a body rolls, a thing
that has no name, a fallen cipher,
a cluster of the dead fruit,
thrown down on the dump.
Pablo Neruda, 1950
“The United Fruit Company”
1. Prologue
I Don’t Like Mondays is quietly groaning on a transistor radio when I reach in the sash window to get the box of Redheads matches that I know is sitting on the sill, behind seashells and postcards from Airlie Beach. Pastel pink and liquid blue, with that faint musk of an unknown, desiccated sea creature. Through the shadowed angle of the kitchen – laundry – hallway door I see the looming figure of Paul Cugat’s father. He doesn’t see me. He is talking, closely, with Anna Smith’s mother – small, with an Angie Dickinson look. I snag the matches and leave. The sun is shouting on my bare arms, my squinting face. Reaching through the fabric of my black t-shirt, my dark blue jeans in that fierce way that seems like an assault. The Ripples on my feet – black suede desert boots with a sole like the shark fin roof of an asbestos clad factory, also determinedly sweltering.
The eucalyptus in the air is tainted with smoke. Tendrils of it sit at the low point of the valley, twined in the heat haze reflected from where the descending blind curve becomes a sudden dip. One of those ones where, if you are driving rollercoaster fast, when you reach the point of ultimate descent, gravity lightens, dispels, lurches, returns, until after stomach in your throat lightness, you are returned, suddenly heavier than before. Everyone drove through there like that. I suppose it was a tree-dappled creek once. Now a cement culvert beneath the melting black tarmac of a suburban crossroads. Tommy Mack lost his foot there, sitting in the gutter, poking at a dead bird with a stick, to exactly such an untrammelled plunge. I heard it from the top of the hill, how the engine roar of the car shrank then swelled; Tommy’s dog-raw howl echoed for miles.
I lit a bent cigarette from a crumpled pack with a few left in it. The match flaring as if in the summer’s heat its potential was also somehow magnified.
This suburb is full of secrets. Layers of grand farm houses and faded brick commission boxes and gleaming suburban developments over ranging eucalypt forests and steeply rolling hills. Sandstone and porphyry clad mansions, with steep, upswept driveways, arched twin-car garages, the fresh cream walls of recently pristine rooms now pinholed with chrome and fire posters, the scraped claw-marks of carelessly thrown sprigged-boots.
It is a commonly held tenet that exposition is the clumsiest kind of storytelling. We cringe when characters turn archly to each other and in a few blank-faced rejoinders fill-out character, background, plot and action, in glib and artificed foreshadowings. How much more so when the character turns directly to the audience, and in bold soliloquy speaks. Still, sometimes, for reasons I hope you understand, this is the only way we have to speak.
The dip had become a sort of shrine. A natural confluence of creek, valley, road and path. I suspect it had been a meeting place of the elder people, before this landscape was overlayed in asphalt and weatherboard, redbrick and roses. It had been a meeting place for kids on Friday night escapes and Saturday morning adventures I think since time immemorial became something more prosaic. Someone was now leaving flowers at the spot. Wreaths with that unsettling union of dark and bright, constraint and freedom. It seemed odd. Were the flowers for Tommy’s lost foot? Tommy would be there himself, leaning on one crutch like Long John Silver, grinning madly, telling us they had cut it off at the hospital. Wrapped it in plastic. Sent it to an incinerator with various other excisions. He asked when he woke, still feeling the ghost of that searing impact in his toes. He couldn’t quite believe it until the doctor told him. Then he’d set out swinging and hobbling up the hill, crowded by a few compatriots, sharing cigarettes, swapping punches, laughter and attention masking the pale turn of his face, a grimace like a shadow.
I’d sometimes tag along on the fringes, relatively new to the area, younger, and far from being part of this crowd. A stranger. This was a leafy suburb, in parts elegant Federation houses with coloured glass windows and broad tiled verandahs set deep in elaborate, still elegantly Victorian gardens. Other streets had hollow-eyed pastel weatherboard cottages, fading to dereliction, or small unadorned brick dwellings in shapes and rows like Monopoly houses. Former commission housing perhaps, now with roses and fruit trees and haphazardly manicured lawns. Our rented place was one of these, less manicured perhaps, a twenty year old FC Holden in dull police blue under a tree in the front yard, the engine partially lifted from its maw slung from a rope sling on an ominously creaking branch.
