent I gathered visiting the girls was more apt to be fatal than rewarding. A possibility of eating far outweighed other considerations; the strong aroma of cooking food was drowning me in saliva.

Almost an hour passed before a casual wave from Dhalja summoned us to the feast. We sat in a group on the outside of the circle, drooling at the mouth and waiting for the first of the laden pitchis to come in our direction. There were tiny fish from the pools, big slabs of meat, green peas and hot grass seed cakes. At least I thought it was a dish of peas but they turned out to be acacia pods. No pitchi got past me without a large helping missing. If there was going to be any more dieting I made sure of being amply prepared.

Besides a massive lump of kangaroo haunch, I ate a big pile of acacia pods and cakes. In bloated contentment I finally lay back, picking delicately at a whole goanna that stood by my side. Lizards taste a bit like chicken, but they look like reptiles even when cooked. The women dig them out from the hot sand beneath the fires and stand them back on their short stumpy legs to cool off. It takes a good while to like lizards for what they are and not because they taste like something else. It’s the same with snakes.

After dinner there was a long formal corroboree danced by a dozen or more of the older men. By pantomime they told a story of how the centre of the land was once covered in salt water – quatcha alia. Of the inland sea being gradually drawn towards the north by the powerful tribe who lived there and desired all the salt water for themselves. A slow rhythm on tap-sticks accompanied the dancers. Highly ritualised steps and gestures were mainly lost on me; partly because a reasonably young woman was crouched by the fire opposite. I asked the sceptical Isaac what it was all about. He replied with bored disinterest:

‘Nothing. They are just shaking their dinner down.’

When it ended Manala and Bareega whispered something to Dhalja; he smiled and nodded his head. In murmured consultation, Bareega persuaded Isaac and half a dozen young married men to assist in the act. These clowns put on a corroboree that had the whole crowd rolling on the ground in fits of laughter. They did the flour fight in the cave as a curtain raiser. Then a well mimicked bunch of kangaroos came hopping in to where the men hid behind a couple of blades of grass, held in outstretched hands. As the kangaroos grazed closer the hunters sprang up and pretended to throw their spears. All but one! The oaf in the middle of the group went to make a powerful throw, but the woomera slipped from the little hole in the butt of the spear and fetched him a terrific crack on the back of the head. Somehow the weapons became entangled in his legs and he rolled around on the ground in a whirling ball of dust. The other hunters gave chase as, with spears gripped under their arms, the wounded quarry either died or fled.

Bareega played the fool. He eventually untangled the spear from between his legs and started to run after the others; but kept tripping over imaginary rocks and landing flat on his face. Finally he spotted a kangaroo sitting up watching him. With painstaking care Bareega fitted the spear to the woomera while the roo scratched itself and nibbled the grass. He drew the throwing stick back to full arm’s length, was about to launch the spear, then he cautiously rubbed the back of his head, and made another inspection to see if the shaft was still correctly fitted. Bareega’s serious and thoughtful interpretation brought howls of glee from the audience. Ultimately he was ready to make an almighty throw, but once again the woomera slipped from the spear. It hit him across the back of the head with a crack that could be heard all over the camp. This time Bareega sprawled flat on his back, in partly simulated unconsciousness, while the kangaroo hopped over and licked his face. I dislike childish, custard pie culture, but in spite of myself burst out laughing. The back of my head was still sore from the morning hunt.

As the family groups began to wander back to their own fires, a second cousin placed a polished hardwood spear by my side. The barbed head beautifully carved and tipped with an inset of razor sharp steel. Ingala brushed aside my thanks.

‘It has a deep hole like a lubra,’ he chuckled. ‘No woomera could slip from its depths.’

---

 

7: Arsenic and Apple-Jelly Jam

No roads lead to the Alchilpa gorge and in the whole of the Snake River country there is not a single clock or calendar. Only the pancake layers of rock in the eroded cliffs measure the eons. At the base of the west wall a foot or two of pink stone bears the long horizontal scars of glacial ice; it is covered by an inch deep mortar or weatherproofing of black sandstone. The uneven courses of stone and compressed earth extend right to the rim of the gorge. Time has not stood still in the Alchilpa; although it has been ten minutes past the hour for the past ten thousand years. The cliffs are no longer building up, they are wearing down. When the Oswalds are reduced to level plains a volcano will probably boom out the chimes of the quarter hour and the ranges will rise again from the desert. At dawn and dusk, time is a living breathing presence.

Daybreak was not a grey mist and a biting chill but an explosion of light and heat. It was Charles Carson who awoke as a naked stranger with a light film of sweat sticking the sand to his back. Fortunately I am part chameleon and like the lizard have the ability to assume the colouring of my surroundings. It takes plenty of practice; for three years I was the only black skinned kid in the class. Not that this sort of thing either began or ended at school. When working at the markets my vocabulary automatically changed and took on a lurid, purely descriptive set of adjectives which would have sent the Sisters of Charity into deep shock. I could be a genuine truck driver’s offsider or a dedicated altar boy within the hour. Everyone is a human chameleon to some degree but with me the recurring necessity for rapid personality switch has perfected the art way beyond diplomatic camouflage.

Even before I walked down to the pool to throw a little water on my face the brainwashing was almost completed. A group of children scaling the cliff helped. There is no reserve in Abunda laughter; with the kids it wells out in a bubbling flow like water from a spring. They know nothing of hate or fear and have no jealousy to disperse. The stones, bones and odd shaped sticks they play with are available to all. So is tribal care; a woman with full breasts or abundant food will feed any child who needs the surplus. There is a total difference between the sound of Abunda’ kids at play and school-yard noises. No voices are raised in anger or clamour for individual attention. No: ‘Watch me!’ ‘Watch me!’ Just a peal of pure joy.

As Manala and I shared a breakfast of small fish one of the women had given us, I asked him where Bareega and the others were.

‘Not far away,’ Manala mumbled through a mouth full of food. ‘Eat. Forget about them.’

‘Why all the secrecy?’ In Abunda this last question came out: ‘Why are you hiding the ulmerka from me?’

Manala raised his eyebrows and shook his head in exasperation. ‘I am not hiding anything. They have been taken to the apulla ground.’

‘Where’s that?’ He frowned and wearily pointed a finger at the fish. ‘Fill the hole in your head with food, Irritcha. We have finished talking.’

I laughed and shrugged my shoulders. ‘Then get stuffed and pass the pitchi.’

We squatted on each side of the wooden dish, opening the soft bellies of the little guppies with our thumb nails and flicking the hard rubbery ball of cooked guts into the sand. By bitter experience I knew the Abunda shinbone to be considerably longer than the European. The difference becomes startlingly apparent in a crouched position; but now the stigma had been lifted it was quite a comfortable posture for having a meal. We ran our fingernails down the sides of the fish to scale them, chewed on the heads and spat out the bones before eating the morsel of flesh. When the pitchi was empty we rested with chins on kneecaps and silently digested the meal. I suppose I was aping Manala, continuing the identity process or some other psycho stunt; the domestic routine of the camp seemed normal enough.

Men sat around gossiping or repairing their hunting equipment, while others fashioned new spears, boomerangs, shields and woomeras. The wood carvers were all surrounded by an admiring audience of apprentices and dogs.

By nine o’clock in the morning the first parties of women and younger children had begun to return to the gorge. Although the lubras do all the work and the staple diet is mainly vegetable with a garnishing of reptiles and smaller animals, they still manage to do nothing during the heat of the day. All of the work does not amount to a great deal. In times of plenty the lubras can fill their pitchis with seed and stuff the dilly bags with yams, berries and lizards in a couple of hours.

No kids in their right minds would miss a morning hunt with the women. Even two or three year olds have miniature digging sticks clutched in chubby fists as they go yelping over the stones in pursuit of lizards and grasshoppers. The chance discovery of a beehive sends the pack almost hysterical with excitement. Older brothers and sisters follow the microscopic trail of the yarumpa; the children lie flat on the ground and sniff at the hole to see if the honey-ants are at home, then sit up and begin furiously digging. In the underground larder of the yarumpa fat storage ants are kept almost incapable of movement; they are living preserve-jars from which the workers add or subtract the honey. Having bitten off the tiny heads, the kids line up the inch long bottles of honey in a straight row; they never eat more than one or two, but little pot gutted toddlers are just about bursting with pride as the haul is handed up and added to the mother’s pitchi.

It’s not all Garden of Eden – or perhaps it is. Halfway through lunch I nudged Manala and pointed with my lips at the scanty covering of scrub near the water-hole. He gave a casual glance, grunted and went on eating. I tried to gulp down another cake, but semi-public fornication tightened my belly with erotic shock. The heaving buttocks of the pair behind the bush nearly choked me, although the wild depravity at first credited to the act in no way concerned this unblushing union. Manala thought I was interested in coition in general and several times during the day pointed at dogs in the act of perpetuating their species.

A husband and wife quarrel broke out over whether the woman should remain in the camp or go fishing. A mild interest developed in the raised voices as Wideera alternated between screaming for the other women to witness the injustice and yelling that she was going no matter what was said. Balcatta gave up shouting an insistence that she stay; his wife flaunted her hips and started to walk away. The bearded young man never bothered to stand up, but hurled a heavy nulla-nulla with what seemed like a casual flick of the wrist. Wideera dropped flat on her face as the club smashed against the back of her head. The sickening thud echoed in my ears and I gave an involuntary cry of protest; neither Balcatta nor anyone else made the slightest attempt to see if the woman was alive or dead. Men went on talking as though nothing had happened and the group of women who had gathered to go fishing with Wideera sauntered off without a backward glance. More than a quarter hour passed before Wideera drew her knees up under her and lurched to her feet. She went back to the camp, squatted next to Balcatta and began to grind grass seed into flour. After a while she said something to him and they both laughed.

 

A little before noon a group of some thirty-odd men walked out of the bush and stood on the gentle slope at the eastern side of the gorge. They were naked but carried broad, shovel nosed fighting spears and blood red shields with black vertical lines.

‘What’s going on?’ I bleated. ‘Who are they?’

