The Clay Dreaming (42 page)

In almost any public forum, the native inhabitants of New Zealand were generally equated with the Aborigines of Australia: the Admiralty clerk, for one, appeared to make of them no distinction. Sarah could scarcely admit to understanding Aboriginal behaviours, and yet had felt compelled to study the Maori as encountered by Joseph Druce, who had lived among them, as one of them.

The
Pakeha
Maori
were said to live in a half-savage state, or savage-and-a-half state, being far greater savages than the natives themselves. This, according to a man who should know: ‘The New Zealanders,’ Maning had written, ‘will not be insulted with impunity, nor treated as men without understanding; but will resent, to the utmost of their power, any injury attempted against them.’

In truth, the islanders shared more in common with their European invaders than did either race with the Australian Aborigine.

On the few occasions where she found the two native races held up in direct comparison, what seemed most immediately obvious were the differences between them. The Maori were quite unlike the native Australians. They dwelt in hilltop forts, called
hippah
, and cultivated the surrounding farmlands. A warlike race, they lived in a state of constant feud with their neighbours. They would contest, and to the victor the spoils, the defeated tribe surrendering their land and property to be enslaved – or worse. The Maori were certified 
cannibals. The last words of a dying chief at Hokianga, North Island, were reputed to be, ‘How sweet is man’s flesh!’

She had seen Brippoki eat some revolting things, but surely this could not be true of either him or his people.

The natives of New Zealand recognised the concept of leadership: they were ruled by tribal chieftains, their ‘
rangatira
’ – men like Te Pahi.

It was said that Te Pahi, on his visits to see the white governors in Sydney, had come into a good deal of contact with the Aborigines of Australia. He held them in a contempt as great as they had respect for him and his kind, if not an outright fear of them (one of Te Pahi’s sons had menaced an Aboriginal group with his spear, and every last one of them fled). Witnessing their displays of weaponry, he had approved the boomerang, but condemned their use of a parrying shield. He judged the pace of their combat ‘too slow’. All in all, the Maori warrior chieftain had condescended to the Aborigine character.

Only after some half an hour’s reading had it even occurred to Sarah that Te Pahi was one and the same man as Druce’s father-in-law, Tippahee, the
so-called
’king of New Zealand’.

It seemed telling that, for a fellow living in Australia a goodly portion of years, Druce not once made the slightest reference to its natives, nor even his least association with them.

Sarah did not have to try so very hard to imagine what it must be like, to be so thoroughly disregarded.

A New Zealander, asked by Maning what God was like, had replied, ‘An Immortal Shadow.’

An intelligent spirit or shadow, according to the Reverend Marsden – what Druce understood as their concept of the soul. Frederick Maning, the
Pakeha
Maori
, disagreed. The idea of a supreme being never occurred to them, he wrote, and the word the missionaries used for God,
Atua
, meant – indifferently – a dead body, a sickness, a ghost, or a malevolent spirit.

Hell was
Te po
, world of darkness or night, or perhaps
Reinga
, a realm across the seas; the Maori appeared to have more than one hell.

Sarah glanced towards the table and the trussed corpse lying there, the bound and burnt offering a Maori chief in miniature.

‘If one half of the world does not know how the other half live,’ wrote Maning, ‘neither do they know how they die.’

The Maori seemed to her to spend the better portion of their lives killing and dying. No wonder they needed many hells. A plethora of conceits in control of their spiritual lives drove them to a great many acts utterly horrific to her sensibilities.

Muru
were their complex rights of plunder – easiest to encompass if compared to the Aboriginal notion of justifiable revenge. The strongest manifestation
of this principle was the mighty
Utu
, ‘satisfaction’ or ‘payment’, although the purest summation seemed the more wrathful ‘retribution’.
Lex talionis
, in other words, the code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi: an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth…life, for life.

Tapu
, or as she guessed it, ‘taboo’, smothered their lives like a spider’s web, in both this life and the next.
Tapu
involved everything held most sacred among the Maori: birthright; a certain level of class distinction bound up with rights of ownership; and the prosecution of any trespass. To avenge breach of
tapu
, or at the command of a witch, their own dreadful
Atua
entered into a man’s body and slowly ate away at his vitals; an infestation very much worse than woodworm, just as Brippoki had earlier suggested.

