Corroboree (28 page)

Joolonga!' he called. ‘I'll catch you up!'

He veered his horse away from the main party, and trotted as quickly as he could towards the grove. Christopher shouted after him, ‘Where are you going?' but he ignored him. Christopher could see very well where he was going; and while he was prepared to accept Christopher's affection, he wasn't prepared to accept his jealousy.

Under the bluey-green shadow of the gums, Charlotte
was waiting for him, accompanied by Captain Henry. He brushed the dust from his clothes with his hat, and dismounted, and Captain Henry came to hold the reins.

Neither of them said a word. They held each other tightly; and then kissed, deeply and warmly, with all the urgency of a kiss which would have to be remembered for months to come. Eyre breathed in the scent of her skin, the smell of her perfume, and felt her fine tickly hairs against his cheek.

‘I couldn't let you leave without seeing you,' Charlotte told him. ‘I've tried so hard to be stern with you, and yet I can't be.'

‘How's your father?' asked Eyre. ‘Is he any better?'

‘The doctor still insists that he must rest. He's taking syrup of squills every day, and mustard poultices, and he's not permitted fatty foods or fermented liquor, and of course that doesn't improve his temper. But I pray for him, Eyre. I pray for him most earnestly.'

Eyre kissed her forehead. ‘In that case, so shall I, if my prayers will do any good at all. And I shall also pray that I shall soon discover everything which I am going out to find, and that I shall be back with you before the New Year.'

‘Eyre,' she pleaded. ‘Love me for ever. I shall always love you.'

He kissed her one last time, and then he returned to his horse and mounted up. They remained there motionless for a second or two; under the rustling trees; trying to imprint on their minds an impression which would last for all the months of separation which were to come. Then Eyre turned his horse, and trotted off through the crackly bark, and Charlotte turned back to her carriage.

Captain Henry removed his hat while Charlotte climbed up and seated herself; and when Eyre twisted around in his saddle to look back at them, he thought how much she looked like a girl who had recently been bereaved.

He caught up with Christopher and the others just as
the dragoons were wheeling their horses around and turning back.

‘Bring us back a bunyip!' one of them laughed; and then they spurred their mounts and cantered back towards Adelaide with shouts and cries and more laughter.

The expedition rode on about a mile further, none of them saying very much, up through the low hilly country-side towards Pooraka. The weather had been dry for the past few days, and the mallee bushes and mulga trees were clinging with dust. Up above them, the sky was ribbed with thin stratospheric cloud, which screened a little of the sun, and gave the morning the appearance of a dull daguerreotype. Their pack-horses snorted and flicked their tails at the teeming grey flies which crawled into their nostrils and around their haunches; and their harnesses clanked and squeaked in an endless rhythm that reminded Eyre of a funeral procession.

Joolonga said, ‘Advisable to stop here, Mr Walker-sir, to look over all the equipment, and tighten the girths. If we have omitted to take anything important with us, we can at least turn back now to fetch it; and if any girth is loose we can remedy that matter before there are sores.'

‘Very well,' Eyre ageed, and called the expedition to a halt. They dismounted, and drank a mouthful of water each, and strolled around while Joolonga and Midgegooroo inspected their packs and their horses' bridles. A warm wind, so slight that they could scarcely feel it, flowed against their faces from the direction of the sea.

Arthur said, ‘You'll excuse me, gents, if I just adjust my clothing.'

‘Pardon?' asked Christopher; but without any further ado, Arthur took off his satchel again, and tugged off his bush-jacket, and then shook himself out of his shirt.

Eyre stared at him in fascination. On his back, Arthur was wearing a large square of pale pigskin, from his shoulders to his waist, and right around under his arms, tied across his chest and his stomach with bootlaces. He unfastened
it, and peeled it carefully off, and rolled it up as if it were a treasure-map on a parchment.

‘I made that for meself not long after I got to Adelaide,' he said, with a sniff. ‘I wore it for most of the time, for all that it made me sweat like a pig. It stopped my shirts chafing my back, for one thing; and for another thing I knew that the scars from a flogging was what bounty-men always looked for first. I saw a man caught in Sydney that way, when his scars opened and he started to bleed through his shirt.'