‘Myall and Ugulla from the reserve,’ Manala murmured. ‘Many of them have never worked on the stations.’ He spoke with a slightly awed respect.

I continued to gape at the impressive line of warriors. ‘What do they want?’

Manala frowned and shrugged his shoulders. ‘They are our guests for the Lartna ceremony,’ he muttered reluctantly. ‘Turn your head the other way.’

I ignored the advice. For a good half hour the visitors stood about a thousand yards off, resting on their spears; not looking down at the camp but apparently staring up at the cliff top. They were not completely naked for they wore bright red headbands, the same colour as the red ochred shields and tight string armlets just below the muscle of the forearm.

The absence of women and children, combined with their queer aloof bearing, was not reassuring. I half expected them to suddenly come screaming down the hill in a furious attack.

Old Beega walked past on his way to the water-hole, without stopping he muttered: ‘Shut your mouth and find other work for your eyes.’

‘Drown your friggin self,’ I mumbled more in embarrassment! than anger; not doubting I was probably making a fool of myself as usual; even the children and the camp dogs were ignoring the warriors.

Manala had been teaching me to throw my new spear and now continued the lesson while we both took sly peeps at the strangers. After a while they stuck their spears upright in the ground and walked forward for about a hundred yards. This time they squatted and laid the shields in front of them. They still carried their woomeras. In the average high noon of the Snake River country the shade temperature reaches one hundred and twenty degrees or more. No ordinary thermometer could measure the direct heat from the sun before the glass tube shattered. The Abunda are not ‘used to the heat’. They are accustomed to old people and children dying under the murderous rays. Hearts race like steam hammers as the broiling blood bangs through the lungs in a feverish search for oxygen. Nobody gets ‘used’ to that sort of heat.

The fantastic temperature climbed with the sun; I found it impossible to concentrate on throwing a spear at a clump of spinifex. The line of warriors on the hill produced an uneasy nervous tension in me, apparently not shared by the rest of the camp. I had a rough idea of the rules for visitors but could see no point in prolonging the agony; if the Abunda had invited these people, why the hell didn’t they welcome their guests and get it over with?

By lack of choice, Manala and I joined a group of men who sat on their legs in the sun-laced shadow of a gaunt and meagrely leafed gum. Naked, dirty, dusty zombies imprisoned under the hourglass of the sun. Sustaining life in an impassive stillness. Over each rock pool the heat vapour boiled up like the waves of a spectral ocean. Behind this translucent sea, in a narrow band of shade at the foot of the cliff, women, children and dogs panted for breath. Elders sought the staring trance, which slows the heart, lets the mind wander down shady paths to the ancestral dwelling – the dreaming.

What little shade the gum tree provided was infested with large, reddish brown ants; singularly intent on climbing the black mountains of flesh which had risen in their paths. I slapped at the ones crawling over my legs and stamped others into the earth; when the undertakers came to drag the bodies away I singled them out individually and ground their heads off with a stick. For two hours or more, while I massacred ants, the brains-trust stared into space. I didn’t notice the gradual awakening or the looks of amused tolerance until Apilquirka spoke:

‘The jimbira were here before you came, Irritcha,’ he said softly, watching the vicious prod of the stick. ‘They will not be sorry to see you go.’

‘If you want to get eaten alive by bloody ants, that’s your funeral.’ I treated the circle of quizzical grins with contempt. ‘I don’t want them crawling all over me.’

‘These jimbira do not eat meat,’ Dillungan replied. ‘They are gatherers of grass seed.’ He spoke of the ants in the personal syntax.

To make the position clearer Manala added: ‘They will not bite you.’ He said it slowly as though trying to convey more than the fact that these were vegetarians.

I ignored the explanations and with the childish theme exhausted they all went back to staring into space.

The shadow of the cliff lengthened but the visitors were still squatting in the sun. One by one the shields had been lifted and balanced on their heads; apart from this single movement the warriors had now been entirely motionless for the best part of four hours. Their presence kept creeping under my skin with the same persistence as the ants crawled on the outside. The slow pace of Abunda life can be maddening at any time, but after the bustle of civilisation long periods of virtual inertia seem related to doom. I was not only stuck with the conviction that all ants bite but also suffered from the delusion that attributed dwindling animation and a blank stare to approaching death. Abunda see neither speed nor time as the essence of the contract. The connection between life and pie-in-the-sky, which Yogis seek by standing on their heads, is similar to the dreaming or reuniting with the personal totem of the Alchera; achieved by the Abunda with nothing more spectacular than a numb bum.

During the afternoon a ‘been-here-before’ feeling grew stronger. I felt sure the warriors on the hill were a repetition of a half forgotten incident. Wongali dozed by my side and I asked him about the visitors.

‘It wasn’t the Myall you would remember,’ the old man answered with a surprising grasp of the question. ‘It would be the Warrumunga. This is their country and it was to the Alchilpa our “skin” first came.’

I knew why the tribe left the Macdonnell ranges; the book said: ‘During the seven-year drought no rain fell at all’; the author was primarily concerned with statistics of average rainfall and only briefly mentioned a starving tribe eating baby-meat. Sister Dominic had placed holy pictures between the pages of the book to mark the bits about the Abunda. I had always imagined the reference concerned fat babies, like the one in the manger of clean straw with the fat cattle looking on. I didn’t have time to read much of it, the history exam was coming up; Captain Cook, Governor Phillip, Macquarie and merino sheep were the VIPs. The Abunda aren’t in the history books and no questions are asked about them – none at all.

I thought Wongali had gone back to sleep but he suddenly began to chant on a single low note; it was like listening to the litany of a mass. He said: ‘When the screech of the cockatoo and the howl of the dingo were unknown to children, whose heads were on level with their mother’s navel, even gum and mulga began to die. Bullroarers were loud in the voiceless land. They sang by day and night in a great corroboree of rainmakers.’

Death and thirst and dying were all contained in the dreamy singsong tone threading the phrases together:

‘Baby-meat was not as hard to find as lizard or snake. We squeezed a little sap from drying roots and bark..’

I watched the gnarled hand pick up a handful of dust and try to wring moisture from it; an ant was trapped between the side of the thumb and the compressed earth – thin, brittle body, wiry legs. I knew fat babies were not eaten, but starving skeletons with eyes set deep in bony skulls.

‘Baby-meat was in the cooking fires as the Abunda dug deep into the beds of the rivers ... Younger children were eaten along with the new born ... We drank the blood of lizards and drank our own blood ...’

Abunda use their hands in a flickering sign language while talking; not merely gesticulating to emphasise the words. The signs convey the actual meaning; words carry only tone and accentuation. Wongali held his hand out with palm turned down to show the increasing height of the children being eaten. He sucked at his arm to demonstrate the tapping of veins. He said: ‘We killed and ate the surplus women ...’

I knew he felt no horror for what had been done; only for the circumstances which made it necessary. Babies cannot survive when the mothers’ breasts are dry; the killing shortened their lives by no more than a few hours; besides, the spirit of a baby returns immediately to jim-bim land and it can stay there and laugh and play and be born again in better times. The tip of Wongali’s tongue flicked across his lips with each mention of eating and the fingers brushed the juices from his beard. Not only sentiment, even revulsion is a luxury far beyond the reach of a nomadic tribesman. He referred to the Abunda as ‘our skin’ and I suddenly knew the term to be literary and actual; it implied the horde were not a group of individuals but a collection of living cells contained within the skin of the Abunda animal. In this case the starving beast, which ate its own flesh and clawed desperately at the earth for water.

Wongali said: ‘Numbukulla heard the song of the bullroarers and there was much rain ...’

Then the book was wrong! A seven-year drought did not drive the tribe from the Macdonnell ranges. Why should it? They were there before the Ten Commandments were written; much more than a mere two thousand years of experience were contained in the Abunda brain; the grooved survival pattern was deep in the ‘skin’. There were seven-year droughts before – before the white man came – before the Christ child was born.

‘... We painted with red and white ochre and danced a mighty corroboree; in praise of the rainmakers; in gratitude to the Rainbow Serpent ...’

Now the taut stringed stomach waited for the living flood to start the gastric juices working. The kangaroos, emus, dingoes and lesser animals which should now pour back into the empty grass filled plains and mountains. The famished body grew tense as it turned its sunken eyes to the west and waited for the hunters to return with the first kills. There should soon be plenty; flesh and fat to pad the bones of the gaunt skeleton. Smooth muscle bowing the corded sinew of the warrior cells; the sagging dried parchment of the female skin growing smooth and shiny; bellies and buttocks soft and rounded. Once more the many breasts would fill and sucking jim-bim turn from spirit child to true Abunda.

Everything was ready and waiting for a period of super abundance; tall sap filled grass rippled in invitation for the grazing game to come and eat their fill.

A new animal had been created in the year before the drought, a furred creature with a short blob of a tail and soft floppy ears. Its white, juicy flesh was sweet and good. The small animal had been given to the Abunda by Kunappipi to show her pleasure with the tribe. The Earth Mother was pleased with the proper observance of totemic ritual; grateful for the circumcision of the youth, the avoidance of incest. She had been handsomely paid in blood from the arm veins of the warriors, in addition to the smaller contributions from virgins and initiates. The description of the new animal had been incorporated in the song-cycles which told of its prolific ability and voracious appetite for grass.

Wongali said: ‘The Abunda ate the grass seed and waited for the animals to return.’ Waited! The low voice chanted the count of the moons: ‘Terra-ma-ninta, terra-ma-terra, terra-ma-ninta terra, atua nummina.’

For me the dreaming of the Macdonnells suddenly changed to nightmare. I remembered a date in a history book! The knowledge felt like a crushing weight across my shoulders as I tried to think of the words, to tell a handful of survivors our people had not been destroyed by the wrath of Kunappipi but by a man-made famine.

The book said: “Agriculture was protected and encouraged under the supervision of Forrest’s commissioners of Crown lands ...”

The rabbit-proof fence was a favourite question of examiners and I learnt it off like a parrot.