The means of guarding oneself against the shadowy terrors of
tapu
were almost too terrible for her to contemplate. The
matua
(elder relation) of a
Pakeha
slain by a Maori had then swallowed his eyes!

Sarah shivered with disgust.

She disposed of Brippoki’s gift, the dreadful pigeon carcass, and, moving room to room, shut up the house for the night.

Lambert slept soundly.

Glad, Sarah prepared for bed herself. Catching sight of herself in the bathroom mirror, she tried one more time to visualise Druce’s tattooed visage – marked in the face, like a divine fingerprint; the mark of Cain.

She took up her Bible from the bedside table.

And Cain walked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.

And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?

And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.

And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened up her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand…a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.

And Cain said unto the LORD, My punishment is greater than I can bear…and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me.

And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

AND Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.

Sarah extinguished the candle, and lay staring into the sudden plunge of darkness. Cain was marked, not for death, but so that he would be spared: in that way, his punishments might be everlasting.

Under more cloud than sky, Brippoki lies flat on a bed of leaves within his shelter of branch. He is inert. Deadman’s stories of the South Islanders have impressed him mightily – a warrior race so fierce, they take their battles beyond the grave.

Dull heat and lack of sleep drifts his mind back to warmer climes, and the days before he is simply ‘the one from Brippick Station’, all alone in the World – there, perhaps even more than here. Days when he is no longer a boy but not yet a man; when he is only a boy; when he is a baby; and before he is born.

The
Wudjubalug
, his people, are proud desert folk. They belong to the land, as the land belongs to them. They give thanks daily for the sunlight and the breeze.

Many stars gather about the moon, when he is only a boy. Hunting is good.

Then their land is gone. No land no more. The whitefellows come,
Ngamadjidj
. White men come, and never stop coming. They take the land and don’t want the blackfellows on it. Shoot them blackfellows, long time, plenty, plenty. All round, by Christ, blackfellows coming up deadfellows.

For the water, the grass and the trees, they come. They bring strange animals to eat the grass and drink the water. The trees they chop down and chew up to make their houses, and put up their fences. They bring new grasses – yellow grass, ear grass. His people try to lead them away from the sacred sites, but they take them anyway. Fences grow up, and blackfellows are told to keep away. No more burning the grass. No digging for roots or cutting trees for firewood.
Blackfellows are shot on sight, and even in the cold and wet their
gunyas
are burned as a punishment.

No kangaroo no more, no hunting. Less stars now, in the night sky.

His people move on, deeper into the desert.
Ngamadjidj
come after. They got all the trees, got all the grass, and now they want to take the rocks! Digging holes deep in the earth, they expose all her secrets. Bring the Lowerworld closer.

Brippoki turns the bright burning coin over and over between his fingers.

The whitefellows were wicked before, with iron sticks in their hands. Wanting for gold makes them even more wicked.

The earth soon becomes tired, and her people starve.

When he is only a boy, his people, they got no use for the white man’s Dreaming. Where they walk freely provides all they need. No need for things.

With the land taken away, they begin to hang about the whitefellow houses. No more hunting for them. They are sent to a ‘reserve’, where the land is
nungkarpa
, shit. Everything around them comes from shit, or turns to shit. They make their
gunyas, mia mias
, out of it. They wear shit and they eat shit. Lost, without status, clinging listlessly about the croppy settlements, his people become rag-wearers, bone-pickers, fringe-dwellers reliant on charity.
Ngamadjidj
laughs at them – worthless, drunken beggars grovelling for scraps.

The No learn to need for things, wanting billy-tea, wanting sugar, flour for damper, jerky; and rum, lots of rum. Rum helps them to forget the pain, the sickness, the bad liver, No country. Forget everything.

Wudjubalug
land stretches from
Jerry Warrack
to
Woppoon
, and there,
lubras
, but no men. The men are up country. There, no
lubras
, only old
gins
. Men forget their women, and the women forget their men. Mothers forget their little ones, and the fathers forget their senses. No fuck, no childhood, no learning any more.

Good marriage must come of good skin – from bad skin comes only bad marriage. As the peoples become less, it is harder to make a good match. To have no land is to have no life. Rum is gifted instead; rum, for
gin
. No good children now no country. Newborns are killed to save them starving.

No more children come, just shit, disease and booze. They die, like flies; when he is no longer a boy, but not yet a man.

Sand turns to clay, to stone. No more No way. That just how it is. Clouds, passing.

