pungent-smelling joint. The man introduced himself as Lester and offered the spliff to Chaseling, who smiled and said, ‘No thanks, but I’ll have what he’s having.’ He nodded towards an old man sitting on the other side of the fire who had a long white beard and sightless eyes clouded over with a milky white film. Chaseling had just watched him put a pinch of green, leafy material into his mouth and start chewing on it. The elder spat a jet of green juice onto a burning branch, where it sizzled briefly.
‘What’s it called, the stuff you’re chewing?’ Chaseling asked from across the flames.
‘Pituri,’ the old man answered.
‘What does it do to you?’
‘You relax,’ the man replied. ‘And you can go long time with no food or no water.’ He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a wad of light green leaves. He motioned for Chaseling to join him. Chaseling rose to his feet and circled round the fire pit, sitting down beside the elder.
‘Get some ash from fire,’ the old man told him.
Chaseling reached down and cautiously put his fingers into some powdery white ash at the edge of the pit – it was warm, but not hot. He took a pinch of it and gave it to the old man. ‘Is that enough?’
‘Uwa.’
The elder held the wad of pituri in the palm of his hand and kneaded the leaves into the ashes. After about a minute, he held out his hand to Chaseling, who placed the wad in his mouth. The leaves tasted hot and pungent, combined with a stringent alkaline taste from the ash.
Chaseling thanked the old man and resumed his place on the other side of the firepit. He chewed for a while, then addressed the elder. ‘What’s this place called?’
The old man said, ‘Real name Wingalu. Then mission come. They change name to St Catherine’s. Mission gone, they knock down the old buildings, but it still called St Catherine’s.’
The dreadlocked man spoke up. ‘This is where kids lived after being taken from their parents. Stolen generation.’
Chaseling felt a flush of shame and gazed down into the fire. It wasn’t just the one generation which had been stolen, it had been several. Throughout the 1800s and three quarters of the way into the twentieth century, the authorities had taken countless thousands of Aboriginal children from their parents. Child protection officers, police and missionaries had scoured the outback, ravaging communities as they dragged screaming children away from their families. The policy was designed to protect Aborigines from themselves, to assimilate them into white society. Now it was acknowledged as a national shame, with living survivors speaking out about the tragic loss of their families and cultural identities as they were raised in white missions and foster homes.
Raising his eyes from their contemplation of the embers, Chaseling saw that Cookie had silently sat down alongside the old man. She was gazing across at him, bright points of light shining in the deep set eyes beneath the beanie. He asked her, ‘Were you taken from your family?’
Cookie nodded. ‘My family used to hide me from the Child Protection, but they got me when I was ten. Ended up at the mission here.’
The old man spoke up. ‘I got taken,’ he said. ‘After Maralinga. You know ‘bout Maralinga?’
‘You mean the British nuclear tests?’ Chaseling asked.
The old man nodded. And then he told a story.
One morning, back in September 1956, he was camped out in the desert with his parents and two older sisters. He was four at the time and already developing his hunting skills. He saw a set of tracks leading away from the hollow where they’d set up camp. They were the tracks of a perentie, the giant lizard of the desert – chevron-shaped claw marks like a sergeant’s stripes, and a swirly line made by the tip of the reptile’s tail.
Fascinated, he followed the narrow perentie tracks to the top of a sand dune. It was then that the sky in front of him lit up like a thousand suns. He stood at the crest of the dune rooted to the spot. All he could see was a dazzling white light, so intense that he could feel its searing heat on his face – and his eyes. He held his hands in front of his face and saw the shadowy outlines of bones. Then came the sound of the blast, a huge and extended boom, accompanied by a shockwave which sent him tumbling backwards from the top of the dune.
The force of the A-bomb explosion knocked him unconscious. When he came to he could hear his mother’s voice. She was calling him, getting closer. But he couldn’t see her. He couldn’t see much of anything. A dark grey mist had descended on his world and over the following days it turned a permanent shade of black.
‘My God,’ Chaseling said, ‘why weren’t you warned?’
‘They try to warn everyone and move them somewhere safe,’ the old man said. ‘But some people, they hide when they see the soldiers coming one week before the test. My father, he see two big green trucks maybe two mile away. He says to me, “They come to take the children.” We go and find my mother and sisters – they are digging for witchetty grubs – and then we go walkabout. Army people never find us.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ Chaseling said. ‘It sounds like you were almost at Ground Zero.’
‘Two years after Maralinga,’ the old man continued, ‘my father get real sick. Cancer. Then he die. One year after that, my mother, same thing. Then the Child Protection people, they come and take me and sisters away. Sisters go to a different mission, I never see ‘em again. But I come here to St Catherine’s. The Jesuits, they bring me up. Used to flog me all the time, with a strap.’
‘I’m sorry.’ It was an inadequate response, but what else could Chaseling say?
The old man smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry, not your fault. Anyway, how you feeling now chewing that pituri?’’
Chaseling hadn’t been monitoring his state as he’d masticated his wad of pituri, but now he noticed that the flames and sparks from the fire seemed more vibrant. He gazed skywards and felt in awe of the stars glittering like a million jewels up in the heavens. The full moon burned almost overhead and it was now chalk white. His hearing seemed more finely tuned, picking out different sounds: the distant barking of a dog; faint music – it sounded like Bob Marley – drifting from one of the houses; the breath of the wind across the plain. He smiled. ‘As James Brown once said, I feel good!’
There was a tap on Chaseling’s arm. It was the dreadlocked man, Lester. He had a roll of canvas which he unfurled to reveal a painting, rendered in a similar style to the snake on the wall of the community hall but in a lot more detail. An impressive work, it was the vibrant image of four ants with brilliant yellow abdomens, set against a background of lines and circles painstakingly rendered with countless brown and white dots.
The largest of the circles, Chaseling noticed, was filled with a mandala pattern like that of the opal fossil in his pocket. Pointing to the mandala, he asked, ‘What does that symbol mean?’
‘Eternity,’ Lester replied. ‘The circles of life. And death.’
5 MEET ALI AND ABDUL
ABDUL AND ALI FAZIR were both part-dressed in camouflage clothing. Abdul wore a green and brown-dappled cotton vest that showed off his heavily muscled arms. A pair of faded jeans and new hiking boots completed his ensemble. Ali’s large bottom and fleshy legs, meanwhile, were clad in cargo pants which were a mottled mixture of khaki and olive hues, while his stomach bulged from an over-tight black T-shirt bearing the name of his favourite death metal band, Mayhem, in spiky white letters. On his feet he wore old Converses, their once-white toe caps stained orange by desert dirt. Completing Ali’s ensemble were a pair of heavy gold chains which glittered on his neck as he stood beside his brother in the moonlight contemplating a tomato red Holden utility.
The car was buried up to its axle in loose sand. Trying to control the anger he felt towards his brother for steering them into this mess, Abdul gazed towards the south, where there were the lights of several houses. He guessed they were