“Late in 1897 pastoralists in the Eucla district of West Australia reported that thousands of rabbits were crossing the South Australian border and heading west along the southern coast towards Esperance ...”

Not northward into the Macdonnells! During the drought the rabbits were forced to follow the green coastal belt.

“The construction of the fence was authorised in 1902. It runs from near Hopetown on the south coast to near Port Hedland in the north-west. It is one thousand one hundred miles in length and is the longest single fence in the world. It was completed in 1908.”

I stared at Wongali and saw the other book; the one with the holy pictures. I remembered answering Sister Dominic’s questions, telling her the average rainfall in the Macdonnells was in the vicinity of five inches prior to a seven-year drought occurring between 1908 and 1915.

‘My tribe moved north to the country of the Warrumunga, Sister, and shared the tribal grounds with their distant cousins.’

Sister Dominic said it was important to know something about one’s own people. She said we were all equal in the sight of God and some day I would be able to tell my people of the Saviour.

I couldn’t even tell them about the rabbit-proof fence! A simple post and wire-netting barricade stretching its deadly length across all the country to the west of the Macdonnells. The fence which didn’t keep the rabbits and kangaroos out; those not already in before the fence was finished and the drought began soon found an open gate. But when the drought ended it did effectively keep them in. The gates were shut and all the creatures of the dreaming were imprisoned! Subjected to strychnine poisoning! Fast moving trucks sowing a trail of death inside the fence – killing vermin! While outside in the desert, now recovering from the drought, the Abunda ate baby-meat. So the imported rabbits would not affect the crop yields; would not eat grass allocated to sheep. The fat sheep of the fat shepherds; who observed no totemic ritual; who nailed their Numbukulla to a wooden cross.

Often Wongali’s chant died away in the middle of a sentence. But always another of the old men would pick up where he left off, in precisely the same key and low singing drone. I was never sure if the three old men unconsciously or deliberately taught me this portion of the song-cycle. They cannot be quoted literally for only sign language and tone connect unrelated phrases. This isn’t what Wongali, Bert or Urumbi said; but it is what they meant:

‘Your father, the Inkata called a great corroboree of all the moieties of the tribe. The Intichiuma ceremony was performed, not once but three times. When Numbukulla failed to increase the game, in spite of being in the tribe’s debt by three Intichiumas, the old men met in council and talked of what must be done.

‘They reasoned that the North people, who were so successful in the withdrawing of the salt water, only shells and bones of fish remained, had now become equally proficient at the extraction of game. The only thing to do was for the Abunda skin to move northwards and either share the hunting grounds or fight the North people for the right to live.’

Sister Dominic’s book contained the statistics of the march. Over two thousand men, women and children began that dreadful trek and all but two hundred and fifty-seven died in the Gibson Desert. In a good year they might have made it. But 1916 wasn’t a good year and the tribe was desperately weak before it began.

The handful of survivors, who finally arrived at the Alchilpa gorge, were in no condition to fight the North people for game. Luckily for the Abunda the Warrumunga had already been civilised and consequently decimated by measles, rifles, influenza and syphilis. The remnants had all been absorbed by missions and cattle stations which left them no use for the land and no desire to fight anybody.

The barren Oswalds lie between the two great cattle stations of Table-Tops and Verdi. The Snake River country is not claimed by either station. The tribe might have stayed in the Alchilpa and prospered but for the gregarious, friendly Warrumunga, and the ritual of the walkabout.

 

Now was the time to prove myself Abunda. To stand up, denounce the curse of the jangaga, the fence and the corruption of the civilised. I decided to make a mental list of the satanic, depraved, degenerate practices flourishing in the south; but all I could get on the crystal set was a city with rain washed streets and fluorescent lights reflected in the shining pavements. From under the gum tree it looked more like heaven than hell. I resolved to skip the evils and just tell them about the wire-netting and the vermin control. Even this turned out to be impossible, for there are no Abunda words for fence or strychnine and I lacked fluency in the sign language. Besides, an intichiuma ceremony does not fail merely because of a stupid action by people hundreds of miles away. If Numbukulla intended to increase the game, he would at least make sure the fertile animals were on the right side of the barrier. Obviously no increase can take place until natural or unnatural causes are compensated for; no God worthy of his name uses a fence or poison as an excuse for failing to grant a boon. I decided it would be better if I went to sleep and forgot all about the unpleasantness.

For an hour or more the ants crawled over me with impunity; I awoke in time to see Dhalja, Bert and several of the others receiving the final touches to their beauty treatment. All had donned headbands and string armlets; Dillungan even wore a curved bone through the septum of his nose. The childish stupidity of the fashion parade amused me. I grinned in sardonic derision as Bert stuck his finger in a wooden bowl of red ochre and drew a broad stripe from the centre of Dhalja’s forehead to the tip of his nose. Yet when the decoration was completed and the men picked up their spears and shields the element of the ridiculous disappeared. Proud warriors of the Abunda marched out to greet their visitors.

Dhalja and his senior officers squatted in a line some twenty feet from the Myall to give them a further opportunity of deciding if they wished to come in peace or war. Having already been given the usual five hours to deliberate on whether they wished to enter the camp or not, there didn’t seem to be much doubt about the outcome. It was purely a formal gesture.

 

Wongali said: ‘At first only the young men on walkabout from Verdi came and squatted within sight of the cooking fires – as the Myalls do now.’

The old man broke up the account of the first meeting between the Abunda and the Warrumunga with rambling descriptions of places in the Macdonnells and disjointed statements concerning the death of his wives and boyhood friends. Abunda history is primarily taught by osmosis – it seeps in through the skin more than it penetrates the ears.

When the original inhabitants of the Alchilpa first saw the Abunda squatters on their territory they were both surprised and delighted. Far from resenting the intrusion the Warrumunga welcomed the newcomers with open arms. In gratitude for the peaceful use of the new land the Abunda extended every hospitality, including fraternal relationship and the temporary use of wives. A corroboree was performed in honour of the guests. Abunda artists told the story of their ancient tribal grounds far to the south. Of drought and starvation; finally the disastrous trek across the desert. It was high opera and so subtly explained in dance and mime the Warrumunga not only understood the Abunda story but felt they had participated in the death struggles of the tribe.

On the second night the Warrumunga repaid their hosts with a corroboree of their own; of which the Abunda understood little and believed even less. They told of riding horses and long days spent in the saddle. Of rounding up great herds of cattle and huge mia-mias with walls of stone. An abundance of food which did not come from the land, but was called flour, tea, sugar and jam. They made much of the great joy to be had from eating this wondrous food.

Naturally the Abunda believed the corroboree was comedy; but not of a very high order. In fact little better than the stories women told to children. They were fairly polite considering the boorish behaviour of their guests; yet still managed to convey the message that such a corroboree would have been better staged in the lukwurra than among intelligent men.

The Warrumunga were both insulted and indignant. But unlike most claimants to miracles were able to return with the proof. They came back dressed in the colourful red shirts and wide brimmed hats of stockmen -mounted centaurs to the awe-struck Abunda. They brought weird uncanny things from their packsaddles and lined them up on the rocks near the pool of the Alchilpa. Fascinating gifts of apple jelly jam, flour, tea, boiled lollies and sugar. Then miracles like cloth, knives, boots and buttons. And, as if this wasn’t enough, one of the stockmen produced a box of matches from his pocket and calmly lit a cigarette. The Abunda were more than convinced. When they recovered from their initial fear of the wonders, they were stupefied with delight.

At sundown Dhalja suddenly walked forward and embraced the Inkata of the Myall. As the guests were being led into the camp a horde of women, children and dogs appeared out of the bush at the end of the gorge. The Alchilpa broke into a bedlam of shouts and laughter as the Abunda women ran to meet fraternal sisters, cousins and nieces. Children yelled and tumbled in the dust, strange dogs sniffed at each other and either started fighting or tore in and out among the forest of legs in an agony of excitement. The feasting and corroboree went on right through the night.

---

 

8: Lartna

Manala probably guessed the time for Lartna was close at hand. I had no idea why we were not allowed to attend the corroboree following the arrival of the Myall but were sent to the Ungunga section and told to stay there. I neither knew nor cared. To a tired brain overexposure to tribal life is like a series of electric shocks. Through the unease of being naked and dirty comes the conviction of being degraded; simple basic acts seem shabby or shameful. As the Myall had mingled with the Abunda, each of the warriors had placed his penis in a fraternal brother’s hand.

Manala explained a refusal to touch the proffered organ could only mean a grudge was harboured against the man. The score would have to be settled in blood.

To me the brush of hand against penis seemed obscene and more than hinting at mass perversion. Although even then I must have suspected there was no truth or reason in this assumption; homosexuals are unknown in the tribes. I still hadn’t properly recovered from the ordeal in the Oswalds and was too tired to think about it or weigh the amount of virtue gained by keeping the reproductive organs taboo.

In spite of the yelling and the throb of the didgeridoo, I slept through the night and awoke at sunrise feeling three parts human. I asked Manala to go for a walk with me to the top of the cliff.

‘We have no space in that direction,’ he explained in refusal.

‘How much bloody space do you want?’ I laughed. ‘We don’t have to walk to Queensland. Just take a look around from up there.’

‘Stay here as we were told,’ Manala advised. ‘It is dangerous to go where you have no personal space.’

I had a vague idea personal space was mainly concerned with the possibility of unwittingly walking into another tribe’s burial ground or places of ritual. If a tribesman was forced by dire necessity to cross another’s boundaries, he always advertised his presence by lighting a chain of fires. This action gave his hosts an opportunity to send out a guide and prevent him from straying into banned places. Unfortunately what I had read dealt only with the more dramatic possibilities and failed to mention the primary cause of any man’s space loss: Women.

I mumbled something to Manala about being a lazy bastard and climbed the steep incline where the cliff slopes down to the mouth of the gorge. In less than half a mile I crossed a well-defined track that marks the boundary between the women’s country and the hunting grounds of the men. I painfully found out, a short while later, that only a married man in company with his wife or wives would enter the country of the women; then only if he was leaving the district and it happened to be the shortest route. Manala’s weren’t the only eyes that saw me silhouetted against the skyline.

