side of the road, just opposite the grain silos on the edge of town. ‘Wally, let’s get one thing straight from the start. I’ve got my faults, but I’m not a racist. I don’t care what yours or Billy’s or anybody else’s skin is like, I treat them with respect till something happens to make me change my mind. But whatever changes my mind, it has nothing to do with the colour of their skin. Now can you get that through your black skull?’
Wally Mungle, like most Aborigines Malone had known, had a sense of humour. He suddenly smiled his beautiful smile. ‘Fair enough.’
Malone started up the car again. ‘Before we see Billy, take me down to the black settlement. I don’t want to talk to anyone, just look at the conditions there.’
‘I don’t live down there, y’know. My mother does, but I don’t.’
‘Where do you live?’ Malone put the question delicately. Twice in fifteen minutes he had had to be delicate: it might lead to cramp in a tongue that, too often, had got him into trouble.
‘I’ve got three acres over the other side of the river. I live there with my wife and two kids.’
‘Is she black?’
Mungle looked sideways at him. ‘Does it matter?’
They went round the war memorial; it seemed to Malone that the Anzac was ready to swivel on his pedestal, his bayonet at the ready. They drove down the main street, which was full now with cars and trucks parked at an angle to the kerb. It seemed to Malone, imagination working overtime, that people coming out of the stores stopped to stare at him and Wally Mungle. In the shade of the stores’ awnings men and women stood motionless, heads turned in the unmarked police car’s direction, ears strained for Malone’s answer.
They had reached the far end of the main street before Malone said, ‘No, it doesn’t matter if she’s black. But I’m a stranger here, it’s a whole new turf to me, and people around here don’t look at things the way I’m used to. I’ve learned that just since I got in last night.’
‘Fair enough. Yeah, Ruby’s black. She’s a mixed-blood, like me. We would of been called half-castes in the old days, but that’s out now. Ruby’s what the Yanks call a quadroon, or used to. She’s got more white blood than me, it shows.’
‘She got white relatives around here?’
A slight hesitation, then a nod: ‘Yeah, but they’d never admit to it. She doesn’t press it, she’s quite happy with things the way they are. By the time our kids grow up, things will have changed – we hope. They’ll be white enough to be accepted.’
‘What are they, how old?’
‘A boy, six, and a girl, three. Nobody would know they’re Kooris, they could pass for Wogs.’
‘Is that what you want for them when they grow up, to pass for Wogs?’
‘No.’ He said it quietly, but his voice was emphatic. ‘I want ’em to be Kooris. I just don’t want ’em discriminated against because of the colour of their skin. I’ve had enough of that. You got any kids?’
‘Yes. Pure white, all three of them. The only discrimination against them is that their father is a cop.’
‘My kids have got that, too.’ But he smiled his beautiful smile again. ‘Okay, turn off here.’
They were just beyond the edge of town, coming to a two-lane bridge over the river, the Noongulli. Malone turned off on to a red-dirt track that led parallel to the river and soon came to the Aboriginal settlement. At first glance the location was idyllic. There was a wide bend in the river and a small beach of flood-washed sand on the far side of the grey-green stretch of slow-moving water. Red river-gums, their trunks blotched like an old man’s skin, hung over the river as if looking for fish to jump to the bait of their leaves. Shade dappled the ground under a stand of yellowbox and on the far side of the river Malone could see the white rails of the racecourse seeming, at this distance, to hover above the ground like a giant magic hoop that had become fixed without any visible support. A white heron, looking in the reflected sunlight from the river almost as insubstantial as if it were made of no more than its own powder-down, creaked in slow motion up towards the bridge. Then Malone saw the reality.
The settlement, standing back about fifty yards from the river bank, was a collection of tin shacks flung together without any pattern, as if the shacks had been built where the corrugated iron for the walls and the roofs had fallen off a truck driven by a drunk. Four abandoned cars, stripped of their engines, wheels gone, lay like dead shrunken hippos between a patch of scrub and the shacks. The cars’ seats rested in a neat row under two yellowbox trees, seats in a park that had been neglected and forgotten. Two drunken Aborigines lay asleep on two of the seats, just as Malone had seen other, white drunks in inner city parks in Sydney. The track through the settlement was a rutted, dried-out morass of mud in which half a dozen raggedy-dressed children played as he had seen his own children play in the sand on Coogee beach. The shacks themselves, some of them supporting lean-tos roofed over with torn tarpaulins, looked ready to be condemned. The part of the settlement’s population that Malone could see, perhaps thirty or forty men and women of all ages, did not appear to have anything to occupy them. They sat or lolled on shaky-looking chairs, against tree-boles or on the ground, just waiting – for what? he wondered. Wine flagons were being passed around, unhurriedly, without comment, every drinker waiting patiently for his or her swig. None of the boisterousness of white beer-swillers here: these blacks were prepared to take their time in getting drunk. And maybe that’s what they’re waiting for, he thought: to get drunk, to have the mind, too, turn black. He couldn’t blame them and never had. It was just a pity they could make such a bloody nuisance of themselves. But that was the cop in him, thinking a policeman’s thoughts.
‘Well, that’s it,’ said Wally Mungle, making no attempt to get out of the car; silently advising Malone not to do so. ‘Dreamtime on the Noongulli.’
‘How did you get out of it?’
‘Because I wanted to.’
‘What about the others?’ He tried to sound uncritical, but it was an effort.
Mungle didn’t appear to resent the implied criticism. ‘Most of ’em are full-bloods. I think they’ve given up the fight. This district has always had a pretty bloody attitude towards us Kooris. It’s hardly changed in a hundred and fifty years, ever since Chess Hardstaff’s great-grandfather came out here and started Noongulli Station. There was a massacre here, right where we’re sitting, in eighteen fifty-one – a dozen Koori men and half a dozen women were shot and killed. There was a trial, but nobody went to gaol for it. The shire council showed a lot of sensitivity when they nominated this spot for the settlement – they thought they were doing us a favour, giving us a river view. It was put up twenty years ago when there was a conservative government in and when Labour got in, they did nothing about moving it from here. Now we’ve got a conservative coalition again and there’s been promises about improvements, but so far there’s been bugger-all.’
‘Does everyone here live on the dole?’
‘Practically everyone. In the old days, when I was a kid, some of the men got work at shearing time, but now the shearing teams come in from outside and none of the local graziers want to have anything to do with the Kooris.’
‘What about Sean Carmody out at Sundown?’
‘Well, yeah, him and his grandson take on a few. But they’re looked on as radicals. His son-in-law,Trevor Waring, who lives next door, doesn’t take on any.’
‘What about out at the cotton farm? Billy worked there.’
‘He was the only one. Practically all the work there is mechanized – these guys here ain’t trained for anything like that. Billy was just a sorta roustabout out there. The token Abo for the Japs.’
‘Why was he sacked?’
Mungle said nothing for a long moment; then