Sarah was taking quite the chance, leaving the house soon after an early dinner. Lambert was too preoccupied with his reading or his memories to either notice or care what she did, so long as she was not too late returning.

St James’s Hall, Piccadilly, on the warm evening of a warm day; impulse had brought her here, impulse and
The Illustrated London News.

‘CALENDAR. Tues. JUNE 16: Meeting of the Anthro. Soc., 8pm.’

The world couldn’t be explored, or its peoples understood, solely from the reading of books. She required expertise.

Ten minutes after eight and Sarah Larkin crept into the theatre lobby. The Anthropological Society of London boasted a membership of eight thousand; there were 706 Fellows, 29 honorary Fellows, 42 corresponding members, and 104 local secretaries – and not a single woman to be counted among them. She had checked.

‘By Jove, Beaven…what do we have here?’

Sarah hung back, fearful.

‘Cruel massa stole him wife, and lily piccaninny.’

‘Piccaninny Circus!’

She overheard remarks from of a small group of gentlemen, stragglers from the main party already gone ahead. Resplendent in evening dress, they gathered around a gaudy wall-poster, an advertisement for the Christy Minstrels: the Hall, most nights, was the venue for a ‘Banjo and Bones’ Black and White Minstrel Show – ‘Very Popular’.

The most porcine of the Fellows struck an unlikely pose. ‘So,’ he said, ‘we have the irrepressible Negro…black yourself up and play the banjo, Blake. I, the bones, Collingwood the tambourine!’ They launched into an improvised chorus of the Minstrels’ most famous song, ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ – very ragged, for all the polish of their appearance.

One of them broke off to hold open a door. ‘Sambo,’ he mock-chided. ‘Come along, o’ we shall miss de main event!’

‘Don’ drag yo’ heels, lazy Bones!’

Their noise receded into the bowels of the building.

Sarah moved forward to take a look for herself at the image on the poster: white men in blackface – not unlike Brippoki, his features clogged with dried Thames clay, but reversed.

‘Sure,’ it read, ‘to Run and Run.’

At any second a member of staff might approach, question her presence, and then all would be in vain. Sarah ducked into a stairwell at one extreme, making for the upper galleries. She ran into a Fellow on the intervening stairs, and froze. As the man passed her by she bobbed slightly, cannily keeping her eyes averted. Despite the lack of lace on her black bonnet, Sarah guessed she appeared more serving girl than lady, and for once felt glad of her dowdy dress. She entered the gods at the very top and crept down to the front.

‘…served the Society well, being the site of our A.G.M. two years ago…’

The grand hall filled and the meeting convened, opening remarks were already under way.

‘In the five years since the Anthropological Society came into existence, we students of man, in wishing to combine all of our partial studies under the
one name, have fought for that very right,’ said the main speaker. ‘The cry nowadays is no longer, “Anthropology is not a science!” The question of today is rather, “What does anthropology teach?” And this is but the latest and most gratifying sign of our progress. With the very greatest pleasure, may I present to you our first Society president, Dr James Hunt, “The Best Man in England”! Come to the stand, James.’

Thunderous applause.

‘Thank you,’ said their president. ‘Th-thank you, too kind.’

Sarah crouched low on the seating, near to the back of the deserted Upper Circle. It was hard for her to observe closely, but Dr Hunt appeared quite elderly, with a large moustache and a shaggy mane of grey hair.

The assembly eventually quietened. Dr Hunt took a deep breath.

‘Anthropology,’ he said, ‘I make no apology, is a self-proclaimed science…’

And in that vein he carried on, his articulation, at times, almost impenetrable. Sarah knew his name from the frequent listings in the newspapers for his many books, among them
Impediments of Speech: On Stammering and Stuttering: its Nature and Treatment
. Also
The Irrationale of Speech: or, Hints to Stammerers, by a Minute Philosopher
. ‘Write what you know’, so the saying went.

‘…Australia the puh-resent home and refuge,’ said Hunt, working hard, ‘of creatures crude and quaint…’

His comments met with a ripple of indulgent laughter, and Sarah’s renewed interest.

‘…creatures,’ he persisted, ‘that have elsewhere p-p-puh, p-p-p-puh…given way, to higher forms.’

Dr Hunt paused, and smiled in a fashion most unpleasant.