The rolling vastness of the view directly refuted any suggestion of a limit to space. A sense of belonging gave the contour of each rounded hill a specific meaning that had never applied to any other place; whether it was because this country belonged to me, or me to it, I never quite decided. Either way the solitary role of Adam in Eden lost its appeal immediately Eve appeared on the scene.

I heard the sound of distant voices, and although I later denied having any other intention than sight-seeing, the fact remains I wasted no more time gawking at the hills. No doubt the expert trackers who followed me were aware of the sudden curve in my path and careless steps becoming a furtive creep. They probably also heard the high pitched voices which became audible at the curving of the track.

I crept to the edge of a shallow gully and looked down. A considerable number of women and children were dispersed across the valley, mainly engaged in digging for yams and collecting grass seed. Two boys and a small girl ran and jumped across a stone outcrop in excited pursuit of a lizard or snake, their breathless yells mingling with the easy laughter of the women; a pleasant scene spread wide on a large canvas. I altered the perspective to a more sharply focused view. A group of young women were working their way along the near slope, running their fingers up the grass stalks and stripping the seed into the pitchis held under the arms. They talked and laughed among themselves, but my casual observation of the whole scene had now narrowed to scientific study of the figures in the foreground. The naked truth drew closer with each step.

No trained bird-watcher could have found fault with my dedicated attention to meticulous detail. There was a pair of legs not sixty feet away and one of these limbs was about to step out of the spinifex and onto a rock. The movement was never recorded.

Dhalja, who was capable of approaching within ten feet of a feeding kangaroo, did not find an engrossed ornithologist any test for his skill. I collapsed with a whistling sigh of compressed air as he slammed me across the back of the head with the flat of a boomerang.

 

Lartna began just after dark. The day before is supposed to be spent in meditation but I spent it huddled near the pool, rubbing the back of my head and sulkily lying to Manala and myself. He asked me what I was doing when the atua-kurka found me.

‘Nothing!’ I told him indignantly. ‘I was crouched behind a bush so those bloody women and kids wouldn’t see me. Then that stinking Dhalja creeps up and hits me over the head.’

‘How was I to know there would be any bloody women there? Christ Almighty! Did they think I was going to rape their scrawny looking wives and gangly daughters? ... I wouldn’t touch any of those crows with a barge pole ... None of you know what a real woman looks like ...’

In between sleeps and guilty silences I kept up the monologue most of the day. Manala was reasonably sympathetic even though preoccupied with the ordeal he knew was coming. Had the positions been reversed I probably would have made it easier for myself by loading him with a share of the horrors in store for us. Manala wouldn’t do that.

We were lying by the fire half asleep when there was a great concerted yelling of: ‘Utchai! Utchai! Utchai!’ About thirty young men came tearing down the gorge in full painted regalia, screaming their heads off. They came through our camp at a full run and scooped us up by the arms and legs. There were so many hands on me, struggling was virtually impossible. Everybody was yelling at top pitch and one voice was screaming in English: ‘Put me down! Put me down! ...’

They carried us about half a mile from the gorge, down a moonlit gully to a wide and level valley. As our bearers fanned out in a semicircle we were dumped behind a carefully prepared screen of brush. The men had stopped yelling. They were deathly quiet. If I had been scared before I was now terrified; vertical stripes of red and white ochre gave them a skeleton appearance in the moonlight. All were staring over the top of the brake or screen; from the other side of which came the thud of many feet. There was no other sound; not a muscle on any of the warriors moved. After a couple of minutes Wongali and Dhalja came around the end of the curved brake; as I attempted to jump to my feet, and have it out with my brother, the flat of a shovel nosed spear hit me on the shoulder and knocked me down again. Both Wongali and Dhalja carried a coil of hair string. There seemed to be something remarkably sinister about those ropes of human hair; I suppose I had seen too many pictures of Red Indians on scalping raids.

Wongali said: ‘In a moment you will be told to turn around and stand up.’ He spoke in a flat even monotone which was nothing like his usual reedy piping. ‘Do not attempt to see what is happening on the other side of the screen or you will die.’ Several of the men lifted their spears, adding emphasis to Wongali’s caution.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ I tried to get some indignation into the question; my voice broke on the last couple of words and it came out as a squawk.

‘Turn around and stand up,’ Dhalja barked. He wore a downward curved bone through his nose that gave his lean jaws a peculiar ferocity.

Manala seemed to be having as much trouble in getting his legs to support him as I was; Dhalja and Wongali tied the prickly hair girdles around our waists. The dancing stopped suddenly and was replaced by a low rhythmic throbbing, not unlike muffled drums. I had once attended a military funeral and the sound was all I needed to convince me I was now about to attend my own.

The thudding beat increased in tempo as we were led around the edge of the brake. We walked between two raised banks of earth about fifty yards long and some six inches high. The ground had been scraped flat with boomerangs; both of us were made to squat on the hard beaten track. The centre section of the hourglass shaped Apulla ground was like a wide cricket pitch. Screens at either end partly blocked the funnel necked entrances; behind them the raised banks flared out in wide semicircles.

The drumming came from a shadowy mass of men, who crouched around the rims of the circles and beat the ground with shields. I became convinced an explosive burst of violence was fast approaching. The rhythmic pounding rose and fell in waves of uneven tempo, which excited rather than dulled the nerves. Ear and guts expected the beat to slow when it quickened, to fall when it rose. My heart pounded with a frightened jerky thud, making me gasp for breath. The hair on the back of my head prickled like the girdle; I strained towards the sound in an agony of waiting for something to happen. Nothing did.

Only the beat of the shields broke the ominous silence. A fine mist of dust mounted above the hammered earth and hung like a filmy curtain in the still night air. The movement of the drummers’ arms and shoulders was blended into a rolling wave of flesh, just discernible through the dust. The impression grew that we squatted on the edge of a misty swamp; a place devoid of life, yet possessing tight reined motion.

There was no alteration in the rhythm, but a subtle change occurred as a line of fires was lit inside the circle. The men began a low chant that increased in volume until it was almost like a song. For hour after hour the singers told a long involved story about a group of kangaroo women of the dreamtime. In the firelight I could see a crowd of silent women standing behind the men; in my mind they became associated with this song-cycle.

These dreamtime creatures were not entirely women or kangaroos but had some of the characteristics of both. For a time I took the literal meaning and tried to relate the words with classical myths and legends. While my tired brain fooled with mermaids and centaurs the story contained little meaning; it was only when I stopped consciously listening the pulsing cadence entered my guts. It became the drumming thump of kangaroos as they sped across the ancient hills in flight. The alchera kananga were endeavouring to escape the pursuit of a kangaroo man; he was fraternal son-in-law to some and fraternal brother to the others. The song leapt into hysterical pitch as the creature caught the women and raped them. The wrongful scattering of his sperm was a sob in the night and an ache in my testicles. It fell to a mourning wail for the wronged women and I felt the constricting sorrow in my throat. The tone of lament changed to anger as the Abunda warriors of the dream time followed the tracks of the incestuous male. The notes swelled into savage exultant fury, when the warriors caught and killed him. I was at the kill ... thrusting at the body with a broad-bladed spear ... helping to vent the hate of a tribe on the mutilated body.

The song ended abruptly on this note and I jerked awake in a lather of sweat; realising with a sickening lurch of my stomach the moral of the story could be pointed straight at me. My sense of fear and guilt grew to fit the occasion. That spying on the women scarcely warranted such an elaborate trial did not occur to me, until I realised Manala would not also be punished for my crime.

The drumming began again, but now the women jumped out from behind the men and began to dance with a grotesque, high stepping stamp. The knees were brought up under the chins with a violent jerk, each jarring impact of the savagely stamping feet threatened to snap off their heads and breasts. They began a moaning wail and let the cry climb into a high-pitched keening scream. Two of the women carried firebrands and these suddenly ran towards the group guarding Manala and I. They ran round and round us, leaping high into the air, the piercing shrieks bubbling from their throats as they jabbed at the guards with the burning sticks. The dance obviously symbolised the desire of the women to free us from our captors; there was nothing particularly queer about it. I suppose most women are sorry to see their sons being turned into men.

Sometime during the dance Dhalja came and squatted by my side. He whispered something about the burning sticks representing mine and Manala’s lives. ‘When those firebrands go out you will be dead,’ he murmured. At least that is what I interpreted him as saying; the screaming of the women made it difficult to hear. I found out later, what Dhalja actually said was: ‘When the firebrands go out Manala and my brother will no longer be ulmerka. The ulmerka will be dead.’

I stared at him in horror-struck dumbness. The drumming stopped and the men suddenly began yelling: ‘Utchail Utchai!’ as a signal for the women to leave the ground.

Before they left a small group of women roughly shoved the guards aside and wished us goodbye. Three old grandmothers and Manala’s younger sisters were crying as they bent over us. I felt several of the aged, claw-like hands touch me on the head and shoulders; being tired and badly frightened, the gestures of compassion caught me in an unguarded moment. I was sobbing as the warriors raised their spears and made a show of driving the women from the Apulla ground.

 

Manala and I watched in stunned apathy as individual men or groups of five or six performed short ritual dramas about dreamtime kangaroos and various other totemic animals. Dhalja and Wongali warned us what was seen from now on must never he told to women, children or uninitiated. In between the dances we were shown the soft wood shields that had been used to beat the ground and were painted with our personal totem dreamings. Manala is kananga or kangaroo and must always eat sparingly of his totem brothers. Wongali said I was of the blood of the eagle-hawk. Actually, I’m not sure if he offered a verbal explanation or not. I suppose he did, although the knowledge of my totem seemed to come to me in a dream.

Both Wongali and Dhalja carried small switches of a long leafed plant and occasionally brushed these across our foreheads or touched them on our ears and lips. The leaves of eremophila longifolia are reputed to have the power of shutting out distractions and narrowing the receptive channels of the brain into a single beam of blinding intensity. The spiritual value of the rituals passes into the novice, but initially the context and meaning do not.

