Corroboree (16 page)

The man stepped up on to the verandah, bowed deeply to May and kissed her hand, and then shook hands with Eyre. His handshake was very firm and strong, and Eyre noticed that there was a white scar across the base of his thumb, and another scar across his forehead.

‘Charles Sturt,' the man announced himself. ‘I believe I was supposed to be guest of honour here tonight; but I'm afraid that my nerve rather failed me.'

‘I'm honoured to know you, sir,' said Eyre. ‘My name is Eyre Walker, and this young lady is Miss May Cameron.'

Sturt took May's hand again, and kissed it; allowing himself a closer inspection of her creamy-white cleavage. ‘Charmed,' he said, richly.

Sturt dragged over a chair, and sat himself down on it, uninvited. ‘I'm supposed to be the most social of creatures; but believe me that's only a façade. I enjoy applause, and general admiration. Don't we all? But the thought of spending the entire evening recounting my expeditions to endless numbers of open-mouthed ladies and their
sceptical husbands … well, it's been almost enough to give me a headache.'

‘You surprise me, sir,' said Eyre.

‘Well, I often surprise myself,' Sturt replied. He reached into his pocket, and took out a silver cigar-case, and opened it. ‘But I consider that to be one of the essentials of a worthwhile life; to keep on surprising everybody, including oneself.'

He said, ‘You won't mind if I smoke?' and lit up a small cigar. ‘I have a particular weakness for the indigenous tobacco. One of the tastes I acquired on the Murrumbidgee.'

Inside the reception room, another fierce quadrille had struck up; and the floor was drummed by dancing feet.

‘I must say that I think your theory about Australia has some merit,' remarked Sturt, leaning back in his chair, and blowing out strong-smelling smoke. ‘Whatever seems to hold good in the northern hemisphere seems to be quite reversed here; and I have wondered many times whether there is any divine logic behind such a reversal. The very essence of this land is its upside-downness, if I might call it that; and to discover its secrets one must first of all invert every interpretive facility that one possesses.'

‘I read about your expedition of 1829,' Eyre told him. ‘I was much impressed.'

Sturt's exploration of the Murrumbidgee and Murray Rivers was already legendary. He had set out from Sydney with a 27 foot whaleboat carried on horse-drawn drays; and in this and in another boat which they had hewn out a giant forest tree, he and his companions had rowed for six weeks along the Murrumbidgee and Murray Rivers, until they had reached the coast of the Indian Ocean, thirty minutes south of Adelaide at Lake Alexandrina. When they had arrived there, however, there had been no ship to meet them, and with their supplies dwindling, they had been obliged to row all the way back to where they had started from, over 800 miles, upstream.

Sturt had gone temporarily blind during the last days of
the expedition, and some of his companions had collapsed in delirium. But all had survived; and when Sturt returned to Sydney with his stories of the spectacular cliffs and idyllic lakes that they had seen, and the sweeping floods on the Murray, and the ‘vast concourse' of Aborigines who had followed them, clamouring and shouting and shaking their spears he had immediately been fêted as a hero, and a great explorer.

His eyes were better now; although Eyre noticed that they still had a slightly stony look about them. His enthusiasm for exploration, though, was as fervent as ever.

‘I long now to open up the interior,' he said, smoking in quick little puffs. ‘If there is an inland sea there, I want to sail on it before I die. If there is a Garden of Eden there, as you suggest, then I wish to walk in it, close to God. It is one of the last great mysteries of the globe; a secret that only the Aborigines know; and perhaps even they have never succeeded in penetrating to the very core of the continent.'

Eyre said, ‘It was about Aborigines that I wished to speak to you.'

‘Well, I'm not sure that I'm your man,' said Sturt; still affable, but suddenly and noticeably less interested. ‘Your Aborigine is a sad and particular creature, and there are many who know him better than I.'

‘But you encountered so many of them when you were exploring the Murrumbidgee and the Murray. You said so in your reports.'

‘I read them, too,' ventured May. ‘They sounded an extraordinarily warlike people to say the least.'

