Corroboree (58 page)

‘If this is the end of our people; if we are betrayed even by the spirits; then so be it. We will fight to the very end of our existence, and that is the word that you can carry back with you to Ngurunderi.'

Winja translated a little of this, but very perfunctorily.
Winja himself believed that the fight against the white man was already lost; and that Yonguldye was trying to live in a world which had long ago come to an end. He also respected Eyre, and was anxious not to upset him by saying anything slighting about white people, or (if he did happen to be a spirit) about spirits.

But Eyre approached Yonguldye, trying hard not to look down at his terrible self-inflicted wounds, close enough to shake hands with him, and said, ‘You are a proud and terrible man. You are a great wizard and a great chief. The greatest of all Mabarn Men.'

Yonguldye stared at him with those dark, unreadable eyes, and said nothing. Out of his shirt pocket, Eyre produced the mana stone which had been given to him by the Aborigine warriors on Hindley Street. With considerable ceremony, he held it out on the open palm of his hand, and offered it to Yonguldye.

‘Your people gave me this totem. Now it is imbued with my magic. Let it now be your totem, as a gift from me. I cannot give you any more.'

Yonguldye swayed. The blood on his body had now begun to congeal; and Eyre could see that the cuts, although gory, were not fatally deep. They had not been an attempt at suicide. Rather, they had been meant as a gesture that Yonguldye could inflict on himself greater pain than anything that Eyre could force him to suffer; that he was master of his own fate.

Eyre continued to hold out the mana stone, and said, ‘Please.'

Yonguldye took the stone, and held it up between finger and thumb, turning it over, and examining it, although at the same time never letting his eyes stray very far away from Eyre. At last he slipped the stone into a small bag he was carrying around his waist, and bowed his head.

‘The future has now been altered,' he said. Winja translated this as, ‘from tomorrow, all the days will not be the shape they were expected to be.' Yonguldye went on, ‘There will be storms. This has been foretold. There will
be rain in places where there has never been rain before. The moons which live beyond the horizon will appear whole; instead of being cut up into stars by the giant who watches over them; and they will circle the world. But what these days will hold for my people, that is uncertain. The story did not happen as it was meant to happen. Therefore, everything will be different.'

Eyre realised that in his anger and his humiliation, Yonguldye was trying to rationalise what had happened. He could not bring himself to believe that Eyre was not the expected
djanga
after all; because when would a white-faced man ever again cause the death of an Aborigine boy, and come journeying through the outback looking for absolution as Eyre had? Not for years, perhaps not ever, whereas Yonguldye badly needed to believe that his people would learn the magic knowledge of the white people now, and have the strength and the knowledge to stand up for what they believed to be rightfully theirs.

He was still furious at Eyre; still bitter and grieved about the men who had died; but in spite of his anger he had to accept his defeat at the hands of the
djanga
, or else he would be unable to believe in the
djanga
at all, and that would mean despair.

‘I will go now,' he said to Eyre, with terrifying gravity; and still bleeding he turned and beckoned to his warriors. The sand beneath his feet was speckled dark with blood. But without any further ceremony, he limped away towards the east, under the hot mid-afternoon sun. Neither he nor his warriors looked back; and none of them made any attempt either to pick up their weapons or to bury their dead. Let the dead bury their dead. Let the
djanga
take the responsibility for the havoc he had wrought.

Ningina came hobbling up. The spear-wound in his thigh was now wound tightly with bloodstained hide. He shaded his eyes and watched the wobbling black figures of Yonguldye and his warriors grow steadily smaller.

‘You should have killed that medicine-man,' he said. ‘You would have been a great hero.'

‘No,' said Eyre. ‘This is not a time for heroes.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Eyre took off his hat. Behind him, there was the
pick-pick-pick
of digging-sticks, as Winja's people dug graves for their dead enemies. It was 109 degrees, out here on the treeless plain called Bunda Bunda, and it looked as if the heat had liquefied the whole world. A molten blue sky, and a desert that rippled like the surface of a muddy lake. Through the liquidness, Yonguldye and his men walked and walked and walked, heading towards a new destiny; and leaving littered behind them the remains of their very last dream.

