They shanghaied him an' his wife, Sadie explained, they brought 'em from here to there.
'Cause once they take you to the institutions, they drum it all out of you, said Ruthie.
The language, it wasn't taught in our schools, said Sadie, drinking. And my grandmother, she wouldn't teach me, because it all ends in the white man's… — She trailed off.
So you don't remember anything from before?
Me an' him, we're still hunters, said Snake. Sit up in the tree, yes, you sit up in the trees waiting, then you jump off and catch that wallaby. An' cobra's good to eat. Good fish bait, too. Go to the river, look for the right kind of log. There's stinkin' logs and good ones. Willow logs and gum tree logs, those are the good ones. Dive down, cut off the log, you can smell the snake inside. Cobras is musky tasting. They taste like the tree they live in. Smell the leaf of the tree, smell the cobra.
Tell him about that time you saw the snake, said Ruthie to her husband.
Oh, said Rob. (Paint was peeling from the bricks behind him where Ruthie's chair nudged the wall between their house and the next house along the Street of Stares.) — Well, one time I was out in the bush an' I run into a big lizard. An' I seen his eyeballs, an' I saw his red, and then I knew it wasn't a lizard, but a fifteen-foot-long snake, an' it chased me. It chased me 'til dark, when I got on the road. Once they feel that hot tar, they can't go no more.
I watched the other three listen to this small story, which they had surely heard before, and saw how it seemed to bring them alive for a moment. Ruthie leaned back laughing with her arms across her belly. There is a connection between native people and animals which never seems to be lost. What do they see; what do they know? This is something that those of us who do not have native blood will never understand. (There are many intuitive secrets like this. Rob, for instance, was a dot painter. I asked him how he'd learned. — It's not teach yourself, he said, it's in there. I can tell straight away if a Koorie* fella's done it or some whitefella.) Something of this nature was occurring when Rob told the story of the snake. I have seen that same alertness and happiness enter the eyes of Canadian Inuit office managers, Ojibway prostitutes and Sioux panhandlers when somebody mentions a caribou, a beaver, a coyote, even an insect, and when I see it I envy those people because I do not have it. This was what Ruthie wanted to keep. — One time this big king cricket came in, she began. It was this big! It was lookin' at Rob.
An' she tell me to kill it, he said sourly.
Thank God we didn't kill it, because it was very rare.
That was the whole story, and then Sadie talked about how good wallabies tasted and Ruthie drank another V.B. and got sad again and said: Once they started feedin' the people on flour and treacle, we started gettin' fat. Before that there was no such thing as a fat aboriginal woman.
I got all that knocked out of me, said Rob with satisfaction. Eatin' all that junk food. They beat it right out of me. Now it don't tempt me.
Course we can't hunt what we want, either, said Ruthie. Like wallabies. Even though the government is killing those animals as pests, we get prevented.
It was about then that I understood that Ruthie with her pretty, mobile face was an ideologue, a militant. Everything she said was hard and inflexibly generalized. Oppression often seems to forge such people. Because the world they exist in is hostile, whatever analysis of their condition they build cannot be the graceful and perhaps unsound tower of the intellectual, who has the leisure and means to rebuild should some chance wind of malice or objective truth bring it down. People like Ruthie make fortresses of their convictions. They build guardedly, of heavy thoughts quarried from local reality. Her pure young face suffused itself with passion and sadness. She tried to sell me her T-shirt which said STOP BLACK DEATHS IN CUSTODY, but I didn't have any money left.
* Aboriginal.
So when you get up in the morning, what do you do? I said. Snake finished his V.B. and got the next. — Get up, he said, say hello to everyone, thank God we're still alive, that the pigs didn't kill us in our sleep.
The cops call it crime, said Ruthie. We call it survival. Well, look, I said. (I was getting a little tired of her.) If things could be different, how would you want them to be?
Don't ask us that! cried Ruthie, leaping to her feet. We just want what belongs to us!
We never signed no treaty, man, said Rob, sitting there with his beer clasped between his parted knees, tanned, bearded and grim. And they just took our land. Once we can get our land back, maybe we can get something. Whatever we get, it's better than nothing.
What land will they give you back? my friend Jenny asked naively.
Whatever they don't want.
We want land, said Ruthie greedily. We'd make money just like the fuckin' white people. Make us a million off that land.
Sadie smiled a little. — I'd buy a house, a car, and plant a big crop.*
I'd buy half a mountain and a river, said her husband quietly.
Why not just give us the mountain and the river? Ruthie shouted. It's ours.
She took the last V.B. in the case and popped it open. Then she whispered: They're gonna kill us, too. Just like everything else. We're gonna go extinct. Just like the animals.
No one said anything, and she drank half her beer in one go. Then she said: We don't come from monkeys. We're just here. We always were here, always will be.
After that, she poured the rest of the can down her throat.
So I walked up the Street of Stares, back toward Redfern Station where the sign said DANGER: LIVE WIRE ABOVE, and they watched me. (See how they visit and talk to each other here, Snake had said. In the rest of Sydney they can't sit and talk.) — They'd given me presents to remember them: a boomerang pulled off their. wall, and a catalogue of a dot painting exhibition in which they'd inscribed their names for me. Below hers Sadie wrote TRUE BLUE KOORIE. Then Snake wrote AUSTRALIANS ABORIGINAL. — I followed the wall that was muraled with boomerangs and suns and dot-painted flowers, that long wall that led away from the Street of Stares, riddled with forests of muraled meaning, inscribed with swooping lines like the long furrows that ran down Snake's arm at the hilt of his blade of bony muscle. That was the wall that now hid me from all the addicts who tried to sell me boomerangs, from Sadie, who'd shown me a dot painting with its snakes and snails and coils, from Rob, now disappeared to get high, from Snake and Ruthie who sat looking at the empty case of beer.
* Of marijuana.
COWBELLS
A steep land creaked with sap in the beech-green air. Ivy grew up the backs of trees, pretending to help them with lying green vertebrae, as meanwhile it sucked their strength. To live means both to strive like the ivy and to suffer like the trees. Dying unites both these elements in a painful struggle. Did the vegetation feel this? They say that plants and slaves do not feel. — Below tolled cowbells like a gamelon, rising through grasshoppers' seed-rattlings among the gone strawberries. Delicious green swellings of the mountain, those the ivy could not drain, but cows grazed them down to the thick. The cows scarcely moved, it seemed, but they ate all day, tearing off greenness with big bites. They gnawed more slowly than the lake-haze, which, hot and blue-white like the wrapper of a milk-chocolate bar, ate the summit, but of course what they gnawed on also took longer to grow back. Even as I watched, those mist-ringed hills of grass, flowers and cowshit (lake and sky both white) were regurgitated. The cows, on the other hand, did chew their cud sometimes, but the grass remained as short as a soldier's hair. Of course the cows' lives were passing. Bronze bells clanged. Now again squatted the haze like a red cow splayed down, gazing stupidly at nothing; once more the hills were lost, but the cowbells still rang. They told milkmaids where the cows were; they did not tell the cows anything. When John Donne wrote what I already knew, that my companions' death-knell is also mine, he failed to map out why I need to hear it. Perhaps the bell does not toll for me. Why not suppose that its real purpose is to keep God apprised of where I am, so that in His good time He can lead me into the slaughterhouse? Perhaps the inevitable needs no warning. That was why the cows' lives rang on and the cows did not listen.