That day, cigarette hooked on my lip, stolen matches rattling as I walked, I made my way up past our place, along the main road to where houses abruptly ended, to where the trees towered on crests and escarpments, to another shrine where kids worshipped, pressed like devotees against a tall, barbed-wire topped chainlink face. Beyond the criss-cross wires, impressed like warpaint in pale lines on tanned skin, a heavily modified 1973 Ford XB Falcon GT 351 – Mad Max’s Interceptor Pursuit Special, denuded from gleaming proto-fascism to a kind of skeletal desperation. We dreamed of dust and the fevered whine of white-line glory. For sale for two thousand dollars. I’d climbed the fence once, narrowed my way through wires, dropped down from a jutting overhang, thrilled to that momentary escape from gravity, for a closer look; braving Alsations in studded collars, men with grease-blackened hands as hard as desert barbarians. Stole a shrunken head fixed inside the door where Max’s tough little blue heeler sat. The grizzly totem, nothing but a bug-eyed, bristle-haired plastic toy; no different to that bought for change at a supermarket or toy shop. The exposed heart of the engine, the chrome furiously jutting from the beetle-black shell of the hood, ply and plastic, dreams and sound effects, roughly spray-painted in dull silver. This is how illusions die. Still, I jumped the fence. Although I threw the skull away, this is how children make their own small legends.
I like to imagine Rob Hughes — no relation – just a coincidence more prosaic than significant — a wiry kid with with dark curls and a hawkish face, always in the white shirt and black slacks that was the uniform of the electronics store where he worked, thought a kid that pulled engines out of cars, that jumped fences, that tucked cigarettes in a rolled back shirt sleeve, but otherwise had his nose in something by Bradbury or Tolkien, was worth inviting to a party, but I think he just invited everyone who happened to be there that day.
“Parents away, party at my place.“
“Cool, yeah,” a nod that acknowledged that secret, tribal compact, of boys, of childhood.
I was fourteen. Not quite delinquent, but far from well-behaved. Dared reality in the face of mundane life. Jumped fences for worthless treasures. Drove unruly cars through surreptitious streets. Stole cigarettes, and matches. Insulted the wrong kids with stupid nicknames. Spilled milk, broke glass. In echoing tunnels left bullets on railroad tracks, stood pinned to cavernous stone walls, trains roaring through full of people, faces blurred by the rush and refraction of tinted glass, as we dreamt 1000 miles an hour, and waited while the world burned. Crawled in the eyes of derelict buildings. Scrabbled, argued, fought in that mostly harmless way. Railed at the sky. Wondered what gods there were, and why they never listened. Told my friend I saw his father at our other friend’s house, when I was stealing matches, not knowing he wasn’t supposed to be there. Committed a dozen known and unknown small acts of violence every day.
2. The Day I Was Murdered
Psychologists have shown that we don’t remember the original memory of an event, but rather, the last time we remembered it. Every time we bare the wound, probe to see if it has at all healed, blindly bandage it again, the scar takes a new shape. Neuroscientist Donna J Bridge calls it, “retrieval distortion.” As if we’d opened a long neglected photo album, on a different day, at a different time, in a different place and circumstance, in a process like relativity, and from our changed perspective, our changed moods, in the moment of observation, alterations to the self irrevocably alter the images we see. Our context changes memory; and thus our interpretation of the memory itself. Whether this is an act of self-preservation, of self-defence, it is hard to know. We can well understand the utter refusal, the enforced amnesia, the way some traumas are both held at bay, and held close like jewels. How much more so when the memory is a few, sharp, emblazoned flashes, half-understood reconstructions, pieced together from the flawed memories, the distorted recall, the fraught descriptions of others. “Maybe a witness remembers something fairly accurately the first time because his memories aren’t that distorted,” Bridge said in a 2012 interview. “After that it keeps going downhill.”