‘This applies equally to the Aboriginal,’ he said, ‘as to the p-platypus and the ka-ka-kangaroo. Just as the…former reveals a mammal in the making, so does the Aboriginal show us what early man must have been like.

‘There can be no doubt, that in the juxta-puh-sition of the…superior and inferior races, the latter will always become extinct if they attempt to compete with the civilised…the civilised man. Those who disdain the new nation of Australia may wish to think it denigrated, or else de-nigger-ated. But, when the Noble Savage knows his place, in subordination to the civilised, his extinction need not take place.’

Sarah looked down from her seat amongst the gods, and was displeased.

The first of the evening’s guest speakers was called to the podium: Charles Staniland Wake, a noted ethnologist. He looked to be a relatively young man.

‘All human societies begin in the state of nature,’ he began, ‘but most of them have progressed since then.’ His opening gambit met with loud laughter and generous applause. ‘The state of nature,’ he continued, ‘is one in which humans have not yet appropriated land as property. Ancient Greek and Roman
historians agree it was the invention of agriculture that gave rise to property rights in land. All societies progress through distinct stages of civilisation. Adam Smith enumerates four: Hunting, Pasturage, Farming, and Commerce.’

Sarah frowned. Hadn’t Sir John Lubbock nominated five?

‘Each stage,’ said Wake, ‘corresponds to its political and economic institutions, including that of property. Hunters knew no property. Pastoralists needed, and thus developed, property in their livestock. Farmers developed property in their land. And a Commercial people such as we ourselves have invented the most complex property arrangements of all to suit our needs.

‘Furthermore, every race has its stages: race and civilisation but different phases of the same great question. As some of you well know, I call this “the Psychological Unity of Mankind”.

‘I will typify the five races of man in reverse order,’ he said, airily, ‘as a bone thrown to any Degenerationists present.’

Five now.

‘Last,’ said Wake, ‘the position of maturity, or rational state, which typifies the European. At the period of early manhood, or empirical level, stands the Oriental. The third stage, of youth, or emotional behaviour, characterises the Negro. Next, the period of boyhood, or wilful level, typified by the American Indian. And finally, at the level of the child, or selfish stage, the Australian Aborigine, one of the most legendary and backward races in our wide-ranging experience.’

Provoked, Sarah edged forward in her seat.

‘The natives of Australia show approximately the condition in which man generally must have existed in the primeval ages. According to Dr Seemann, who is with us tonight…’ Wake nodded into the audience at a certain point ‘…Australian Aborigines are the oldest as well as the lowest race of man. Australia, as with New Zealand, could be construed a unique haven for less evolved forms. Dr Hunt has already specified some best-known examples of the marsupial
genera
, their existence now confined to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. So it is that in the Australian seas we find the
Cestracion
, a cartilaginous fish which has a bony palate, allied to those called
Acrodus
and
Strophodus
, so common in the Oolitic and Lias, predating the Cretaceous.’

Murmurs and nodding all around; everyone seemed to approve this properly scientific dialect of hoots and screeches.

‘Australia,’ said Wake, ‘must therefore be described as the oldest of the great continents, and the least altered…a country in its dotage, which from time immemorial has retained its character unchanged. Thus, “New” Holland may be likened to an old man, tottering towards the grave.

‘Look to the desert-like interior, the great number of its salt lakes, the rivers terminating in swamps…it is almost dead already. All is hopeless stagnation.
Corals surround the whole, such calcified growths forming where the ground is gradually sinking. The leaves are dull, the flowers do not smell, and the fruits, without any exception, are tasteless and insipid. The whole of this vegetation and the animals depending on it must disappear before the country becomes a fit abode for the white man. Environmental conditions such as these,’ said Wake, ‘are unfavourable to mental and physical development, and have caused the inferiority of the lower races, the remote and highly pigmented inhabitants of Africa, Asia, America, and Australasia. Progress is only possible for these peoples with the aid of the more advanced European.

‘In conclusion, Australia has done playing its part, and must now prepare for vast changes.’

Applause. C. S. Wake stood down. The chairman was upstanding.

‘Thank you, Charles,’ he said. ‘The floor is now opened for your responses… The Chair recognises Dr Hunt.’

The old gentleman stood and turned, but did not take to the stage. ‘I met with a cricketer at the Athenaeum Ball,’ he said, his mouth forming that exact shape, ‘a man I took to
be
one such advanced European. He captains the Blacks cuh-currently touring our great nation.’