Sturt coughed, and brushed ash from his trousers. They were threatening, and raucous, the first time we saw them. They lined up on the banks of the river, and up on the cliffs, and chanted war-songs at us; and for a time I must admit that we were very alarmed. They were shining with grease, and they had painted themselves like skeletons and ghosts. Their women appeared to have capsised a
whole bucket of whitewash over their heads. But, in the end, they did little more than stamp at us, and shout, and then retreat. They didn't hurt us; not once; and when at last we did manage to make some kind of contact with them, and talk to them by signs and gestures, we found that they were a very unfortunate people indeed. Rich in superstition and myth, no doubt of that. But scratching a living from food that would horrify you, if I were to tell you of it, and wandering from place to place with a restlessness that totally precludes the development of any kind of civilisation. They were riddled with syphilitic diseases, even the very youngest of them; in fact some of the sufferers were so young that I can only pray that they were born in that diseased condition. I agree with you, Mr Walker, that the Garden of Eden may indeed be found in the centre of this continent; but I must say that I doubt very strongly whether the Aboriginals are the truly innocent people whom God intended to dwell there.'

May, who had been listening to this with some discomfort, took Eyre's arm and said, ‘Shall we dance now? I really would rather dance.'

Eyre said, ‘Of course. But please let me first ask Captain Sturt if he knows how a particular Aborigine might be found.'

‘I beg your pardon?' asked Sturt. ‘A
particular
Aborigine?'

‘That is what I wanted to ask you. I have to find a chief, a Wirangu I think, whose name is Yonguldye, The Darkness.'

‘Now then,' said Sturt, ‘that may present some problems. The blackfellow will stay in each location for only a limited time, according to the season, and according to what magical and traditional obligations have brought him there. In September, for example, many of the Wirangu will be seen at Woocalla Rock; where they will hold a corroboree to mark the victory of Joolunga over the Lizard-Man, long ago in the time they call the dreaming.
Then, they will be gone. All you will find of them will be their ashes and the bones of the animals they have eaten.'

Eyre said, ‘It may seem curious to you, Captain Sturt; even a little desperate, perhaps, but I recently made a promise to a dying Aborigine boy that I would ensure his burial according to Aborigine custom. He told me before he died that I should look for the one they called The Darkness.'

‘Eyre,' said May, tugging at his arm again, ‘can't you speak of this later? They're playing ‘
Dufftown Ladies.
'

But Eyre held back for a moment, and waited for Sturt to answer him. After a while, Sturt looked up with a mixed expression on his face; as if only Eyre himself could resolve how Sturt was going to feel about him.

‘Why should a young man like yourself feel obligated to a blackfellow?'

‘I made a promise, sir, that's all. And I have to confess that, in a way, I was responsible for his dying.'

‘Has he been buried already?'

‘So I understand; but according to the Christian service.'

‘But are you not a Christian yourself?'

‘My father was a vicar, sir, in Derbyshire.'

Sturt sucked at his cigar, so that the tip of it brightened like a red-hot cinder. ‘There is more to this, don't you think, than simply a promise of burial to one unfortunate black boy?'

Eyre stared at Sturt carefully. ‘There may well be,' although he didn't fully understand what Sturt was implying.

Sturt nodded. ‘I had with me two or three young men like you when I rowed down the Murray. You, Mr Walker, have the calling. You know that, don't you?'

‘The calling, sir?'

Sturt raised an arm, and swept it around to suggest the far and unseen horizons of Australia. ‘You have the calling of the great and terrible interior. You may be a new chum; you may be fresh to Australia; but you are not a coastsquatter, like so many; afraid even to contemplate the
Ghastly Blank that lies to the north of us. Ah, you have the vocation my boy! I can sense it! All you have to determine now is whether you have the strength.'

Eyre said nothing. Sturt had touched too many silent strings inside his mind; and for the first time played for him the inaudible but irresistible music of real ambition. He began to see that his promise to Yanluga may have been far more significant than a simple commitment to one dying boy; it may have been a promise to himself, and to his future life, and to the unknown continent of Australia.