I remember walking to Rob Hughes’s place that Friday night, past rows of trawling cars, neon strips of shops, the fury of music and laughter and engines, hot oil and monoxide, burnt eucalyptus and fish and chips, the chainlink fence of the squat, pebble-crete high school, powerful sprinklers chittering rainbows over actinic fields of green under the lowering evening sun. The world gleaming in summer’s violent heat. I hear you ask if the world really deserves such lurid and swollen language. I can only say, through the dark glassly, this was still childhood. Ozone and the breath of grass, the false scent of rain.
Rob’s house smelt of pasta, and wood smoke, cigarettes and beer. One of those Federation places, but kind of cluttered, a dog house and old prams on the verandah. The lyre-patterned tiles chipped and loose. Paint peeling on the mock-doric pillars. The garden grown from elaborate to labyrinthine. I stuck my head in his room, first down a cavernous hall. Said, “Hi.”
He was at a desk, talking into a handset, surrounded by plank and besser-block shelves bowed with the weight of amps and record players, tuners, CB and ham radios, gadgets and gizmos; dim LEDs and flickering level meters, soldering irons, microphones, cables untangling through the window to the strutted samurai frame of an antenna mast in the outer dark, scraping at the stars.
Music echoed outside, Zeppelin hollowed out and shrilling. Voices gathered in pockets – it was crowded already – hall, kitchen, verandah, flickering the colours of poisoned wood. I headed to the bonfire where the front yard sloped towards the dark crevasse of the road. People crowding here, despite the heat. Lots of kids – older kids – I didn’t know, a few I did. A kid in my class called Hank – ubiquitous black jeans, Pink Floyd T-shirt. Anna, who was my girlfriend for a little while, and then just as strangely, not. We’d made out in the back of a car, winding back home through the hills, for the first time the moment heightened and hazed in aromatic smoke, a Kate Bush cassette on the stereo, the heartbeat intense. At the crossroads, that headlong moment freed from gravity. How could anything as conventional as boyfriend/girlfriend mean anything after that communion?
The other Rob – Rob Harris. Football team captain; square-jawed, dark eyed, aquiline, a dark fringe low on his brow. A solid guy – probably better suited to rugby than AFL. His coterie. David Cugat, who I’d put into the recovery position after he’d knocked himself out hitting a jump badly on the ad hoc BMX track in the national park. Hank had gone for help. David’s mother had given us both crucifixes, as if we’d saved his life. I’d just sat there and kept an eye on his breathing until the ambulance arrived, uncertain what exactly I’d do if he stopped. Breathe, breathe in the air on the radio in my head. Anna was with the footballers. Out of a sense of guilt I mentioned stealing the matches from the kitchen window sill – I knocked first but no one answered – mentioned that David’s father was there. The fire surged with a sudden vehemence. She turned aside, on her face a colour like porcelain glowing in a kiln.
I don’t remember much after that. Someone put a bottle of vodka in my hand. I remember the taste; antiseptic and medicinal. Inches from my face, the vast imperium of the bonfire.
Shrieking. I think I must have thrown up on someone’s shoes. Then, mostly insensible. Rob Harris, that hard face, rictus tight. Other faces, red as paint, eyes like broken glass, a cold kind of anger, an angry kind of laughter, blunt as insults, as fists and boots made dull, wooden sounds. Rock Lobster was phasing in and out, amongst the more primal sounds. Ragdolling, pinballing, dragged up and smacked down again. How ridiculous to get beaten to death while Rock Lobster played, I thought, maybe laughing.
Through the fire, then, a closing, darkening circle. The odd flash of streetlights, the long arcs of powerlines, the scrape of scrub. That plastic and burnt gum tree smell. The curved husk of a burnt and rusted car. Garbage and dead refrigerators. The dank smell of rotting mattresses, spilling springs and wadding like viscera. Closing over me in embrace as much as love as finality, the spindle arms of once burnt trees.