In the paling light of the coming dawn I sat staring fixedly at the horizon. For lengthening periods my eyes did not blink, yet the physical condition was not unpleasant. Whether the trance-like state was brought on by the longifolia leaves, or purely by prolonged exhaustion, the result was equally satisfactory. I was aware of the fading stars and moon as a pale wash in the sky; however these things no longer registered as a mark of passing time ... I belonged to a static world in which I was also fixed and frozen. Like my eyelids the doorways into the present were wide open ... Yet I could not escape ... Could not go through those doors ... I must first sit through the measureless years of the dreaming ... The Abunda race was old when the ancient Greeks were a young and savage tribe ... Our rituals established and lost in time before the pyramids were built ... We possessed our land while Moses was still roaming the desert. I was aware only of the great spanning eons of Abunda history. I made no comparisons.

The symbolic kangaroo of the dreaming, hopped and mimed the story of evolution. Its forepaws turned into hands and the new fingers learnt to hold a spear. Evolution was never a theory to the Abunda; before the remote ancestors of Charles Darwin were born the knowledge had been incorporated into religious ritual.

Four young men standing near us twisted a stick into their string armbands. The veins began to swell under the constriction; I flinched as they drove pencil-like splinters of wood into the raised and pulsing blood-streams. In an unhurried, casual manner, one of the warriors picked up a shield, pulled the stick from his flesh and let the blood pump into the wooden dish. As it was passed from one man to the next the shield began to fill. In the pale light the dark liquid looked almost like ink. The dancing came to an end and there was only the faint, dull, oily, splashing sound. The brain is not allowed to rest; Wongali took my head in his hands and turned it away from the blood donors. He squatted with his face almost touching mine and began the indoctrination of the conception dreaming; of the origin of personal totems in general and of my totem in particular.

In the ancient eyes of Wongali pinpoints of light flecked the opaque darkness of the pupils ... A network of red rivers ran across a burnt and yellow plain ... A golden speck became an eagle-hawk flying high in a cloudless sky ... Hovering just outside the corona of the sun ... Forever circling, sailing on still wings in the blue vault ... Just as the hills in the background belonged to this place, so did the young woman who stood naked in the dry yellow grass ... Imprisoned in this moment of time she continually ran prehensile fingers over her stomach ... placed each of her thumbs on an exact point of the hips ... pressed the ball of the thumbs into the black satiny flesh and spanned the soft curve of belly with long calloused fingers ... She smiled with satisfaction as the straining fingers failed to touch the indent of the navel ... I nodded my head in agreement, the swelling had definitely begun.

With hands still bridging her stomach, Baleeta looked up at the sky and saw the hovering hawk. Full, fleshy lips peeled back from strong teeth in a smile of pure joy ... She swallowed and the dark eyes glistened as she drank in the effortless flight of the bird ...

Now there was only the hawk ... Above the outstretched wings the blinding rays of the sun were diffused and coloured with an all feminine glory ... with the divine all merciful essence of a woman ... the enchanted core of a soft and gentle being ... who gave her life for an unborn child ... who eternally supports the wings in the void ...

Wongali’s voice stopped! I silently screamed for him to go on! I looked down from a great height ... A priest lifted a chalice of wine above his head. The hushed sound of beating wings was drowned by his voice: ‘This is the blood of Christ.’ He raised a golden cup filled with wafers of bread: ‘This is the body of Christ! ... The Eagle-hawk man saw a priest place bread on the protruding tongues of the supplicants who knelt before him ... The son of Baleeta walked down the aisle of a high vaulted church ... the light from stained glass windows picked out the saffron-coloured robes of the altar boy ... whose feet sank into deep carpet ... whose Abunda accent was added to the massed soprano voices of the choir: “I wish my little heart to be a garland wreathed with flowers, where my blessed Jesus may repose, on my first communion day ...”

Dhalja held the brimming shield out to me. Taking it in both hands I drank Abunda blood; gagged on the warm fluid, was ashamed and drank again. I dry retched and wiped the blood from my chin. The words of the communion song still echoed in my head: “I wish my little heart to be ...” The blood drinking did not seem barbaric. It seemed right. As though blood should taste like blood and not like wine.

Even after we had taken the token sips and the still-full shield was poured over our heads there was no feeling of revulsion. I prayed: Let a spear thrust add my blood to the gift of the warriors; let me have the courage to say, ‘thy will be done ...’ I thought something like that might happen. But as the sun rose we were led a short distance from the Apulla ground and given the luxury of paper-bark beds under the shade of a eucalyptus tree ...

 

The ceremonies went on from dawn to sunrise for five consecutive nights. All night! Every night! And during the day while we lay in a semi-coma of exhaustion the sacred bullroarers kept up a continual, whirring roar. They are similar to the bull roarers school kids make, by drilling a hole in the end of a ruler and whirling it around their heads on a piece of string. The sacred variety is no different, only larger; they make a sound like blowflies that have grown to the size of wedge-tailed eagles. Deep sleep is virtually impossible, stunned awareness becomes continuous; closing of semi-rigid eyelids no longer draws a curtain, it merely shuts out a little light. Every young man in the camp took his turn to stand by our beds and twirl the bullroarers over, our heads. The men going off shift always threw a few handfuls of dust into the air, to blind the demons less sensitive to noise. Older men were busy in the bush repainting the jarandalba boards; Wongali, Bert and Dhalja visited the workers each day to supervise and spur them on.

The prolonged rituals came too soon after the ordeal by thirst for me to form any opinion of the usual effect on initiates; yet I imagine, the state of mind Manala reached by religious ecstasy, was almost the mental condition I achieved by exhaustion. The death wish is probably three parts mechanical; depending on a certain amount of electrical impulse reaching the brain. Step up the voltage and decrease the heartbeat is the Abunda recipe for making martyrs. I wanted to die – to be sacrificed. So did Manala.

Every dawn, following the blood drinking ceremony, we were given a bath in it. And on the third morning we were led back into the Alchilpa to prove to the women we were still alive. Slumped to our knees in the sand; hair and skin stiff with the dried coatings of blood; I prayed for death. Not: ‘I’m tired I want to die’ type of suicide. Not even: ‘Father forgive them they know not what they do.’ It’s nothing like that! The sacrifice yearns to be slaughtered; to be rid of the stinking body. I craved the divinity which would come with a shovel nosed spear piercing my throat. My essence draining into the golden cup of the sand ... The Abunda would lift the chalice towards the wings in the sky. Would shout: ‘This is the blood of the eagle!’ The priest would reply: ‘Et cum spirit-tu tu-O.’

On the fourth night the boards were ready and the dance of the jarandalba began. The thirty curved and shaped boards form a detailed map of the tribal lands; they show nothing of contour, longitude or latitude, the painted lines are the tracks of the dreamings. Where a creature of the Alchera created a water-hole or a mountain the spot is marked with its symbol. Old men who repainted the boards year after year not only learnt the tracks of all the dreamings; they knew the precise location of all water-holes and how they came to be there; they could accurately describe the terrain of unseen country, the type of game inhabiting an area, which places were taboo and which were not. They knew where each man’s space or actual land was situated. The old men said that without the jarandalba we would have no rights to our land.

‘The boards were the gift of the Warrumunga,’ Bert told me. ‘They gave us their jarandalba, we gave them marriage rights with Abunda women.’

In the early hours of the fourth morning, one man came running from the north end of the Apulla ground with a five-foot board held in front of his stomach. As he reached the centre of the ground other board-carrying men came yelling and bounding from all directions of the compass. The rituals reached a new peak of crescendo as the furious pace of the stamping feet was matched by the jerky mass movement of the boards. What began on a wild note worked up to a berserk climax. Carved shape of boards and pulsating movement made the meaning obvious; it was enacted with a fervent, zealous vigour which seemed to tremble the earth.

In civilised society the symbol of estate is the duty stamp. With the Abunda it is an erect and raging penis. Tribal land cannot be held by rubber stamp; possession depends entirely on the virility of the young men; on the receptive wombs of the women.

The two lines of dancers converged and the hollow thump of the boards when they met was the drumming of the gargantuan kangaroos of the dreaming; the sound of the great orgasm. Men screamed and writhed in the dust. I thought I held my scrotum in my hands and moaned at the aching agony; but perhaps like Manala. I was shaking my testicles at the dancers while the mournful howl of a dingo tore from my throat.

There was no break. The fourth night converged into the fifth; but now there were only two jarandalba boards and these had been bound together into the shape of a cross. The warrion opened their arm veins early in the evening and the hair string binding of the boards was cemented together with quarts of blood. An old man smeared the wood with blood and charcoal paste. Curving lines of emu feathers were pressed into the wet glue on the outer edges of the cross; the dreaming designs of the kangaroo and eagle-hawk totems were outlined in white down from the breast of an ibis.

While the cross dried a middle aged man with a thick matted beard and a long knife in his hand offered his penis to the group surrounding us. All except Dhalja and Wongali signified with a brush of the hand their approval and respect for his ability with the knife. Dhalja snatched up a heavy killing spear and held it with the point just parting the man’s beard.

He spoke without heat in the formalised tone of ritual: ‘If my brother is mutilated the pay-back will start with your life. Wabgana.’ Wongali placed his hand on the shaft and repeated the vow on Manala’s behalf.

The evident possibility of maiming did nothing for my peace of mind, neither did my brother’s offer of revenge prove any consolation. I knew Wabgana. In pointing him out. Dhalja had named him as my father-in-law. It is the duty of the knife man to provide the youth he cuts with a wife; it could also be a unique opportunity to get rid of an unwanted son-in-law.

The knife was placed on the ground and sung. The chanted words of the chorus repeated over and over: ‘Cut straight and true with your sharp edge.’ Both Manala and I stared in horror at the long thin blade of the bullock skinning knife, probably stolen from some homestead butcher’s shop.

It was now sprinkled with blood and laid on the centre of the cross. The sacred bullroarers were also placed in position; one on each side of the knife. There was something incredibly stark and terrifying about the action; a final and irrevocable certainty. Blackened and blood stained boards, with stiff hair binding and concentric circles of feathers, had part of their mystic meaning revealed as real and actual by the practical truth of the knife. A cold wave of fear started in my stomach, fragments of ice touched my spine and the back of my neck. Four men carried the cross to the far end of the ground and laid it on a bed of leaves.