His life of girls and bicycles seemed suddenly frivolous; and without any purpose or satisfaction. But even when he had been cycling, and flirting, and drinking home-made beer with Dogger McConnell, something must have been happening within him; some deep and vibrant change. Why had he felt so responsible to Yanluga? Why had he agreed to let Arthur Mortlock go free? Perhaps he had sensed in them, as Captain Sturt had sensed in him, that they were true children of the Australian continent, and that it was they and their descendants who would reveal at last the frightening and mystagogic significance of
Terra Australis Incognita
.

At that moment, Mr Brough stepped out on to the terrace, and cried, ‘Why
there
you are, Captain Sturt! We've been a-hunting for you everywhere! Do come inside, the ladies are all agog to meet you.'

Sturt took a last suck at his cigar, and then tossed it glowing into the acacia bushes. ‘Very well,' he agreed, trying not to sound too resigned about it. Then he took May's hand, and kissed it again, and shook hands with Eyre, and said, ‘We must discuss this some more. Where do you think I might find you?'

‘I work at the port, sir, for the South Australian Company.'

‘Well, that's capital, for I shall be down at the wharf tomorrow morning. If you can persuade the company to allow you a few minutes' spare time; there are one or two
matters we could discuss. And I might be able to assist you in locating your mysterious Mr Darkness.'

Sturt went inside, to be greeted by spontaneous applause, and a quick burst from the orchestra of
For He's A Jolly Good Fellow
, immediately followed by
The Rose of Quebec
, which Eyre supposed to be an obscure acknowledgement of Sturt's military service in Canada, just before Waterloo.

‘Now then,' he said to May, ‘perhaps we can dance. I'm sorry to have spent so much time talking about exploration, and Aborigines.'

‘Well, it was a pleasure to meet Captain Sturt,' said May. But then she squeezed Eyre's hand, and added, ‘The only trouble is that men like you and he, well, you perplex me.'

Eyre ushered her in through the open French doors. The room was hot and crowded and even noisier than before, with a new and shriller chorus of voices now as the men drank too much punch and the women tried to attract the attention of Captain Sturt.

‘You mustn't let such things worry you,' Eyre told May. ‘Men like Captain Sturt and I, we perplex ourselves.'

Inexplicably, Christopher appeared to be bitterly put out that Eyre had already been speaking to Sturt, and that Sturt had done nothing to dissuade Eyre from going in search of Chief Yonguldye. To show his annoyance, he stamped his feet furiously as he danced a quadrille with Daisy, and glared at Eyre with such wrath that a dear old lady in a pearl head-dress rapped Eyre's elbow with her
fan, and said, ‘I do believe that gentleman is trying to attract your attention, young man. Do you think he might be in pain?'

After the quadrille, however, as Christopher came stalking over to argue with him some more, Eyre immediately swept May out on to the floor to dance a long, slow, clockwork waltz, around and around, with Christopher's indignant face appearing with bright-red regularity on the third beat of every tenth bar.

Eyre found May quite provocative; and his britches tightened as they danced. But provocative as she was, her conversation was nothing but a shopping-basket of confusions, worries, second-hand notions, and unrelated facts about nothing of any importance. With his imagination already widening to encompass the ‘calling' which Captain Sturt had spoken about; with his mind's-eye repeating for him again and again the sweep of the arm with which Sturt had outlined the furthest reaches of the Ghastly Blank; Eyre found it difficult to follow what May was saying, and even more difficult to come up with any sensible replies.

‘Everybody knows that Aborigines are little more than dirty children,' said May, as Christopher's face swung past her shoulder, followed by the glittering chandelier, and a footman carrying punch, nd a white-faced young man with fiery red hair.

‘I'm sorry?' said Eyre.

‘They steal, and they lie, and they're no use at all to man or beast.'

‘What? Who do?'

‘Oh,
Eyre,
' protested May, ‘you're being absolutely impossible.'

Eyre kissed her on the forehead, just at the moment that Mrs Palgrave was peering at them both like a custodial bandicoot. ‘Forgive me: let's go and find something to eat.'

Christopher caught up with them in the dining-room, where the long walnut table had been laid out with terraces of food.

‘Eyre, you're being quite impossible.'

‘I know. May has just told me that.'