3. The Fiery Death Of Small Town Heroes
Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” in a 1963 book covering the trial, the war crimes, the crimes against humanity of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust. Undoubtedly the book, even the phrase, has a more complex meaning than the one we have typically inherited. In that the example of a concentration camp guard is usually given, who, facing justice, says I was only doing my job, I was only following orders. Evil is perpetuated in the way we dehumanise others everyday, at the behest of authority and tradition, procedure and system. Documents are signed, rules are adhered to. Thus, in the midst of war, peace is kept. In the face of chaos, order is defended.
But such banal admissions are made after the fact, when the perpetrator is facing justice. They are no longer inside the ideology, inside the narrative which sustained, moved and absolved them, but in the midst of one in which power has shifted. In the moment in which evil is enacted, the perpetrator is sustained by that shared ideology, lauded by authority, armoured by belief, justified by mythology.
If evil is banal we can applaud, because good then becomes exceptional, and thus, in our banality and exception, we are heroic, just, grave, joyous in right, our position, our action, irregardless of how inhumane, fulfilled in the moment the world falls on that unexceptional, that banal other.
Rendition is always extraordinary. The boot always descends from a position of exceptionality. The object is at once excepted and exaggerated, both utterly feeble and overwhelmingly monstrous in their difference, that difference itself a threat, beyond the pale, outside all bounds of common decency. That thing vomited on your shoes. The perpetrator, in pretence unconscious in their adherence to that which stands against their disgust, is in the moment personified as exceptional; the state, the team, the race, the brigade, the cult, the flag; in that moment they are always more than human; an idea virulent in glory. Evil only becomes banal in the aftermath; falling out of the narrative that made all possible cruelties not merely necessary, but absolute; only then do these offences, in defence, in capture, in hiding, become a matter expressed in terms of banal justification.
Later, I was alive again. Roaring water, the heat almost scalding. Glass and tiles. Wet clothes, heavy wrenched. Spinning back up from the oubliette, a reluctant leaf caught in the updraft. Limping home. I think one of my shoes was missing. In the dark, peppered with lights, the chitter chitter chitter of sprinklers on football fields.
Waking, I peeled my face away from the pillow, like cling-wrap from weeks old meat. Blood the red nearest black, fresh streaks, carnelian bright. In the bathroom mirror, a swollen, Quasimodo half-face. Eye closed, puffed, balloon red, mottled as turkey skin. Encrustations closing one nostril, breath wheezing out the other, lips swollen, cracked, split. Forehead grazed, swollen, scabbed. The other half of my face, in placid unbelief, uncertain which was true, which mask —quite normal.
I do not really remember my parents’ reaction. I imagine horror, tears. My father stoic, resigned in his anger. My mother heartbroken yet again. I could not tell them what happened. Why I had livid, blunt imprints on my arms and back and neck and thighs and ribs. Why my jaw only moved in small ways towards silence. Why my eye was blind as a toad. I really don’t remember. I can only imagine the bruises and reefs in the following weeks blooming like tropical sunsets. Myself a dèsert archipelago. The days gradually shortening. I know they kept me home. Hidden away for months or more. I do not remember going to the doctor. I do not remember them going to the police.
Whether they did or not, I am long past recriminations. Historians, psychologists, forensic researchers talk about how in cases of personal and cultural trauma, those who have experienced atrocities, tragedies, war, genocide, the fragmentation of the person and the body, may misrecall dates, times, the exacting minutiae of details. These do not matter. Having been reduced to the extremity of experience, what matters is an acknowledgment not of the incident, but of that overwhelmingly lived emotional truth. For myself, I do not remember much of anything.
Eventually I drifted back to school, almost a ghost. A few fading scars left to show I was once a monster. Something bent over in my gait. One afternoon by sparse trees on the edge of the ever chittering football fields Rob Hughes told me how Rob Harris, his football coterie, had beaten me when I was paralytic drunk. Hauling me up so they could hit me again. Eventually, when my flailing resistance had ceased, when I was crumpled on the ground, too close to the bonfire, unmoving, they thought I was dead, and panicking, dragged my body to the end of the road. A wooded hill on one side, on the other a steep, scrubby cliff, falling twenty feet to a gully littered with debris; the burnt husk of a Volkswagen, the rust-stained sarcophagi slabs of discarded refrigerators, garbage, loose and in bags, rotten mattresses, guts spilling out. They threw my body down and left.