Eyre said, ‘That is quite astonishing. Show it to me.'

Arthur unrolled the pigskin again. On close inspection, it looked like nothing more than a thin sheet of bacon rind, very dried up, and not very much like human skin at all. But Mr Chatto had been looking for weals, and scars, and the notion that Arthur's back might have once belonged to a Large White had undoubtedly never occurred to him.

‘A man sees what he expects to see,' Arthur remarked, sagely, and tucked the skin into his leather satchel.

He was about to pull on his shirt again, when Eyre touched his arm. ‘You'll probably think me morbidly curious,' said Eyre, ‘but would you show me your back as it really is?'

Arthur took of the spectacles he had been wearing and folded them up. ‘Are you sure that you want to see it, Mr Walker? It's not a sight that does much for the appetite.'

‘All the same. I want to know what they did to you; and I want to know what kind of a mark they made on you.'

Arthur shrugged, and said, ‘If that's what you want.'

Silently, he turned around. Eyre and Christopher looked at his bare back and neither of them spoke. Eyre felt as if the air had become impossible to breathe, and the sweat ran down the sides of his face and chilled him. He had never known that human flesh could be reduced to such a livid ruin; not purposely, not deliberately, not at all. Arthur's shoulders were criss-crossed all over with shiny mauve scars, scar upon scar, until the flesh was knotted into ropes and ridges and twisted shapes like umbilical
cords. Further down, the flesh had been beaten away from his backbone until only a thin transparent covering of scar-tissue remained, through which his vertebrae could be seen as whitish lumps; and the fattier sides of his back had been cut up into diamond-shaped segments, red and angry and sore with sweat.

At last, Eyre whispered, ‘Thank you, Arthur,' and Arthur put on his shirt again, and fastened up his jacket.

‘I wasn't the worst, by no means,' said Arthur, matter-of-factly. ‘Plenty of lads were killed by flogging, and some were flogged and had salt and vinegar rubbed into their backs. Some couldn't walk afterwards, and quite a few lost their manhood, if you understand me. They'd flog you for anything at all, at Macquarie Harbour, I can tell you.'

‘I honestly don't know how you managed to bear it,' said Eyre. He felt deeply shocked. So shocked, in fact, that he didn't even know if he wanted to continue with this expedition. Why was he galloping off in search of a medicine-man to bury a dead blackfellow according to his tribal rites, when living white men were being so mercilessly punished in the name of Christianity?

‘I'll tell you how I bore it,' said Arthur. ‘I didn't bear it. I was just there while it was being done to me, and that was all. They tie you up to an X-frame, wrists and ankles, stripped to the waist, and then they flog you in front of the whole company, with the six-tailed cat. It's better if the cat is knotted; it bruises more but it doesn't cut. But some of the gentlemen preferred to cut you, and one or two of them were so expert they could cut you one way and then the other, so that the flesh flew off in perfect squares. I didn't bear it because no man can bear it. A flogging is beyond bearing. It is the nearest thing to hell on earth outside of the solitary. The second time they flogged me I looked down between the angle of the X-frame and saw the ants carrying off great pieces of my back. I came away that time and I had a hump like a hunchback, and it was eight weeks and a day before I could walk.'

Eyre took off his hat. He looked northwards, out towards the scrubby horizon. ‘I think we'd better get on,' he said. ‘If I hear any more of this, I'm going to start questioning the very basis of my life here, and the very motive behind our going.'

Both he and Christopher were silent as they remounted their horses, and set off. Arthur, however, was in good spirits, and started to sing.

‘
All around my hat, I will wear the green willow;

All around my hat, for a twelvemonth and a day
.

And if anyone should ask me, the reason why I'm wearing it
,

It's all for my true love who is far, far away
.'

