The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish (3 page)

‘Get yer arse aboard!' the bosun screamed above the creak of the windlass. ‘The fuckin'
tide's turned. If we don't shift now we'll be spending the night with the bloody
cannibals!'

The island lads were warily clambering up the rope ladders slung over the side of
the SS
Mokambo
, somehow balancing Archie's crates on their shoulders as they went.
At the rail, equally wary sailors took the crates aboard. The great war canoe had
already been winched out of the water. As Archie climbed a rope boarding ladder its
outrigger swung wildly, threatening
to knock him back into the water. There was no
time to say goodbye. He barely had time to wave before he heard the shout ‘up anchor',
and the tramp steamer began moving, leaving the cluster of outriggers and their forlorn
paddlers in its wake.

By dusk Great Venus was a mere smear on the horizon, and West Venus Atoll, home of
the famous fetish, was close a-starboard. In the gloaming Archie could just about
make out the ceremonial path, lined with the ochred valves of giant clam shells,
leading in from the beach. There was not a light to be seen on the place: the Venus
Islanders would rather die than set foot there after dark.

The last of the tropical twilight faded, and Archie went to his cabin. A small mirror
hung on one wall. What he saw in it shocked him: a brown man, muscular, trim and
tattooed, dressed in nothing but a skimpy loincloth. The trunk containing his clothes
had been placed beside his bunk. He opened it for the first time in years, took out
his suit, felt its fabric, and at once remembered his nickname—Beanpole Meek. That,
and his brothers' habit of pointing out his ‘Bondi chest' (far from Manly) had been
perpetual humiliations.

Archie dropped his loincloth and struggled into his trousers. He tugged at them and
heard a ripping sound. His right thigh had burst through the seams. Next he struggled
into his shirt. It seemed to belong to a child. Surely a fellow couldn't change that
much between nineteen and twenty-four? Perhaps the fabric had shrunk. In any case,
the captain's wife might be able to help.

‘I can put gussets in them, but there's not a lot of spare fabric, she said dubiously.
Her gaze drifted from Archie's body to the suit and shirt lying in her lap.

‘Do you think you could try? I mean, I can't arrive home looking like this.'

‘You're not too hard on the eyes. But I suppose you'll need clothes in the city.
Leave it with me. I'll fix up something.'

The captain invited his passenger to dine with him most evenings. Archie was surprised
at how difficult he found it to have a conversation. He just couldn't find the words
he wanted—in English at least. The captain seemed taken with a young cricketer called
Bradman. Even though Archie followed cricket keenly, the name meant nothing to him.
And both the captain and his wife kept talking about ‘the crash'. He assumed they
were referring to some terrible rail tragedy, until it became clear that it was about
money. Lots of money.

Ten days later, with Archie only dimly aware of changes in the wider world, the
Mokambo
steamed into Sydney Harbour. She passed through the heads in the dead of night, and
the first Archie knew of being home—if that's indeed where he was—was the stench
of coal smoke. He sat on deck in the predawn darkness, observing the city lights
through the grimy atmosphere.

It had been, he recalled, Professor Radcliffe-Brown who'd encouraged him to go to
the Venus Isles. He had the ear of both the museum's director, Dr Vere Griffon, and
Cecil Polkinghorne, the museum's anthropologist, to whom Archie had been apprenticed.
And so, just four years after having arrived at the museum as a fifteen-year-old
cadet, Archie was granted study leave to go to the islands.

The Venus Isles had a bad reputation. But in 1911 the Reverend E. Gordon-Smythe had
brought Christ to the natives, and it was generally believed that headhunting had
been curbed, if not entirely eliminated. Most families would have been concerned
to see their son shipping for such a place, but the Meeks were a hard, unsympathetic
people. He couldn't remember hearing a kind farewell from his parents, or from his
four brothers.

‘Study the culture, Archie. Note everything, and bring a rational, detached mind
to your work,' Radcliffe-Brown advised. It only now dawned on Archie that, instead,
he'd lived the culture. But he
had
done one important thing. He'd made a collection.
And what a collection it was!

Chapter 2

As the sun rose over South Head, Archie made arrangements to clear his collection
and personal effects through customs, and he set off in his ridiculously small, patched
suit, on a leisurely meander towards the museum. After five unconstrained years his
feet were so broad that his shoes pinched him wickedly, forcing him to adopt a strange,
limping gait. People stared as he passed. Brown-skinned with hair uncut, he felt—and
looked like—a stranger in his own city.

Had he forgotten, or perhaps never realised, how bleak it all was? There were no
trees—no plants but weeds to soften the bare asphalt, dilapidated houses and overhead
tangles of poles and wires. Even Hyde Park looked naked, its southern end turned
into a morass by construction works for a new
war memorial. He remembered the endless
fundraising and planning for the monument, and was glad to see that building had
commenced.