Later Rob Hughes found me, dragged me back up the gully. Left me slumped in a burning hot shower to revive me. My crucifix was missing. I think I remember it on the tiles, a few broken images I can’t separate from thoughts of baptism, and resurrection.
I saw Tommy Mack down near his shrine some time later. “You’re still alive,” he said, somewhat surprised. “You too,” my bewildered reply.
Later again I saw David Cugat at that other shrine, the wrecker’s yard. Cars rowed and piled in chrome and enamel henges. The Interceptor was no longer in the yard beyond the chainlink fence. Disappointment was only nominal. He told me his parents were getting divorced. Anna’s too. Because I told Anna I’d seen them that day, when I took the matches. His father, her mother, had had a thing before one time, on a combined family holiday. Postcards and seashells and unexpected fire. You could see he wanted to kill me, but then again, perhaps he understood, I had already died.
Some months after I was murdered, still mostly a ghost, I saw a few column inches in the city’s newspaper. This suburb, because of history, geography, the vagaries of distance, was always more like a small town, with its own isolated morés and culture. To get in the big city paper was something of a coup. Still, given the way it made the world tilt on its axis, the report was innocuously small. A group of young men, all members of the high school football team, had died in a horror smash. The team captain, a promising young player, the only one named, had borrowed his mother’s car, a high powered V8 Ford. The car had careened, burned, crashed, torn apart on a telegraph pole. Speed undoubtedly a factor. Rob Harris’s photo was there. A school photo, small, grained, so banal in its aftermath. Unsmiling, the eyes, despite the article lauding a hero’s untimely loss, in tragedy, to me, no less empty.
4. Unstitching The Smile In My Side
One might imagine that from such a report, from such an occurrence, I might have harboured some sense of the universe exacting a natural justice. Rather, it cemented the meaninglessness of our conjoined violence. These young lives were gone, beyond resolution. Theirs couched in familiar terms of tragedy and promise were at once acknowledged and dismissed. The way their loss was enshrined made mine insignificant, impossible. Not just forgotten, but vacated; beyond resolution, a complete erasure. There was no longer a possibility that those young men had ever been anything except heroic, consequently, whoever I had been, brute, unmouthed, insignificant, now, necessarily never existed.
There were still, however, like fine traceries on skin, a few entanglements of unacknowledgeable pain. One of my earliest memories as a very small child in a dustier country town, far from hills and sea, is limping down a white linoleum corridor, toward towering glass windows, the silhouettes of my parents tall against the light, the grin on my face half pain, half joy. I suppose a doctor, stethoscope like some insect around his neck, seeing the signs of an unspoken injury, leaned down suddenly, frowning. I had just come out of an oxygen tent at Tamworth Base Hospital where I had spent weeks in isolation, recovering from bronchial pneumonia. Now, two fingers prodding into a swelling in my side discovered a new source of pain; acute appendicitis.
Scars grow with you. What is little more than a sliver on an adult, across the abdomen of a two year old is a gape of torn fabric, seams held tenuously close by a dozen overlarge stitches. Twelve years later, curving under the sleek of a youth’s dissolving puppy fat, it was a grinning maw, pursed in disapproval, the stitches below a thin layer of dermis, swollen and gone to black.
I did not know then, I do not know now, why my parents never took me back to the hospital, or to the doctor, to have the stitches from that appendix operation removed. In that long ago now, after my murder, it grinned at me like a badly drawn clown’s mouth. Taking tweezers, one day, I dug at the skin, opened a small, ragged hole, only a little blood, got a grip on the pulpy thread, and pulled it out. The dead mouth stitch had the taint of a rotten tooth. I didn’t do them all at once, just a few at a time over several months; the relief upon extracting them, similarly palpable. The skin immediately after, red and inflamed. When eventually they were all gone, the mouth had become merely a scar, and there was a kind of silence from a voice I didn’t even know had been shouting.
