Authors: Keneally Thomas
That night Prim stayed on by the students’ fire, which Auger had managed to make the centre of his social evening conversations. Noel Yangdandu and his tall cousins in their cowboy shirts and jeans talked in jagged, laconic English about working on cattle stations from Oodnadatta to the Roper River and west to Halls Creek. Their forebears had seen their first horse only two or at most three generations ago, but these fellows all looked like riders. The students asked about where this and that man’s country was. Men pointed into the night – north, south, east, west, into the ancestor-graced darkness. One by one though, the Burranghyatti men rose and vanished. The betrothed graduate students sneaked off to their tent to crack a bottle of wine they had smuggled into this officially dry reservation. Prim’s tent-mate staggered off yawning. Finally, only Prim and Auger were left before the dying fire.
They had nothing to say for a few minutes. He placed his hand on her
wrist and said, ‘Oh Prim.’ She was delighted. She had reduced him from the polysyllabic cosmos he inhabited in the courtroom to just two syllables.
How does one woman betray another? By the superior authority of her desire. Its claims are greater than the mere retentiveness of wives. In a camp that seemed to her blind to their movements, Auger put his arm around Prim’s shoulders and walked with her to his tent. Tearing at her clothes, laying his lips to her bared shoulder, he mentioned that there was a beautiful, star-struck place along Turner Creek that would be a better place for all this, but the evening cold was against it. ‘I’ll take you there one day,’ he told her.
So occurred Prim’s first experience of berserk, multiple, howling, wakeful, engrossed, transcendent sex. For the first time she knew that disabling sense of mutual congratulation which lovers bestow on each other once the summit is achieved. The only two mountain climbers in the world, ready to descend into a brief saddle of contentment before hauling each other skywards again!
She dragged herself back to her tent at 1 a.m., late enough to provoke talk, early enough to make talk not quite credible. In fact, in the drunken vanity of the hour she wanted her fellow graduate students to be at the one time ignorant and amazed.
On her return to Sydney, her addiction to Auger seemed more substantial than the known world, than the literal streams of traffic on Missenden and Parramatta Roads, whose purpose was purely to hem in Auger’s scholarship at the University of Sydney. Auger had early told her that his marriage was loveless, and the mistake of his life. In loving Prim, he said, he was liberating his wife from lovelessness too. Again, this observation came to Prim as if it were extremely novel, rhetoric without pedigree, not just a stock cliché of affairs between eminent older men and worshipful disciples. His wife was an emotional manipulator, he told Prim. Her possessiveness had very nearly destroyed him, and his only solace had been his work. But now he went into his unhealthy contests with his wife arrayed and armoured in Prim’s light. ‘Let me tell you, Prim, there’s nothing out in Gharrademu to compare with the perils in desert places of the heart, the waterless stretches.’ His wife had delayed having children specifically because of their unhappiness, but he said he wanted children of Prim.
At the time, Prim and her sister were renting another place in Redfern, this time a dim nineteenth-century worker’s cottage, into whose stairwell
a light shaft had been cut to give the place a sunnier, more modern air. It was all too convenient that it should become the chief place of assignation for herself and Auger.
Hence Dimp got to meet Auger. Dimp, who was worldlier, who was not only beautiful but had robustness and an earthy common sense in matters of the heart, and had once or twice been where Prim now was, was at the moment there again with Brendan D’Arcy. And though Dimp frowned a great deal about Prim’s affair while making coffee for herself, her sister, the visiting Professor Auger, she said little. But there was ultimately a fight in which Prim, who wanted the entire visible world to be engorged with her own passion, attacked Dimp for not liking Robert Auger.
‘I just don’t believe what he tells you about his marriage,’ said Dimp. ‘I’ve heard that sort of guff before.’