In front of the stately Burns Philp building stood a slender figure, balanced on
short sticks and with a dead bird perched on its head. Its face was flawless, as
pale as a corpse, and its fingernails and lips were as red as if dipped in fresh
blood. Unnervingly, its eyes were surrounded with a strange purple glow. It took
Archie a moment to realise that she was only a very fashionable young lady, albeit
heavily made up, wearing high heels and a bird-of-paradise hat. He wanted nothing
more than to grab Sangoma and shout, ‘Look at that, Uncle! You think you look fine
with a pig's tusk stuck through your nose and a few tattoos on your face. Well, it's
we Sydney people who really know how to dress up! Just look at that young woman.
Now, she
is
flash!'

The more Archie saw, the more he became amazed. In Macquarie Street there'd been
a noticeable shift from hansom cabs to motor vehicles. And the men, in their grey
suits and fedoras, moved like autumn leaves before the storm. He saw a banker with
an expensive briefcase, a doctor with his trademark Gladstone bag, and a ritual leader
in his black cassock.

At last Archie reached the museum. He paused before its column-flanked entrance.
The place was a temple to nature, modelled along classical lines and constructed
in a golden age when upstart colonies had vied to impress the motherland. Its doors,
tradition had it, were tall enough to admit a brontosaurus, and wide enough for a
blue whale.

Archie's eye caught a movement. A sparrow hopped in the
roadway, its confidence and
smart black bib making it as much a city slicker as the banker with his briefcase.
The bird looked Archie brazenly in the eye, then plunged its beak into a steaming
pile of horse shit. ‘You cheeky fellow!' Archie said as it flew off with its tidbit.
Introduced birds—sparrows, starlings, blackbirds and rock pigeons—were everywhere.
But hardly a native was to be seen.

Archie stepped over the threshold and strode the black-and-white tiles of the great
hall. Slanting beams of light from a roof lantern caught the dust and transformed
it into a glittering fog. The galleries were not yet open to the public. The high,
empty space echoed with his footfalls.

The day was setting itself up to be a scorcher and the hall was filled with the scent
of what most would gloss as
eau de museum
. Archie savoured the old preserving alcohol
with its fruitiness, aliquot of cloying formaldehyde, and fishy high note given off
by the pickled sea creatures immersed therein. The tang of lacquer from the stuffed
Murray cod registered on his palate, while the dun dustiness of old bones coated
his throat. But what was that other smell? The smoky, sweaty aroma of the inside
of a stone-age hut coming from the New Guinean artefacts was so familiar that it
went almost undetected.

He passed under the skeleton of a great whale suspended from the roof, its vertebrae
strung on a straight iron rod. On hot days the oil that mottled its bones liquefied.
Sometimes a splash would materialise—like a drop of blood from a holy statue—on what
was claimed to be the skeleton of the last Tasmanian. The remains hung beside the
bones of a gorilla and a chimpanzee, each suspended from a wire that passed through
a hole in the
top of its cranium. Their arms hung limply by their sides, their toes
pointed earthwards. They looked like gibbeted criminals.

In the middle of the hall was a cylindrical glass bottle refulgent in a shaft of
light. It contained the cigar-sized egg-case of a giant Gippsland earthworm. Archie
could see the solitary embryo floating in its exquisitely translucent, golden case.
Unborn, it was already twice the size of a common worm. Nearby stood a glass cabinet
that lacked the accumulated grime of ages. It had not been there when he'd left.
Inside were minerals, one of which formed a white, silken sheet that resembled the
décolletage of a young woman, across which were scattered a soupçon of pea-sized,
rose-red crystals. Its beauty held him spellbound. Surely the display was the work
of that indefatigable curator, Dr Elizabeth Doughty. Her looks and energy had frightened
him when he was a cadet. But then he heard her rhapsodising in the tea room about
the beauty of tourmaline and the intricacies of malachite, and she became in his
eyes the paragon of what he hoped one day to become—a museum curator.

He had once thought the exhibition the grandest thing in the world. But now it seemed
forlorn. Bull roarers, bones, barnacles, butterflies and boomerangs all in random
proximity—objects enough to make the tremendous space look cluttered. What, he wondered
for the first time in his life, was it all for?

Then he remembered Cecil Polkinghorne's words when giving his new cadet a tour of
the institution. ‘Here,' he had spluttered, gesturing grandly towards the collection,
‘lies the collective memory of our people. Objects may languish unstudied or forgotten
for a century or more. But rest assured
that one day, in response to the needs of
the times, a curator will take up an object, and in it trace indisputable proof of
the way things once were. Here, history finds its physical testimony.'

Archie arrived at the director's office before he was fully prepared. He hesitated,
trying to recall the speech he'd practised on the boat. Just as he raised his arm
to knock, the door swung open. Dryandra Stritchley, the director's secretary, flinched,
seemingly horrified by the nut-brown stranger with his right arm elevated as if holding
a knobkerrie. Her bearing was as upright as a sergeant-major's, and she was as slender
as ever. Her elegant if slightly severe face, grey eyes and sensible clothing were
all unchanged. Only the knot of greying hair hinted at the time passed. When she
recognised him she quickly regained her composure. ‘Meek. It's you at last! The director's
waiting for you. He's been waiting for some time. Two years to be precise,' she said
archly. ‘And don't dare show your face here again before you get a new suit. And
a haircut.'