As I said before, I would never want to inflict the violence of these events again on my parents. They have had already a lifetime of all our familiar troubles. Nor is my father willing to discuss, or even acknowledge this part of his history. Doubtless, he has his own measure of private griefs. Still, this history formed me at least as much as I have formed it, and thus, in the hope of approaching some kind of understanding, I can only turn to those who have spent years exploring trauma, and the ways of its healing. Professor Judy Atkinson, a Jiman and Bundjalung woman, in her book, Trauma Trails: Recreating Songlines describes how Charles Figley in his book Trauma and its Wake, portrays “the traumatic effect of extraordinarily stressful experiences as being like the waves created by a stone cast into a pond.” Later, she extends the metaphor, so when we see a man entwined and inescapably falling into repeated patterns of trauma, “observed in isolation, his behaviour [makes] no sense,” but “linked to other layers of experiences and trauma, the behaviour has meaning.”
Here, I pick up the stone, throw it back in time, wondering if the flow itself defrays the ripples on its surface, or if I myself have mistaken the river’s changing surface for implacable yet fragile glass.
An article in Allen’s Indian Mail reports that, on June 11th, 1871, upon turning back after a day’s tiger hunting with four other Europeans, George Dignum, recently employed by the Oudh and Rohilkhand Railway, died in gruesome circumstances in a “horrible gun accident.”
Some ten years earlier, on Saturday the 21st of December 1861, The South Australian Advertiser reported a case of Wife Desertion before the Police Court,
Adelaide, in which George Dignum was ordered to pay maintenance to his wife.
The South Australian Register discusses the case in somewhat more eloquent language. Undoubtedly for a different class of reader, one in which the child Louisa Jane Dignum, née Baker, cannot be mentioned at all.
That child, fathered by an unknown, unknowable, erased Aboriginal man a year or so earlier, was my great, great grandmother.
We can know almost nothing of the love, or the violence of their union. We can only know that, despite being the young daughter of a prominent watchmaker of the town, she was married off to someone who perhaps at first saw some advantage in the marriage, but soon didn’t; though forced to pay maintenance, henceforth refused to live with her. That left in destitute circumstances, Louisa’s parents refused support. We can only surmise, with a sort of contrary logic, in the violence enacted against her in the wake of that vacated union, that, on balance, it was one of love.
We can know almost nothing of the intervening years, between the inept tiger hunter’s death, and the ill-treated wife’s second marriage in 1877. Louisa Jane Baker Dignum married a young ship’s carpenter, James Owens, from Bermondsey, England, in 1877. Had eight children over the next 13 years, died, reportedly of a chill a short while after giving birth in 1890, at 32 years of age. According to scant family lore, James took to drink, the baby died of neglect, the other children were placed in orphanages. James Owens was never heard from again.
My great-grandmother was Louisa’s first daughter, Clara Isabella, my grandmother was Yvonne, born on 29th February 1922. A date with its own significance. Her father died while she was still an infant. There is no remembered history here. Only grained entries in registers and files. She married a Welshman, Oswald, and had two boys. I have a vague memory of hearing that mellifluous accent once or twice as a child. That marriage again did not last. Yvonne survived on what her haughtier relatives called an Aboriginal pension, and by cleaning houses. The boys, according to a relative who contacted me through a genealogical website, were often shuffled amongst an extensive network of family and friends. Whether for convenience or to hide them, I cannot say.
My mother’s family were from old English Tasmanian colonists, and more recent Scottish immigrants. Her father’s father the last piper of a grand Scottish castle that collapsed with the decline of imperial aristocracy in the early 20th century. Reduced to working as an itinerant farm labourer, he held tightly to that Scots immigrant culture that you can find still celebrated in northern NSW.
He never spoke one word to us. I remember when we moved from Sydney to where my mother’s family lived, she still unwed, with a tribe of woolly haired children in tow, with this strange, lost, handsome, dark, obsequious, angry man that she loved, whom everyone saw as Aboriginal except, it seemed himself. The grim set of my mother’s father’s mouth, a proud scar of abhorrence and disapproval.