When the affair began, Prim had thought that it would be at most weeks before the Auger’s avowedly failed marriage was abandoned. She was as yet innocent of the potency of a failed marriage over a triumphant affair. After four months, another journey to Central Australia together, a weekend of hiking in the Hunter Valley, a reconnaissance of an embattled Aboriginal settlement in Queensland, Dr/Mrs Auger had still not been told. His wife was unhappy in a vague sense, suspicious, Auger said, and would prove indifferent and scornful when she knew. He was waiting for the right moment to tell her that Primrose Bettany was willing to free her from her sour possessiveness. ‘I have to wait until she’s a little more stable,’ he told Prim. She would be told once he was satisfied she had a grip on herself.
At first Prim followed an instinct that she must not be insistent. A further month passed and she became anxious. Another one, and she decided to take up the duty of stridency, and spent part of her time hating herself for asking the same question over and over, and the rest hating Auger and his wife. This was a time of angry, less languorous penetrations of her body. ‘There you are, you bitch,’ said Auger one day on her bed, conceding her his angry seed.
She had already been talking for some time to him about her dissertation: on the Burranghyatti women, not in terms of their traditional life but in their semi-reservationised state. Those women who were forced to leave the hearing tent during crucial male evidence – what of them? Had they possessed greater parity of ritual power and authority in their traditional desert life than male anthropologists had suspected? Or was it the
crisis of coming in from the desert to the reservation which had diminished the male elders and given the women a new authority? Auger had referred Prim to the only other literature then available in this area. A dazzling article, he said, written in the seventies by a professor from the University of Minnesota, Dr Joyce Ackland. His praise for the material was spacious enough to make Prim faintly jealous, until Auger produced a conference program in which photographs of those who delivered the papers appeared, and Prim was despicably pleased to find Professor Ackland homely and nearing sixty.
Ackland, in any case, had written on the subject more from a traditional anthropological point of view. The thesis of her article was that the provision of stored and bore water via taps had altered the balance between men and water. It had taken urgency out of male rites designed to ensure the recurrence of water, the ceremonial maintaining of water sources in the desert being up until then substantially men’s business. For it was the women who now turned on the reservation taps and fetched the water in jugs and pots from stand pipes. Or so Ackland’s proposition went.
But Auger, though he admired Ackland’s article, wondered whether the women’s social powers had been increased not by tap water but by the way men succumbed to disorientation, bad diet, gaol and alcoholism. He showed Prim another article, by a West Australian academic – another elderly woman – who argued that, in their traditional life, women had had significant ritual input into maintaining water holes. Their new familiarity with taps, banal as such water might seem but ever a miraculous mother in the desert, was not a supplanting of the men but a continuation of female powers possessed before the reservation was put in place.
So Prim was to write a dissertation on both views and either reinforce one over the other, or reach a new synthesis of both. On a minute research grant, she spent two blistering months interviewing two middle-aged desert women, the Pidanu sisters, who had taken, at their christening by Lutheran missionaries in the 1960s, the names Betty and Dottie. She sat with them by the hour, playing gin rummy before, out of politeness, out of pure kindness, they took her, sometimes together, sometimes separately, to some local women’s sites within hiking distance. At a cave beyond Mount Bavaria, the sisters each told her, sundry totemic beast-men, birdmen, lizard-children, disguising themselves as infants, persuaded a female ancestor, Kabiddi, to spill her milk for the convenience and succour of humankind.
Before she could attend any women’s rites associated with this and other mysteries, Prim was privileged to find herself led off at dusk to a low escarpment near Turner Creek where, with white clay on her forehead and painful smoke from eucalyptus boughs in her eyes – the women smoking her ignorance out of her – she was admitted to the first, infant version of initiation. Great mysteries awaited her; she was certain of what would be a limitless, career-long association with these women, their aunts, daughters, nieces. She was a modern anthropologist, not looking at them through a long lens, but their intimate. For she was interested in all that awaited them – the solar-powered telephone, the satellite television – and not simply in the exotic aspects of where they had been in their previous, nomadic existence. And she would as a reward be one of those scholars who were named referentially,
reverentially
, in journals. ‘Bettany’s pioneering work with the Burranghyatti women in the Mount Bavaria region …’ She would, of course, be argued with by later scholars on the scene, but her authority would supersede theirs. And in the tent courts, or the courts convened in some community hall in remoter Australia, she would serve the Burranghyatti people eloquently when they made their claims.