They journeyed west through the desert, following the kangaroo. Week after week, under skies that were devastatingly blue, living on charred meat and half-cooked lizards and whatever water they were able to suck out of the mud.

Eyre discarded his soiled and tattered shirt; and his back reddened and peeled and burned and then tanned as dark as wood. He was surprised to see, one morning, the birth of an Aborigine baby, slithering out of its mother's vulva as pale as a white baby; and he realised then how close to the European races the Aborigines were. Just because they had migrated to this strange desert continent, millions of years ago, and just because they had adapted to heat and drought, and a nomadic way of life, that had not denied
them their ancestry, nor their intelligence, nor their racial heritage.

Eyre, as he rode along with them, thought of the words that Captain Cook had written, only seventy years ago, when he had tried to describe the natives of ‘New-Holland' to his English readers:

They may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far happier than we Europeans. The Earth and the sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life, they covet not Magnificent Houses, Household-stuff &c, they live in a warm and fine Climate and so they have very little need of Clothing, for many to whom we gave Cloth left it carelessly upon the Sea beach and in the woods as a thing they had no manner of use for. They think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and that they have no superfluities.

For Eyre, these weeks of journeying across the land of Bunda Bunda with Winja and his people was like an extraordinary but revelatory dream. He hardly ever thought about Captain Sturt, or Christopher, or even of Charlotte. He was completely preoccupied with hunting kangaroo, with helping to skin and roast whatever game they could find; with digging for water and building fires. After five weeks, he went naked, and tied his trousers around his neck to protect his shoulders from the sun. There seemed to be very little point in being the only dressed-up man in a friendly company of people without clothes. Winja's women laughed openly at his white bottom; until Winja shouted at them, and threatened to prod them with his spear. Winja still thought a great deal of Eyre; especially after the way he had defeated Yonguldye; and he would not have him insulted.

Eyre and Minil grew closer all the time; for both of them were discovering the simple truth of survival in the outback; and at the same time the complicated truth of
Aborigine beliefs. A love developed between them that no longer required explanations or understanding. It consisted of touches, and close embraces, and looks, and kisses, and of holding each other in the night, when the moon was high and the wind was freezing cold. Sometimes it expressed itself in affectionate silence, when they rode together during the day, with their last solitary packhorse following obediently behind them. Two naked people, a man with a wide-brimmed hat and a girl with a tight kangaroo-skin headband and wild black hair, on horses, on the hottest of all imaginable days. At other times, it expressed itself in violent lovemaking; when Eyre would force Minil on to her back and raise her legs high in the air and lance her and lance her deep into her vagina until she tore at his hair and screamed out loud, regardless of who could hear or who could see.

It was a life of incendiary passion and unreal tranquillity; when the days and the weeks no longer mattered, and were no longer counted; when Eyre rediscovered his basic thirsts and his fundamental hungers, his throat and his stomach and his penis; but with a force and a dignity that gave new meaning to everything he felt. Nothing could be cruder than to have to squat in the sand, in front of the girl you loved and the people you knew, and excrete. But nothing could be more spiritual than to sit with them around their various wind-blown fires; just before the sun had set across the plain; and offer prayers to the greater Gods who had created the world, and all the abundance that it could offer.

They reached the coast one morning in March, on a cool and breezy day when Eyre had decided to put on his shirt; although he still wore his trousers tied around his waist. They came across it quite suddenly. One minute they were walking through thick mallee scrub; the next they were standing on the edge of a cliff overlooking the shore.