They were to follow the coastal plain between the Gulf of St Vincent and the foothills of the North Mount Lofty mountains until they reached the northernmost point of the gulf, where the Yorke Peninsula protruded into the Indian Ocean like the cocked leg of a saucy dancing-girl. They would carry on northwards across the ‘thigh' of the peninsula until they reached the head of the next inlet, the Spencer Gulf; and it was here at Kurdnatta that the Indian Ocean thrust its deepest into the underbelly of the Australian continent. Beyond, to the north, lay nothing but The Ghastly Blank'. Unexplored, unmapped territory, into which only the bravest and foolhardiest of doggers and prospectors had ever penetrated. Those who had seen it and survived had brought back stories of mountains like the moon and deserts that never ended, of mysterious
glittering lakes that could never be reached, of dragons and monsters and extraordinary insects, and green fields that could appear and disappear overnight. It was at the same time the most alluring and the most frightening land on earth: and that night, as they camped amongst the mallee scrub, their lonely fire flickering in answer to the stars, Eyre felt the stirrings of its ancient and sun-wrinkled soul.

Joolonga sat and chewed tobacco, while Midgegooroo unloaded the horses and watered them, and Weeit squatted by the fire and cooked them up a potful of pork and brown beans. Although their fare was necessarily plain and filling, Weeip was a good enough cook. He had been taught baking at the mission, he said. Cakes, pies, and ‘York Shark Pudding'. He could make a passable mug of tea, too, very hot, with molasses stirred into it.

Now that they were out of Adelaide, Weeip discarded his leather apron and went naked, except for a thin string of twined hair around his stomach. Midgegooroo kept his
buka
, but dispensed with his loincloth. Only Joolonga remained dressed in his white man's uniform and cocked hat; although on several occasions he would forget to put on his britches. Eyre had seen scores of naked Aborigine men before, but never at such close quarters, and he was fascinated to see that their penises were not only circum cised but slit open all the way from the urethral opening at the end, right back to the scrotum. He asked Joolonga about it, but Joolonga was evasive, and simply said that it was ‘usual'. The sub-incision caused the Aborigines to urinate in a wide spray, but obviously it had not affected their sexual capacity, for later as young Weeip slept and dreamed, and Eyre kept watch, the boy's penis rose several times in a jutting erection.

On that first night out, they talked about Mr Chatto and Mr Rose, and Yonguldye, and what might lie ahead of them. They also talked about the penal colonies at Botany Bay and Macquarie Harbour, and Arthur gave them a long and unsettling account of his life as a ‘guest of the Crown'.
‘In particular, I think of Tom Killick—a young pale fellow fresh out from England; an accountant I think, transported for life for embezzling £2 from his employers. The first night at Macquarie Harbour, the guards amused themselves by treating him as if he was a master-criminal; and pretending they were afeared of him. They locked him up for the night with eleven of the worst knaves on the whole island; men who were little better than animals. They buggered him that night, all eleven of them, and most of them more than once; and the other unnatural acts they forced him into—well, I saw acts of that nature many a time, and I regret to say at times that I was party to them. But the effect on that delicate young fellow was to turn his mind, and by daybreak he was screaming and sobbing like a woman. You would have thought they were a-killing of him; the noises he made. And in the end, they did, in their usual way, because he killed himself. I saw him do it, in the exercise yard; stand on a box with a broom, and push the handle into his back-passage; then just let himself drop. Right through his guts, that handle went, right through his stomach and liver and lungs, and lodged inside his chest. Four of us tried to get it out, but we couldn't, so in the end we just sawed off the brush and left the rest inside of him.'

They listened to these stories seriously and unhappily. When he had finished, however, Arthur lifted his cup of rum, and said, ‘There should be no long faces here, gentlemen, for you have rescued at least one wretch from that kind of life; and given him an opportunity for freedom. So here's your health, and may we find the success we're after.'

‘Well, I'll drink to that,' said Christopher. ‘I think I'll also drink to the hope that I never get to see the inside of one of Australia's prisons. The idea of being kept in chains!'

‘Ah, it's not the chains you have to worry about, Mr Willis,' said Arthur. ‘It's what they do to your mind.' He tapped his forehead, and said, ‘If's up here that they do
the damage. Inside your bonce. They make your brave man frightened, and your good man evil, and your weak man as wild as a snarling, snavelling beast. They corrupts the pure, and they spays the strong, and they makes your wisest man into a idiot. They knows their stuff, sir; but all I can say is, on reflection, that no man ever came out of those prison settlements a better man than what he went in.'