In the face of a legacy of abandonment, a history of shame, a present of denial, disapproval, racism – that first year I almost died was the first year Australia gave Aboriginal people the same rights as everyone else under the Australian Constitution – in the face of that history, that truth, keeping a wounded child at home was not an act of neglect, but of protection.
5. Epilogue
Truth is fraught. It cannot be found easily in pennants or reports. I can only tell you that the events described here are true; their impacts, more so. Of course the names have been changed, to protect the guilty, and the innocent. The tiles at Rob Hughes’s place may have had urns, not lyres, the columns, unadorned cast iron in peeling forest green, rather than fading bevelled concrete. The scree-littered cliff, less steep, but deeper. Some things are indelible; the burnt husk of a car, hunkered like a monster. The clamour of summer bushfires. Far from home, the glisten of leopard-spotted seashells. A small, cruel smile in black and white print. My face a mask.
Language is violence. Even more so; language that speaks as the arbiter and delimitation of an overwhelming truth is violence. Such truth necessarily encompasses a calculated omission. This is a kind of mathematics without whose calculation we would not have had Hiroshima or Auschwitz, terra nullius or the Trail Of Tears. As Judy Atkinson says, we do not heal through commissions, inquiries, courts or histories; we heal through telling stories.
In his novel of the life of the Eora resistance leader who defied British colonisation, Pemulway: Rainbow Warrior, Eric Willmot tells the story of a girl Yanada, who, torn between love and commitment, a conflict threatening an imminent violence harmful to all her people, goes mad. In the tale, the Eora storyman finds in that madness three parts of truth. The first part; the truth that is readily apprehensible to all; that she is mad. The second; the truth that is in the minds of others; that her madness can destroy the community, and therefore she must be banished and disallowed from having children, a socially necessitated truth.
And the third part of truth; a truth that we can only learn for ourselves; a truth not readily apparent; that she (and I, and we), caught in the midst, a catalyst for trauma and disharmony, brought herself into madness. This is Hamlet, and Jesus, and Cobain and Vincent, and Sylvia Plath, and also that nameless, mumbling wreck you ignore when crossing the street. Yanada became the Moon, and a reminder. We more ordinary souls, less poetic emblems.
I once had a birthmark on my thigh, tan against my more florid skin, the shape and colour of an autumn-mottled gum leaf. I had hazel eyes; blue and grey and brown, the colour of a winter river, but like my tenuous grip, both have faded, the melanin dispersed, my eyes gone to blue. Which is not to say that these things, and so many others, that shaped me are gone, only that they are now beneath the surface, unseen, and yet indelible. We do not diminish, even in these things that wound us, but grow deeper roots, more knotted bark, scarred, but with a more earthen weight in the way we stratify time.
Time and place are blurred, by distance, by memory, by trauma, even the pain is a distant ache; hiraeth, as the Welsh say, like a half-forgotten summer, to which we can never return.
This is my story. True in its way. In each way that matters. If we are not careful, if we forego the poetry of our hurts, for a cruel and more exacting iteration, blunt, documentary, transparent, a kind of truth could be easily drawn out, like a rotten tooth, like a stitch in time’s almost healed wound. In that too close discovery, a final betrayal, an inexplicable crime, another act of irreconcilable violence.
Bibliography
Allen’s Indian Mail (18 July 1871) ‘Horrible Gun Accident’, Allen’s Indian Mail, Trove, National Library of Australia
Hannah Arendt (1963) Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil. Viking, New York.
Eric Willmot (2021) Pemulway: The Rainbow Warrior. (Reprint), Brio Books, Sydney.
Donna J Bridge (2012) interviewed in, ’Your memory is like the Telephone Game – each time you recall an event, your brain distorts it.’ by Marla Paul in, Northwestern Now.
Judy Atkinson (2002). Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines. Spinifex Press, North Melbourne
The South Australian Advertiser (21 December 1861) ‘Wife Desertion’, The South Australian Advertiser, Trove, National Library of Australia.
The South Australian Register (19 December 1861) ‘Desertion’, The South Australian Register, Trove, National Library of Australia.
