Читать книгу Butterflies and Demons - Eva Chapman - Страница 11

CHAPTER 1

Impact

Adelaide Environs, 1820s

Kirrila scooped up crabs in the gentle surf of Ngaltingga. A movement along the shore caught her eye. She straightened her back and scanned the edge of the bay, shaded at this time of day by tall cliffs.

Just a pelican diving into the sea, she decided. Her daughter poked her katta into the wet sand, fascinated at the flurries of ‘surf vermin’, as her language described crabs, scuttling away from Kirrila’s net. An unusual sound distracted her mother, but before Kirrila could look around, an arm grabbed her.

‘Moorundie,’ she hissed, surmising wrongly that these enemy river men had chanced on her, a lone woman, while they raided the sea cliffs for red ochre. Her child let out a squeal. She twisted around and saw the girl slip from the grasp of a pale man with strange garb all over his body. Terror gripped her – ghost-skins from Karta: just as the Ngarrindjeri had warned. She screamed at her daughter to run. Both assailants bundled her roughly towards a boat that appeared around the edge of the rocks. Gagging at their odour she clawed at the sand with her toes, willing it to suck her back. A thumping resounded behind them. Could she be saved? A ghost-skin picked up what looked like a shiny katta, and pointed.

Crack!

Thunder ripped apart the blue of the sky. She glimpsed her uncle, a beloved wise burka, as he fell. Her head banged on the edge of the boat as it heaved into the sea. She retched.

Adelaide, 1950

Billy put on his cowboy suit and placed both guns in their holsters. He had an execution to perform. Reffos had dared move into his street. He swaggered out into the blazing sun that flooded Commercial Road. The other kids were waiting. He saw the refugee standing outside number 48. Gee she was tiny! Couldn’t be more than three years old. She smiled shyly. He hesitated.

‘We don’t like you,’ he heard his sister say. ‘We don’t want you here. Go back to where you came from. You smell. We’re gonna shoot you dead.’ Billy saw the uncertainty flicker over the small girl’s face. She obviously didn’t understand English. Spoke some awful gobbledygook language, no doubt.

‘We’re gonna shoot you dead!’ repeated his sister, pointing to Billy in his cowboy regalia. The reffo looked at him – looked at the guns in their holsters. Terror strafed her face. Billy’s hands rested lightly on his weapons. He knew what he had to do. The other kids stepped back. The asphalt of the road shimmered in the heat. Billy strode towards his prey.

Kua rushed on to the beach. His isolation in the Murlawirra gully, customary after his recent circumcision, had been interrupted by cries and explosions that shattered the peace of the summer day. He saw the boat disappear into the Wongayerlo, the water where the sun always sank. He saw the fallen body of his uncle, his blood staining the white sand. He rushed forward, but stopped at the old man’s signal, ‘There’s nothing you can do.’

Kua gaped at the hole in his uncle’s stomach. He watched the slow ooze of blood, remembering its warmth on his own body as it bathed him during his first initiation. How proud he had felt to be anointed by the grace of this precious fluid which was now draining away. The old man’s eyes steadily met his. Kua trembled at their power, his body still resonating with the chant his uncle sang during his second initiation. It charged his every sinew with potent energy, and overrode the searing pain at the core of his budding manhood. How honoured he had been, to be intimately branded by the male dignity and wisdom of his ancestors. The young man drank in what his uncle was communicating with his eyes.

‘It’s now up to you, Kua Kertamerru Murlawirra. A heavy burden is placed on your young shoulders. The white man is here in our sacred land. It falls upon you to take on this new and unknown challenge. Just look to the stars, look to the land, look into the wellsprings. All will be revealed.’ The lustre faded from the dark eyes. Kua was left implacably alone.

Svitochka was very excited about being in Adelaide. She had spent the first week in a Displaced Persons’ Hostel on the banks of the River Torrens. She was enraptured by the black swans that glided by. At last her endless travelling was over. Sharp imprints of a tumultuous past were beginning to fade. Glimmers on the water triggered flashbacks of the searchlights of border guards, when she escaped from Czechoslovakia; grunts of swans reminded her of two men who seemed to be hurting her mother, on a dark night in Austria; the azure of the sky echoed the blue monotony of the sea voyage to Australia.

She felt peaceful sitting by this river. The land was welcoming her, caressing her. She half shut her eyes and imagined kangaroos drinking at the water’s edge. She hadn’t seen any of these exotic creatures yet, even though fellow migrants on the boat claimed they would be hopping all over Australia. Svitochka was oblivious to the fact that she was sitting on an Aboriginal site, where Tandanya Rock once stood. For thousands of years this had been the sacred centre of the Tandanya, or Red Kangaroo people. In 1950, nothing commemorated the fact: no plaque, no sign. Unbe-knownst to Svitochka, the ancient energy was seeping into her bones, giving her a strength she would need for the arduous years ahead.