Two rows of singers now lined the entire length of the Apulla ground. Myall on one side, Abunda on the other. They squatted and beat the ground with heavy sticks to accompany the fast rhythm of the narga dreaming songs. A competition developed as each side stepped up the beat and tried to outsing the other. The dust rose in thick choking clouds from the hammering clubs, while the roar of voices swelled until they echoed from the far gorges. At the height of the performance two lines of fully armed and decorated warriors jumped over the heads of the singers. Huge armfuls of dry leaves were thrown on the smouldering fires. The cross suddenly appeared to float up between the ranks of the warriors and travel over their heads. It hung suspended in the air, directly above Manala and me, before being passed back to the end of the line.

Three times the dreaming designs of our totems seemed to float above the dust and leaping tongues of fire. Finally, when it was almost overhead, both of us were snatched up and held at full arms length above the heads of our bearers. I saw the cross appear a foot away from my face; I closed my eyes as it briefly settled and pressed against my chest. My lips touched the hair binding and I tasted blood. Perhaps the association was all mixed; perhaps not. I know I was praying in English: ‘Thy will be done on earth ... Our Father who art in heaven ...’

As we were lowered to the ground three men dropped on their hands and knees behind each of us. We were pushed in the chest and pinned across the backs of the kneeling men. I didn’t resist; in any case there was nothing I could have done to free myself. There were two men standing on my hands and two more on my feet; Dhalja straddled my body and was half sitting on my chest. He still held the spear and his arm was drawn back to throw or jab. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the flash of the knife. Manala gave a low coughing grunt, muffled by Wongali’s thigh pressed against his face. A murmur of approval came from the audience.

It was my turn. Wabgana grasped my foreskin and put it on the stretch. There was a sharp searing pain, but nothing of the mortal jab I half expected. Dhalja lowered his spear and held a small piece of dripping flesh over me.

‘The ulmerka are dead,’ he gravely pronounced. ‘You are now wurtja and will soon be atua-kurka.’

The anticlimax was too much for me. I started to laugh. Still seated on the backs of the kneeling men I bellowed with delirious relief. Dhalja held the piece of flesh pinched between his thumb and forefinger; I could see through the hole in the middle. Between gales of laughter I spluttered: ‘Who killed Cock Robin? Eh Dhalja! Who killed Cock Robin?’ I was still saying it when I looked down at the pool of blood between my legs and passed out cold.

---

 

9: Arilta

For seven months of all his years, Manala lived on a ration of bread, beef and sweet black tea. As a child he added to his food supply by snatching titbits from the camp dogs and like all Abunda kids thrived on the poisonous diet. A mistake in judging a dog’s temperament could have cost him an arm; just as the error of learning to read and write may have lost him peace of mind. However, Manala committed neither blunder and grew up both illiterate and an excellent stockman, sound in mind and body. In order of preference, he liked girls, riding horses and the excitement of the mustering camp. He was also tremendously proud of the red shirt, high heeled boots, wide brimmed hat and narrow legged trousers of the colourful stockman’s outfit. About once a month, Manala went to Port Darling on the back of the store truck and spent his meagre wages on boiled lollies, tobacco and tinned food. Twice he had been able to bribe a white man to buy him a bottle of wine, and on both occasions, by combining the liquor with petrol sniffing, had become gloriously drunk and prodigiously sick.

Manala was fortunate in not being able to read the record of how the land was cleared for sheep and cattle. A Northern Territory policeman, after returning from a punitive expedition, which consisted of slaughtering Woolwonga tribesmen, proudly wrote: “I feel I cannot end this report without paying tribute to the Martini-Henri rifle, both to its accuracy of aim and quickness of action.” However, by the time Manala was old enough to form an opinion on local politics, the killings on both sides had practically ceased; the records were locked away from him forever between the pages of books and old newspapers.

There are no words in the Abunda language for such abstract terms as: integration, segregation, victimisation; nor would many use them if there were. Unlike the tribes occupying more fertile lands, the Abunda considered weather and witchcraft, rather than murderous greed, had driven them from the tribal grounds. They saw no reason to hold a grudge against the jangaga. Manala considered himself fortunate to have a job which paid ten shillings a week and tucker; the stories he heard of the old times, when the rains did not come and the meat in the cooking fires was not beef, strengthened the conviction.

Except that he pass the initiation ceremonies, and gain respect in the tribe, Manala did not brood on past or future. While he listened to the old men chanting the song-cycles, he carved weapons for himself, toy boomerangs for the children and mentally examined the possibilities of a woman walking in his tracks. Manala always left a clear set of footprints when passing the lukwurra and each day carefully inspected his marks as though they were a set of rabbit traps – in a way they were. Where old men are given teenage brides the chances of catching a bunny in a young man’s tracks are reasonably good. Manala’s allotted woman was of the Myall, but he had a few preliminary affairs; the last of which earned both him and Beeja’s second wife a severe beating.

 

For a considerable period after the Lartna rituals, Manala lost interest in footprints. Immediately the ceremonies ended, and while we were still bleeding, Wongali and Dhalja escorted us to a waterhole about six miles from the Alchilpa. I no longer found it laughable. Lartna lingers; the kneeling bowed and bloody in the sand; the passing through the flame, even the resultant soreness, all add to the impression that something a good deal more distinctive than long trousers separates the men from the boys. After becoming wurtja, I not only felt different, but also bloody painful.

Walking naked through spinifex country is a prickly business at any time and right then it was sheer agony. A blade of grass brushing against the raw flesh would send me cursing and bounding into the air; two minutes later the performance would be repeated. Manala shuffled along in a wide legged gait, with one hand held loosely in front to brush away the grass, as though he had been getting around like a bandy ape all his life. Even with both hands spread in front of my thighs, odd stalks of grass would whip past and flick the wound; in the finish I grasped the vital organ in one hand and held the other over the sore end to form a protective cap. I became more and more irritable with every step. Manala said I looked like a man who had caught a rare bird and held it to his belly.

I was in no mood for jokes and arrival at a slimy little waterhole on the edge of the western plains did nothing to improve my temper. The place looked a good deal more barren and desolate than it actually was. Dhalja and Wongali said we had to stay there and fend for ourselves until the wounds healed and they returned.

‘What if we don’t heal?’ I barked at Dhalja. ‘What happens if we get blood poisoning out of this friggin stupidity?’

‘Do not eat snake,’ Wongali answered. I spoke to Dhalja in English but the old man seemed to understand. ‘No snake, echidna or lizard,’ he said as though prescribing a diet, ‘and your worrapaira will heal.’ He added as an after thought: ‘It is best to drink sparingly for the first three days.’

‘Well! Thank you, doctor,’ I muttered at the old goat. ‘If we don’t eat reptiles what the hell are we going to live on?’

Dhalja handed me a beautifully carved woomera, made from a slab of mulga wood, and my own shovel nosed spear. The woomera was his most prized possession.

‘Eat the other things,’ he advised as he stalked off with Wongali at his heels.

‘Are you going to stay here?’ I snarled at Manala. He grinned. ‘I’m too sore to creep into the lukwurra tonight.’ In spite of myself I started laughing. ‘Me too!’

It suddenly occurred to us that we had survived the Lartna ceremonies and this night we could sleep in peace; in the middle of gathering sticks for the fire, we held our penes in both hands and howled with delight. Just the mention of the word lukwurra revived the mirth and sent us into fresh peals of laughter. The other part of the joke was about Manala and I now being blood brothers – jalbaru. Men of equal status who have passed through the same initiation ceremony owe each other the total allegiance of blood. From now on Manala must back me in any quarrel I became involved in and vice versa. Jalbaru goes a lot deeper than loyalty or lodge brotherhood; it’s a form of ideal marriage.

It couldn’t have happened with a nicer fellow, Manala is not merely a simple savage; amongst many other things he is ‘a verray parfit gentil knight’. If it had been me, stuck in the middle of nowhere with a clown who didn’t know the first thing about hunting, I would have been tempted to lord it a bit – give with the big teach. But Manala doesn’t need to boost a puny little ego by showing off.

Thanks to him our wounds healed quickly. When we wanted a pee he scooped two holes in the sand and put red-hot stones in them out of the fire. The ammonia laden steam takes away all the soreness and helps with the healing. I drank a lot more water than Manala, but at least I caught the habit and always scooped a spare hole, just in case he felt in the mood. We used to laugh about it. A private joke was to suddenly bend down and scoop a couple of holes in the sand.

Just the same we would have starved to death if I had continued hunting with him. Manala advanced about five hundred reasons for our lack of success; the excuses varied from a change of wind to pure bad luck. If he had said: ‘No man could hunt with a clumsy, idiotic bastard like you blundering around behind him,’ it would have been a lot closer to the truth.

Only when I wore out with one chase and watched from the top of a hill did I begin to understand the difference between hunting and chucking spears at kangaroos. A really good spearman has no apparent movement at all; less than a shadow intrudes upon the scene, he becomes a part of the landscape. On this occasion, as the wind changed completely around so did the relative positions of Manala and the wallaby. There were no bushes growing in the gorge, only low clumps of spinifex. The minute hand of a clock had more apparent movement to the eye; yet the distance between hunter and hunted continually closed. Sometimes the wallaby paused in its feeding and looked straight at the motionless shadow. Manala never throws from more than thirty or forty feet and at that range the flight of his spear is a blur and a solid thunk when it hits.

He always threw the meat down near the fire with a shrug of vague apology; intended to give the impression the roo had come bounding from the scrub and suicided on the end of his spear. It never happened to me. I found a yam occasionally, gathered grass seed and pounded it into flour. I knew Manala didn’t approve of me collecting woman’s tucker, although he professed a liking for the gritty little cakes. These were half husked, contained large proportions of inedible seed and equal quantities of stone chips and sand.

