was told that the tribe didn’t have young men and women ready for initiation,” argued Bony, knowing quite well that long preparation precedes actual initiation. “All right, you prove it, eh? You call the young men and the lubras here to prove it. Go on, bring them here for me to see. Their cuts wouldn’t be old yet. Come on, Gup-Gup, stir yourself and order them to come here.”
“It was not the time,” answered Gup-Gup. “Our young men and women were not ripe. The initiation of the young men of Beaudesert was what we went walkabout for. Beaudesert fellers same as Deep Creek. They go walkabout, we go walkabout. White-feller law not against it. Constable Howard never told us stop always in camp.”
“So it wasn’t true about you going walkabout to initiate your boys and lubras. I say bring them here: you wriggle out like that centipede you killed.” About Bony’s face played a softly deceitful smile, and the two men saw it and ceased chewing their tobacco. “Of course it wasn’t the right time. No faraway Abo looking into his fire could have told you the plane would fly over the Crater. You didn’t have time then to have your young people prepared. You knew when Constable Howard and I left Beaudesert to come to Deep Creek, for a black feller looking into a fire told you, but there was no black feller looking into a fire on that plane. So you didn’t know it would fly over the Crater. Easy, isn’t it?”
They were looking at his mouth rather than his eyes, and in their eyes was no expression. It was as though shutters had fallen before the glowing pupils, far more impenetrable than the so-called Iron Curtain. The effect was not to shut Bonaparte out, but to close themselves in, bar themselves against the intrusion of a foreign force threatening the citadel of a hoary culture. The Great Wall of China, the electrified barriers along the frontiers of Communist countries are merely childish exercises by comparison. Bony had come against it so often he had long since recognized the futility of beating upon those mental shutters. He made another cigarette and smoked to the butt before saying, “You fellers could be pretty damn fools, not cunning fellers like you think. You are Chief Gup-Gup and you are Medicine Man Poppa, and between you you rule your people. You and your people live here with plenty of tucker. You live in peace for there is the white-feller law to say no one fight you and you must not fight anyone. You, Gup-Gup, can remember when there was always war and when your people fed well for short times and starved hard for longer times. You sit there in the warm and you remember how you have kept your people together black-feller fashion, and how you have kept the black-feller law so that your people are ever happy.
“Why for all this? I’ll tell you. Deep Creek say for you all to shift camp to this place, plenty of water, plenty of tucker. Your young men stock-ride for the station and you all get plenty of tobacco. Hall’s Creek a long way away. Fitzroy Crossing a long way away. Here at Deep Creek you can rule your people and Poppa can keep them obedient to the blackfeller laws and customs.
“Not so the black fellers at Broome, the black fellers at Darwin. In those places the black fellers have become black-white-fellers. They’re finished. You know that. You saw how that could be with your people if you hadn’t come to Deep Creek. You know that in those places the black feller puts out his tongue at his Chief, and he doesn’t care a plug of tobacco for his Medicine Man. He goes from camp to camp, sleeping with this lubra and that one; he earns white-feller money, which he spends for dirty firewater. You know all that, the two of you.”
Bony sighed and employed his fingers rolling another cigarette. They watched his fingers and met his eyes with their own shuttered against him.
“That dead white feller gets himself killed,” he went on, quietly. “He gets himself planted in the Crater. Someone put him in there, because he didn’t have wings to him. Now that hole in the ground belongs to you. It’s on your country, not Beaudesert country. You tell me you are the Chief and you the Medicine Man, and then you tell me you don’t know who killed that feller and who put him in the Crater. Why, you know how many eagles are flying over your country and who comes into and who goes from it. And you know who killed that white feller and who planted him.
“As I said, Gup-Gup, you could be pretty damn fools. White-feller law could say that you are too big damn fools to run around here. Not me, but white-feller law could put you both in gaol, and put your people some other place and, when you come out of gaol, you would see your young men and the lubras poking their tongues out at you and telling your Medicine Man to go jump over a fence. That is if ... I say if ... Gup-Gup, and you, Poppa, were flung into gaol.”
The ensuing silence was prolonged until the Medicine Man vented held breath and said, “White fellow nothing to do with us Aborigines. Us Aborigines nothing to do with him.”
Silence took them again, strengthening still more the barriers separating this ancient people and the modern representative of an alien race. Bony smoked two more cigarettes before rising and walking back to the homestead.
Chapter Six
The Little Pets
Bony was unperturbed by the apparently negative result of his call on Gup-Gup and his Medicine Man. Individually they ran true to type and, together, had behaved normally.
Coincidently, the power vested in a commanding officer and his adjutant over a battalion is roughly analogous to the government of an Australian tribe, and, as the battalion is the unit of an army division, so is the tribe the unit of a nation. A soldier will agree that a well-run battalion is one governed by a martinet of a commanding officer, sugared by an adjutant who is popular with the men: or vice versa: a splendid balance being thus achieved.
Gup-Gup was the sugar and Poppa the vinegar in the diet of this Deep Creek tribe of the Bingongina Nation. In another tribe of this same nation the balance in command might well be reversed. More often than not, tribal rebellion is due to too much sugar or too much vinegar.
It was probable that Gup-Gup had been elected chief by the Old Men of his tribe on the demise of the previous office-holder, and it was not unreasonable for Bony to put his term at seventy years, a period covering the change from the completely wild state to that of peaceful co-existence with the white race. The chief would not be ignorant of the process of disintegration already beginning to threaten his people by the steady encroachment of civilization: in fact Mrs Leroy, who enjoyed his confidence, had been so informed.
As for Poppa, it was most likely he had been appointed to his office by his predecessor, having been especially trained because of his singular attributes, revealed in early manhood, and, also, having survived the severe physical trials set out by centuries-old custom. Your white doctor cures with drugs and sympathy. Poppa would cure with herbs and fear. Your white priest prevents much sin with the threat of hell fire: Poppa would curtail much back-sliding with the fear of the Kurdaticha Man and the Great Snake. What Freud revealed by his writings, Poppa would have learned very early in his training.
Neither of these unwashed aristocrats was a fool: both would have been stoutly admired by Machiavelli. They would not incur the hostility of the law by trying to evade responsibility for a minor crime committed by one of their people, such as stealing from a homestead store or killing a white man for interfering with a lubra. Bony was considering with growing confidence that the cause of the shuttered eyes was an abstract one such as loyalty to a white man or men, or fear of a neighbouring tribe more powerful than they, and less influenced by white-fellow law.
These matters he reviewed while sitting on a log on the bank of Deep Creek overlooking the water dammed back by the concrete wall. The site was well chosen, for the Creek here had itself dug deeply at an elbow, permitting the water to extend for a hundred yards to the far side, and bank up round the bend above. Water beetles and other insects constantly ringed the surface of this dam, and, upon it, the shadows of the dancing leaves played silent music.
Bony had his back to the house and was unaware of Mister Lamb until determinedly nudged in the back. A few moments after he had obliged Mister Lamb with a cigarette, he was joined by Rosie and Hilda Brentner. They sat either side of him and drummed their heels against the log.
“Are you looking at our dam?” asked Hilda.
“I was thinking how pretty it is with the water-beetles hard at work and leaf shadows dancing