Kangaroo Island, as it was dubbed by white-skins, was known by Kirrila’s people as Karta – the land of the dead. It was uninhabited for generations before white sealers and sailors landed there. Kirrila was thrown into a loathsome existence; used at night for the carnal gratification of her captors, and by day as a slave. She was forced to hunt, cook, fetch and carry. Other black women on the island suffered the same predicament; harlots and slaves to a motley bunch of pirates and sealers, who, here at the end of the world, traded with passing ships. Some slaves had been captured from Van Diemen’s Land and others from Ngarrindjeri country. Many tried to escape, but were shot while running or savagely beaten when caught. Some drowned as they swam out to sea, their bodies washing up a few days later.

A child of one of the unfortunate women attempted to run away. He was caught and his ear sliced off as punishment. Kirrila tried to ease his pain as he writhed in agony from the wound. Hungering for her own children, she cradled him tenderly until death released him. At night while her captors snored, she walked down to the sea and sluiced out her insides, to rid her body of the fluids spilled so carelessly into her precious place – a place prepared for love and motherhood by the secrets of the women in her clan, especially by her kammammi, her maternal grandmother. She held that dear face in her mind’s eye, as she bathed in the cleansing sea.

Kakirra, the moon, had risen full and cast her shimmering light over Kirrila’s body, helping her to feel beautiful again. Kirrila’s name meant ‘the shine of the full moon’. She had been given this name because she was born when the moon was fully pregnant. Kirrila grew up with a special affinity to Kakirra, and her knowledge of all her cycles was passed down to her from her kammammi. Men preparing to hunt would consult her about weather patterns the moon augured; a big ring around a ripe moon meant big rains – a small ring, light rains. Right now, this moon, the ring slipping a little to the side, suggested an occasionally blustery south wind. A tiny reflection of the silver orb glistened in the tears that welled in her eyes. Here, in the land of the dead, ruled by ignorant boorish white-skins, this special knowledge entrusted to her was useless.

Jeanette, sitting at her front window, watched the trio walk along Commercial Road. Just the oddest people she had ever seen. The man, an old-fashioned suit draping his thin frame, peered at her gate trying to discern a number. He heaved a cumbersome suitcase in front of him, the faded brown leather plastered with labels. The woman, strikingly pretty, stumbled behind with another suitcase. It was the little girl Jeanette was drawn to, even though she looked strange too. Instead of a normal dress, she wore long pants and lace-up boots. Her fair hair was braided in plaits just like Heidi on the front cover of the book Jeanette was reading. Jeanette was struck by the irresistible happiness that radiated from the girl’s face. She wanted to be her friend. She stared ruefully down at the leg irons which rendered her an unwilling prisoner at her own window, and watched the family pass by. Jeanette knew where they were going. Miss Bressler next door needed someone to look after her frail, elderly mother, and had applied for Displaced Persons’ help.

‘There’s lots of them coming over – refugees, or ‘reffos’, as they’re called,’ her father had explained at the dinner table. ‘They are from Eastern Europe. Their homes and lives have been destroyed by the war. So they’ve nowhere else to go, poor bastards!’ Jeanette’s father, a veteran of the mammoth struggle against Rommel in the North African desert, was no stranger to the misery of war. He never could bring himself to talk about it. Although he managed to miraculously escape the bullets that killed his mates, he felt helpless in the face of the cruel polio virus that crippled his only child.

Jeanette wondered if Eastern Europe was anywhere near Switzerland, where her storybook heroine Heidi lived. She was intrigued that Heidi’s real name was Adelheid, which became Adelaide in English. What could this foreign girl’s name be?

Kua Murlawirra spied a sailing ship from a rocky outcrop up near Yurrebilla, the ears of the giant ancestor Ngano, who lay sleeping above the wide Tandanya plain. Many seasons had passed since that fateful day when his pangkarra was torn apart. He continuously berated himself for not spotting the boat that stole Kirrila. Why, he could see the tiniest movement of prey in the far distance, and spear it with deadly accuracy. He also berated himself for not protecting the tract of land, the pangkarra, passed down to him. Other male members of the clan had been hunting in the wirra that fateful day, while he recuperated from his circumcision, wearing his yudna for the first time. Since then he had undertaken three more initiations. He proudly fingered the tattoos, received during wilyaru, the final ceremony. These marked him as a fully-fledged warrior of the Tandanya, the Red Kangaroo people, or Kaurna as they would one day be called. As a fully initiated warrior, he hoped he could live up to the many secret lessons imparted to him. He officiated at the banbabanbalya, where he and neighbouring clans, particularly the Ngarrindjeri in the south and Ngadjuri and Narungga in the north and west, gathered to discuss important business. The current all-consuming topic was the encroachment of the white-skins, and what should be done about them.

A central meeting place was at the Tandanya Rock, sacred site of the Red Kangaroo Dreaming, down by the Karrawirraparri. In view of the black swans, the banbabanbalya were volatile affairs and, interspersed with dancing and singing, often went on for weeks. Some men, especially the Ngarrindjeri, wanted to spear every white man they saw. The white-skins from Karta had stolen their women; ‘kringal kop’, ‘nose first’, they called them disparagingly – who with their protruding white snouts sniffed after their women. The Ngarrindjeri were more warlike than the Tandanya people, who traditionally had the role of educators and advisors. Having undergone hunting initiation and proudly bearing the scars, Kua Murlawirra could wield a spear as skilfully as any Ngarrindjeri, but knew spearing white men was not the answer. The banbabanbalya also focussed on the terrible diseases that appeared at the same time as the whites. Smallpox, as the whites called it, and other alien scourges were decimating their numbers. There were so many new influences and big changes that had to be absorbed.