After so many months traversing the desert, Eyre was peculiarly moved by the sight of the sea. He climbed slowly down from his horse, and walked to the very edge
of the cliff, and looked down at the tumbling, seething surf as if he had never seen anything like it before. Winja stood a little way off, watching him with quiet paternalism, as if he in his turn had been waiting for this moment, and expecting what Eyre's feelings would be. Minil came up, too, and stayed close to Eyre, holding his arm, and for a long time they watched the long curve of the ocean, from east to west, and the gulls which dived and screeched for Goolwa cockles.

Some of Winja's men clambered down to the shore, where they found a dead pelican lying among the rocks, its beak rising and falling in the tide. Whooping, they brought it up to the clifftop, and hacked it open, so that they could drag out its entrails. Tonight, the families would all share a treat: pelican's intestines filled with heated fat. Eyre watched them cutting open the bird, and the white feathers flying in the wind, and smiled.

‘You have become one of us,' said Winja, quietly.

‘No,' said Eyre. ‘I can never become one of you. I only wish that I could. Even poor Joolonga could never become one of you; not again. I have to go on; to finish this journey. I have learned now that God wills it, whoever God may be.'

‘God is in your heart,' said Winja.

Eyre took Winja's hand, and squeezed it hard. ‘God is in you, Winja. God is in all of us. That's what my father used to say, and it's true.'

The sea surged and splashed below them. Far away, beyond the ocean, lay Antarctica. Behind them stretched the hot and desolate land called Bunda Bunda. Eyre felt as if he had arrived at last at the conjunction of the Lord's hugest and most impressive creations. This was not the place where He had run out of ideas. This was the place where He had foregone conventional beauty in search of truth, and found it. It was apposite that it had cost Eyre such suffering to reach this place; because no truth could be reached without suffering. Eyre got down on his knees, and closed his eyes, and while Minil laid her hand on his
shoulder, he repeated the words of Psalm 86. ‘Give ear, O Lord, to my prayer; and give heed to the voice of my supplications! Teach me Thy way, O Lord; I will walk in Thy truth. Arrogant men have risen up against me, and a band of violent men have sought my life. But Thou, O Lord, art a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abundant in loving kindness and truth.'

That afternoon, on the beach, while the women baked cockles in the sand, and the men fished, Eyre baptised Winja and Ningina in the foam; and there was singing and stick-clapping, and the fires were lit for a family corroboree.

Winja said, as they sat around the fire eating the cockles, ‘Tonight we must begin your
engwura
, Eyre. You have become one of us; but you are still an
utyana
, an uninitiated youth. Your
engwura
is your initiation ceremony. You must be a man, not only among the white-faces, but among the black-faces.'

Eyre scooped another cockle out of its shell. ‘Can't we leave it until tomorrow? It hurts, doesn't it?'

‘What is pain?' asked Winja.

‘Pain is when your body hurts,' Eyre answered him, tartly.

Winja pressed both hands against his head. ‘Your body will hurt, but inside your head you will feel nothing but peace.'

Eyre frowned, and Ningina laughed. Eyre turned to him crossly, and said, ‘I suppose
you
weren't nervous, when you were about to be initiated?'

‘I was shaking!' laughed Ningina. Everyone around the fire joined in, and some of them threw pebbles at Eyre and cried, ‘
Utyana! Utyana
!'

Eyre said to Winja, ‘Are you seriously inviting me to be initiated?'

Winja nodded. ‘Seriously. You are one of us. It was Baiame's will that we met you in the desert.'

Eyre glanced at Minil. Minil looked remarkably pretty tonight, with her headband, and her patterned
buka
drawn
over her shoulders, and a string of red-painted beads decorating her plump bare breasts. He felt that she had found contentment now: with an Aborigine family to satisfy her need for freedom, and to get back among her own people; but with Eyre to love her and to give her the European sophistication which Winja's people lacked. He felt regretful in a way that she had found such contentment, because it could never last. Winja and his families would have to be on their way, and Eyre would have to return to Adelaide; and where would that leave Minil? Eyre could sense the pain that would inevitably end their relationship; he could sense it already, now that he was down by the sea, and closer to civilisation. He just hoped that it would not be so great that neither of them could bear it.