The only time I did succeed in providing the meat, it was nothing to be proud of. I wounded an old boomer who was sleeping away his declining years in a bit of a cave; the poor old bastard was probably sick with tick fever in addition to senile decay. Although knocked flying as he came bounding from the entrance, I somehow managed to stick a spear in his side. The old fellow paused, stared at the shaft protruding from his ribs, then shook his head and glared at me sprawled in his doorway, as much as to say: ‘What a friggin character you are.’

I must have followed old man roo half way to Queensland; I didn’t think he would die; I only wanted to get my spear back. It wasn’t stuck in very far and seemed about to fallout at any moment. However the old boomer fell over while going up the side of a steep hill and lay there looking worn out and tired. He wasn’t dead. The big eyes watched me as I pulled the spear out and sat down by his side. I thought about bashing him over the head with a rock, even considered driving the spear through his heart to impress Manala with my accuracy of aim.

I discarded the sordid idea in disgust. The hand-like claws were folded across his chest and there were several bald patches down one side where the giant ticks had burrowed in. We must have been there for over an hour, just staring at one another. He had a line of grizzly grey fur where eyebrows would have been; I was hoping to Christ he still had the strength to get up and hop away, but this was the finish. After a while the old patriarch shuddered, closed his eyes and died.

I didn’t want to eat him, yet I couldn’t leave the carcass there; the foul and rotten murder had to have some justification. It took me hours to get the body back to camp. On the flat stretches I carried him and the rank smell of the fur made me sick. Down hills I dragged him by the tail and the thump of his head banging on the rocks made me even sicker ... Picture of proud Abunda warrior with kill.

Manala was full of praise, repeatedly exclaiming over the size and ignoring the age. He stretched the poor old boomer out full length so we could both admire the size of my kill. When I remarked on the hoary seniority of the victim he launched into a eulogy on the cunning acquired by years and the corresponding skill a hunter requires to match the grey beards.

He kept saying: ‘A bit of real meat for a change! It is hard to hunt the old meat with the full taste!’ Manala has a big heart – all the better to see you with.

I told him the truth. Even the bit about sitting on the hill looking at one another, and me hoping the roo would get up and hop away. Manala is something special in the way of listeners. By use of sign language his replies come underlined with insight; savvy, not matched by speech. Hands flick across his body; a bent finger touches his throat – his chest; the wrists turn fast or slowly outward – inward; the palm rests lightly on his belly -smacks his forehead; a thumb touches the left ear – the right. Manala digs easy; picks up the beat of joy or grief and swings. He doesn’t feel obliged to cap a confidence with some revolting personal anecdote of his own. Neither does he wriggle about and try to stare you down like a God with fleas.

At night we talked about girls, places, incidents and girls. He told me about the stock-camps and walkabouts. As I described going home at nights in a trolley bus, the long rain-washed concrete canyons and the lightning flicks from the pole on the overhead wires were in Manala’s eyes. I told him about the city and hanging around the missions and the markets. There was none of that horse-shit about sitting down ‘alonga great stone mia-mia’. Manala speaks at least eight tribal dialects; English is kindergarten stuff compared with the complications of Warrumunga, ceremonial, sign and actual. Manala understood fluorescent light at the first flick of the middle finger towards the moon and on the second reference gave the simile: ‘Lightning in a bottle.’

“Gibbit baca! Gibbit tea! Poor fellow me! Poor fellow me!” Manala doesn’t fit that bloody stupid gibberish. Not by a long shot he doesn’t! There were about five thousand reasons why I didn’t leave the camp in the bush and make my way back to Table-Tops or Bindora and Manala would be about ninety-five per cent of them. I’m sold on the guy; the Sonnets could have been written for him:
“Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope.”

We were kept in isolation at the six-mile soak for three weeks. At the end of the first period I had improved a bit with the spear but specialised in the heavy killing boomerang belonging to Manala. I reached the stage where I could lop a branch from a tree at sixty feet; the day before Wongali and Dhalja came back I broke a fast moving emu’s neck with it. Manala said it was the best shot he had ever seen; however he always said the nicest thing he could think of – true or not.

He also used the same policy in keeping unpleasant news to himself. He must have known all about the fast approaching Arilta ceremony, yet never mentioned the pending ordeal; he could have shared his fears with me but didn’t. Manala was atua-kurka long before the Arilta ceremony – a fully developed man in anybody’s language.

I thought the crowd of warriors who accompanied Dhalja and Wongali had come to escort us back to camp in style.

‘Looks like the guard of honour,’ I remarked to Manala.

‘They are the tapunga,’ he whispered. ‘May your guts be strong, Irritcha.’

‘Good luck to you too,’ I muttered. Tapunga didn’t mean a thing to me; the nearest word to it in English is table. That’s what they were – the tapunga. The living table!

There were no preliminaries. Three of the men carried a twenty-foot pole and without speaking drove the hair and feather covered sapling into the earth near our campfire. It stood upright and menacing.

‘What’s that for?’ I asked Dhalja, with the sinking feeling crawling back into my guts.

‘It is the Nurtunja,’ he explained. ‘Before Arilta you must embrace the Nurtunja. It will help dull the pain.’

‘The pain of what?’ I yelped with the squeal back in my voice. ‘Aren’t we going back to camp?’

Dhalja frowned and nodded his head. ‘When you have become atua-kurka.’

The painted warriors had formed two rings around us and the inner circle took Dhalja’s nod as a signal to commence. Arilta is a pagan, unbridled version of “ring a ring a roses”. Manala and I were on the inside of the circle, only a few feet from the Nurtunja pole.

I knew the words of this dance! They came from an old English folk song: “Here we go gathering nuts in May, nuts in May, nuts in May.” But this wasn’t May – nor a cold and frosty morning. The flying dust and sweat streaked bodies circling the hairy maypole took the words from their context. Nuts in May! Not chestnuts! My nuts! Mine and Manala’s.

The head shrinkers say castration is a basic childhood fear formed by the Oedipus complex. They may be right, but it can be brought on much more rapidly with the Abunda version of “ring a ring a roses”. The steps of the dance are not complicated, yet few white ballet dancers could perform them; even Pavlova couldn’t slap the flat of her foot high on her buttocks without breaking an ankle. The length of achilles tendon and elongated calf muscle make it easy for all Abunda to slap their behind with their feet and make a noise like pistol shots.

Ritual dance has no relation to puny little stories about dying ducks. Although the Arilta ceremony goes on for hours, there is no interval; no peanuts or lollies. The jarring stamp of the foot is the taproot striking down to suck up the essence of life; the side shuffle is the motion of the earth around the sun. Nothing is backdrop or part of the scenery. The great blazing disc of fire in the sky is of the dance; not a symbol of a vague something but hot and real. Same dance and sun as in the dreamtime. The performers feel the sap rising; they become the sperm of man; formless but holding the knowledge within the seed. The circling is hypnotic and the slapping of foot against thigh or buttock occurs at regular spaced intervals. Their arms demand something from the audience impossible to withhold. The plea ranges from the harsh command of stiff wrists and jutting elbows to an incredibly soft entreaty of outstretched arms. The muscled limbs are of no importance – it’s the belief! The emanation of faith.

There might be a few who could dig Arilta. Certainly not those with the reflection of concrete office blocks in the windows of their skull. Perhaps a few, gaunt, leather coated, flick-knife figures. Pony tailed, angel-eyed revolters, who have renounced the victory and the dry sealed tomb of urban womb ... They might dance and sway, leap and pray ... here we go gathering nuts in May, guts to pray, nuts in May ... It’s like that.

The time a quarter revolution of the earth ... the sun standing directly above the Nurtunja pole ... casting no shadow ... boring down through the top of my head ... piercing the soles of my feet. While transfixed by a red hot rod; pinned to the hub of a revolving wheel, the dance ended. My arms were stretched out and I was led up to the Nurtunja pole until chest and face were pressed against it. I just stared at the blood soaked binding of hair and feathers; if it gave me strength or spiritual benefit, I was not aware of the change. All I could think of was the amount of hair the women must have given to wind the pole from top to bottom.

Dhalja shouted: ‘Tapunga!’

Eight men threw themselves flat on the ground, another eight piled on top of them and then another and another. They formed a slab of flesh four feet high. A few arms dangled down the side of the table and Wongali walked around tucking them in and tidily straightening heads and legs. The warriors lay on their stomachs and the row of buttocks in the top layer made a sweaty, curved hump in the centre of the table.

The men holding our wrists suddenly bent down and grasped our ankles in their free hands. In one heave Manala and I were thrown across the Tapunga and the four Myalls sprang up after us. They sat on our chests and legs. The slippery mound of buttocks was in the centre of my back and the sun glared straight down in a blinding dazzle. Once again my penis was grasped and the urethra put on the stretch. This time the pain was so intense a wave of black shock seemed to precede the actual searing hurt. For some reason – probably the glare in my eyes – I had the distinct sensation of my body being raised up and actually touching the rolling fire of the sun. The impression of elevation to a higher plane was blanketed in shock; but definite and real. It could only have lasted a few seconds; a sick numbness crept up my body and the mound of flesh beneath me seemed to heave and rock.

When I came to only Dhalja and Manala were there, even the Nurtunja had gone. Manala and I were lying with our backs against a tree and shields between our legs. I took one look at the pool between my own legs and damn near passed out again, the shield was more than half full of blood. The urethra had been cut from below. From the tip to a point about an inch and a half along the meatus the channel had been slit wide open.

Dhalja said: ‘You are now atua-kurka and have no more initiations to fear.’

Sick as I was the vague feeling of elevation had not disappeared. I couldn’t help notice the pride in Dhalja’s voice as he pronounced my warrior status; trying to sit up and see what an atua-kurka felt like was a mistake. The raw wound touched the edge of the shield and I flaked out again.

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10: Atua-Kurka

Before Dhalja left he warned us to lie flat on our backs when we slept, or else our penes would grow crooked. We spent most of the inital time spread out in the sand near the soak; under the shade of a gum that dripped its sticky sap all over us. The miseries kept us staked down like insect specimens with pins through the guts.