Returned to Sydney, Prim wrote a confident and combative dissertation – a critique both of Ackland and of the other scholar, Judith Verner – studded with footnotes from Strehlow to Tindale to Auger. Auger, who was a computer whiz, introduced her to the then fresh wonder of word processing and what it could do for a dissertation. ‘I don’t know how anything got written before the PC,’ he told her.
Her writing ran parallel to her affair, which, though by now it made her as much miserable as ecstatic, she saw as her destiny. She entered a calm but firm phase of her discourse with Auger on the subject of what she called ‘an honest confrontation’ with his wife. The more Prim argued, and the more he delayed, the more a certain sort of confidence grew in her, something hollow, stale, yet somehow rampant and addictive. She became the demanding party in sex, he the frightened one who wanted to retreat to a few well-tried options. It was love in a kind of war. She was strangely delighted when Auger, gushing into her, yelled like an angry peon delivered of a load. ‘Oh Christ,’ he would say, ‘that’s it, that’s it.’ His voice seemed also to threaten that she might have earned other, fiercer degradations, and these would be delivered in time. It was amazing to her how long she was willing to live like this, in a kind of unresolved tranquillity.
Her dissertation done, she gave the computer disk and one of two copies she had printed from it to Auger’s office. Then she applied to be admitted to the doctoral program at Sydney. Her fellow graduates, she was vaguely aware, nodded and said, ‘Of course, of bloody course.’ For they were applying to other places, to the University of Western Australia, to Northwestern or UCLA or Constanz or Tubingen. But they understood why she wanted to stay with Auger. After the event she would wonder at their casual good humour when more malice was justified.
Auger’s office, near the university’s renowned neo-Gothic quadrangle, was crowded with paintings of Central Australian dreamings from a range of desert cultures, carved birds from Arnhem Land decorated in the ‘X-ray’ style which celebrated the creatures’ chief internal organs, and a spectacular bone casing with a shark painted on it. When she’d first visited it as an undergraduate, the office had impressed Prim as a sort of druid’s cave, imbued with all that saved Australia, in her eyes, from its own torpor: the romance of the Aboriginal cosmology.
Now she was due to visit it because there was a perfunctory note from Auger in her mailbox, a note without the intimacy of an envelope. It asked her to visit his office any time from three onwards.
So she went. In this mood she was more ready to be robust, jolly, bossy with him than to be afraid at his unaccustomed mode of summons. When she went in there was a kind of shyness in Auger as he came around his desk, held her almost perfunctorily by the shoulders and kissed her cheek.
‘I know what all this means,’ she said, thinking he was about to tell her she had not been accepted into the doctoral program. He was about to tell her that there had been some fierce doctoral committee argument about her that he had lost.
He asked her to sit and they faced each other like strangers on opposite sides of the desk. ‘Prim, listen. There’s a problem with your dissertation,’ he said at last. Her expectations fell another notch. Her Master’s would be delayed.
He explained he had read her dissertation first and was concerned, ‘for your sake as much as anyone’s’. So he passed it on to Professor Rabin, because he wanted ‘a more detached view’.
Prim would ever after remember precisely the way he looked out, levelly but with a small, painful, magisterial squint into the bright leafy trees across the lane, waving above rowdy students on their way to
alfresco study in the Holme courtyard. She had a sudden sense that he was going to cast her off.
‘So, you’re going to send me for another spin around the block,’ she said, and tried to laugh.
‘Well, you see, I just wish I could.’
‘Come on, Robert. Don’t
wish
things. Tell me.’
He looked at her, his eyes not quite engaging, his face pale.
‘Prim, it looks like you’ve put yourself outside my help.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I find undigested lumps of Verner and Ackland in the middle of your dissertation. I mean, we all draw on each other in a way, but we’re supposed to go through a process of making the scholarship our own and finding our own voice.’
Prim said, ‘That’s crazy. I referred to Ackland mainly to challenge some of her conclusions.’
Auger passed her dissertation. ‘Why don’t you look at page 25 from the paragraph beginning “On the basis of this evidence …”’