People with a great love for explanation have advanced countless reasons why tribesmen submit to the Arilta ceremony. They say: “It is a practice begun in the mists of ancient time and the meaning has been lost.” “It is an attempt by men to create the mystic qualities of the women’s menstrual periods within their own bodies.” The most popular theory is that sub-incision causes sterility and the cutting is to reduce tribal numbers in times of famine.

With the tribes who drill a hole in the base of the penis and prevent the healing wound from knitting with the insertion of a small stick, this may be so. They have to hold a finger over the hole before they can cause conception. However if the true method of sub-incision caused sterility it would not be a form of birth control but a means of mass suicide. No tribesman is allowed to marry until he is atua-kurka; all Abunda fathers have been sub-incised.

There is no great mystery about it. The splitting of the head causes a marked lateral expansion of the erect penis. Both sides of the cut heal but do not knit together; the channel remains open. Manala said the heroes of the dreamtime probably began Arilta because they wanted to enjoy coition more fully.

He added: ‘Most women will have nothing to do with a man who has not been sub-incised. More so if they have already slept with an atua-kurka.’

I gathered the practice of Arilta is heartily approved by Abunda women; even if the odd one – like Beeja’s second wife – feels youth still has some advantages over age.

Manala smoked us. We squatted over little fires and he dropped handfuls of green leaves onto the coals; until the soreness went away and our lower extremities took on the coppery hue of dried salmon. Three or four times a day we were reminded of our atua-kurka status, for the wide open channel does not permit a standing posture during micturition. We now had to squat to pee – as all warriors do.

It was a time of plenty. Every day two or three young men arrived with meat, cakes, corms, fish and all the luxuries the camp could provide. Our servants gathered sticks and wood and left the fire ready for the night, without speaking to us at all. They laughed and talked amongst themselves, but if forced to ask or tell us something, used sign language. Manala said in the old days boys undergoing initiation were not allowed to speak for two years. Even when Bareega and Isaac turned up as full atua-kurka, they just grinned, put the food down and walked away. The healing period is like being in a convent or monastery under vows of silence – the reason for the discipline is much the same.

After a week or so, lying around doing nothing started to get monotonous. Besides a thick scab had formed and a good deal of the pain gone; providing we were extremely careful.

Manala showed me how to make string out of bark fibre by rolling it against the thigh and spinning the ends together with a scratching, flicking motion of the forefinger. I demonstrated how to plait the string and splice the plaits into broad bands. We worked for days on end making armlets and headbands. It was necessary to lie with our arms in the pool to shrink the bands on tight and make the muscles bulge out; also difficult, because we still had to lie on our backs. But with time and patience we had the best arm and headbands in the tribe; Myall included.

Having begun the wardrobe we progressed to anklets. The trouble here was in first of all finding suitable feathers for the covering and then obtaining a glue which would stick them to the plaited underband. It turned out to be an easy project. One of the Myall boys brought us a handful of hawk feathers and we interspersed these with the pink breast down of a galah that came to visit. The resinous gum of our tree shelter was not only on hand; we were sitting in it.

I had no intention of wearing any of this stuff in public, but Manala insisted I dress up to let him judge the effect. It was the same with the nose-bone. He ground and polished two curved femur bones from the forepaws of a kangaroo, until they shone like milky glass. Manala put his in with no trouble at all, for his mother had pierced the septum years before. I wasn’t sure if mine had been done or not. After fiddling about with the bone and lightly prodding, I came to the conclusion if my snozzle ever did have a hole it must have long since healed over.

Manala said: ‘Let me see.’ He gently probed with a sliver of lancewood, then with a quick slap of the open palm drove it clean through the septum. The rush of tears to my eyes blinded me and I thoroughly cursed him as I gingerly tried to pull it out.

‘Leave it for a couple of days,’ Manala advised. ‘The pain will be gone and it will come out easy.’

He was right; but leaving the stick in stopped the septum from knitting. The hole was permanent.

This time we were over six weeks at the soak before the scabs fell away and Dhalja judged the healing process to be completed. I don’t know why, but we were busting our guts to get back to camp; I suppose the reason was obvious, yet couldn’t be admitted, even to ourselves. When Dhalja said we would be taken back on the following day, both of us behaved like a couple of excited kids. Most of the night was spent sitting by the fire, laughing and talking our heads off.

Every man in both tribes came to escort us in. The horde started yelling excited greetings while they were still a thousand yards off; an animated thrill of pure delight seemed to precede them. In seconds we were the centre of a milling, boisterous mob; every man trying to shout his individual congratulations above the din. They were just as excited as we were that the ordeal was over. It was Welcome Home, Christmas, and Happy Birthday all rolled into one.

The return to the Alchilpa was slow going for a while, as those who had missed hugging us in the initial scramble, now insisted on taking a turn. A good many painted warriors had tears in their eyes as we were pressed to hairy chests; all named fraternal or actual relationship in the words of greeting. A broad shouldered Myall with a heavy beard held me by the arms.

‘Walumba is happy his cousin Irritcha has become a man,’ he said. I never felt so intensely excited and full of kick in all my life.

We took a wide circular route to approach the gorge from the south and avoid the cliffs. A halt was made about a quarter of a mile from the Alchilpa and Manala and I were decorated in all our finery. Somebody produced a tin of goanna fat and this was rubbed in until our bodies shone like black marble. Red ochre stripes were drawn from shoulders to thighs and connected across the chest by looping bands of white. Head and armbands were adjusted with meticulous care. Dhalja produced some rabbit tails and these were strung from the anklets and armbands like bobbins. Nose bones were inserted and there didn’t seem to be any question whether I would wear one or not – even in my mind. I felt nothing but exalted pride in being atua-kurka, eagle-hawk Abunda.

The final touches to our decorations were a gift of pubic tassels. Gaily festooned rings of small bright feathers, about an inch and a half in diameter. They are attached to the pubic hair by fine threads; a man who wears the pubic tassel is cock-of- the-walk.

When all was ready Manala and I stood tall. Gripping our spears and woomeras, our chests puffed out while trying to maintain as much aloof dignity as the excitement would permit. We were carefully inspected from head to toe, most of the men felt obliged to tug at our armlets and make some minute adjustment. Dhalja then formally presented me with a beautiful mulga shield, light as a feather, hard as steel, carved and painted; decorated with eagle claws at both ends of the oval. Manala got one too and his had the claws of a kangaroo to fit his totem. A fraternal brother gave me a heavy killing boomerang, also of mulga wood, but ground and polished with charcoal to a black lustre.

I didn’t need a mirror. Just one glance at Manala as we led the party towards the Alchilpa was assurance enough. I could see the tips of my nose-bone and the gleam of it below my eyes added to the fierce pride.

The men at our back began to chant in swelling chorus:
‘Chuck-ur Kukerai Yaa! L’!
Yaama Kank-waa!
Inkwurkna Inkwurkna Atna!’

The women heard the chant and poured from the camp in a concerted, screaming mass. If the men had appeared excited to see us the women were delirious with joy. They were oiled and painted with stripes of white ochre in honour of the occasion. Girls and young women were prominent in the forefront of the group.

The two parties stopped some three hundred yards apart and the women began to dance. First it was just a mild stamp, advance and retreat in line. Then older women squatted and began the wailing singsong which accompanies the dance of the Unthrippa. Clap-sticks began to increase the beat, faster and ever faster until the dance was a wild frenzy of tossing limbs, jerking bodies, sweat and dust.

At the height of the dance two young women broke from the group and ran towards us. I knew there were two, but I saw only one. She ran like a tigress, the fluid motion hardly moving her taut breasts, yet covering the ground with incredible speed. A creamy, off-white dingo loped at her side; they were magnificent animals – both of them.

She stopped no more than ten feet away and stood utterly still, balanced on the balls of her feet. Only the faint heaving of her chest marked the run, the dog sat watching with adoring eyes. Then she began to really dance; a slow sinuous rhythm, depending almost entirely on muscle control, the row of cicatrix scars above her breasts moved with a wavelike motion. Separate muscle spasm travelled from calf to thigh; at the same time painted lines across her narrow waist began to flicker then intertwine like snakes. The weaving sway of the beautiful body increased in tempo; full lips parted in a half smile and the sensuous dreaming eyes closed. Only the prehensile ability of tribal women allows them to perform the last part of the dance of the Unthrippa. The weaving body becomes snake like. Breasts turn in half arcs and the muscles of the lower abdomen begin to contract and expand in a dance so frantically sexual it stops the breath. Men go berserk and kill under the spell of the Unthrippa.

Suddenly the girl wheeled around and ran back to the other women; Dhalja shoved me in the back, but I didn’t need pushing. For the first hundred yards I took off and flew. Then I felt the pace automatically change to match Manala’s half dance, half strut. As we came prancing in the women threw tufts of rat tails at our shields. Manala hurled his boomerang high in the air towards the camp of his mother in the sky – now she would know he was a man and had left her campfire forever.

I could see my woman standing a little in front of the main group. The agony of her barbaric teasing throbbed and ached in guts and testicles; my hand tightened on the boomerang and lifted it until the flat curve was aimed straight at her throat. She saw the threat and her shoulders hunched in disdain; the neck muscles stood out as she threw her head back. Illuta’s contemptuous submission changed my mood to sheer exultation. With a resounding yell I put every ounce of frustrated energy into the throw; the balance and flight of the beautiful Myall boomerang took it high over the heads of the women in a whispering, flashing arc. It clipped the top off a slender gum and went on to disappear over the cliff. From every throat came a guttural: ‘Ahee Ah!’

I strutted forward, lifting my feet high to set the anklet rabbit tails bobbing. Stopped in front of Illuta and hit her across the head with the flat of my hand. She swayed but didn’t go down; one hand still held the snarling dog by the ruff of the neck. Manala’s fist was closed and his woman was knocked cold for a few seconds.

We turned and stalked off. Our brides, surrounded by weeping, babbling girlfriends and relatives, hastily scrambled for dilly-bags and digging sticks. They fell in some twenty respectful paces behind their new lords and masters.

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Intro | Part One.1 | Part One.2 | Part Two | Title