The ship Kua Murlawirra was watching anchored at the mouth of the Ngankaparinga, the women’s river. Three white men came ashore and camped on a sandbank. The leader of the party was a kind looking man who seemed to carry no weapons, except perhaps for a strange round implement which flashed in the autumn sun. He kept looking at it and making marks on something that looked like a dried, pale piece of bark. Kua, spear in hand, approached cautiously. The white man surprised him by coming forward, smiling broadly and shaking his hand. He pointed to the river, indicating he wanted to know the name. Kua hesitated. He knew the women would be furious if he disclosed it. Its secret crevices had been their hiding place from unwelcome men, for generations.

‘Burka-Paringa.’ He improvised quickly. This meant ‘Wise Man River’.

‘Pooke-Parringa,’ repeated the white man as he made marks on the pale piece of bark. Kua pointed at it quizzically.

‘Paper,’ he was informed.

‘Pepa,’ repeated the black man, marvelling at its smooth finish and wondering how white man could construct fibres so thin.

There were so many things he wanted to know. Why were they here? Where did they come from? How were the pelts they wore so fine? After exploring the foothills, the party packed up camp and went back to the ship. It seemed a harmless encounter.

Kua Murlawirra was puzzled. Others berated him, especially his young friend Ityamai-itpina, who grumbled, ‘we should have speared the lot!’ But discussions with elders confirmed the rightness of a peaceful way forward.

Stan Berwick walked home along Commercial Road from his job as hardware assistant on Unley Road. He lingered at number 48, peering over the high front hedge. He had heard unsettling news at the shop; Mrs Bressler’s spinster daughter was engaging some foreign people to help her.

‘Reffos!’ he announced ominously to his wife and two children. ‘Reffos have moved into the road. Can you believe it? I thought this a respectable neighbourhood.’ He banged the table. Forks clattered. Each evening, as soon as he closed his front door, the mealy-mouthed shop assistant metamorphosed into a bullying thug. His first task was to mete out punishment to Billy, his eight-year-old, who was always in trouble.

‘You wait till your father gets home!’ Molly Berwick constantly admonished. Tonight, to Billy’s relief, it was the reffos down the road who incurred his father’s pent up wrath, not his beleaguered backside.

‘If I had my way, I’d shoot the bastards!’ growled Stan darkly.

After tea Billy and his sister went outside and approached her friends playing hopscotch on the pavement.

‘Do you know there are some reffos at number 48?’

‘Ooh yeah! We’ve seen’em. They’re horrible. We godda get rid of’em.’

Captain Collet Barker was pleased with his successful expedition. The fertile plain looked promising for future settlement, which his military commanders in England had asked him to investigate. They were a jot tetchy about the French increasingly nosing around this southern part of New Holland – ‘Even devising dictionaries of the language of the inhabitants, you know – awfully worrying, by Jove!’ Barker had seen very few of these inhabitants on his exploration so far, but was pleased with the brief contact he had made. The man he had shaken hands with by the river had a good strong grip and friendly eyes. He was reminded of Mokare, a Noongar man he had befriended in Western Australia. But Barker’s assignment was not yet over. He was also charged with finding the mouth of the River Murray – a possible harbour for this potential colony. The inlet into the Pooke-Parringa was unsuitable, and another a few miles north looked swampy.

Anchoring his ship further down the coast, he and his party set out overland for the river. On reaching the Murray mouth, Barker noticed a high sand bar on the other side and decided to swim over to have a better vantage point. He ignored the remonstrations of his companions, ‘The river is dangerously high!’ and ‘Surely this is taking duty too far.’ Or ‘Captain Sturt has warned that the natives are unfriendly!’ Barker felt totally confident in his relations with natives, having befriended Mokare and many other black men during his last post at King George’s Sound. He stripped, and jumped into the fast-flowing river, his trusty compass strapped to his head. His companions timed his crossing, nine minutes and fifty-eight seconds to be exact, and then watched him disappear over the sand bar. A couple of hours later they thought they heard a cry. Exceedingly anxious by now, they made a large fire and waited. Nightfall came, bringing with it the ominous sounds of a native dirge. A chain of small fires lit the sand hills.

‘All night did those dismal sounds echo along that lonely shore,’ wrote Barker’s batman. What he did not yet know was that a trio of Ngarrindjeri had spotted Barker’s tracks in the dunes. All three men had lost women to brutal white-skins who had shot their clansmen with their ‘crack-a-backs’. And now here was a loathed white-skin on their territory! Naked. That was puzzling. Was he carrying a ‘crack-a-back’? He held something round and suspicious which glistened in the sun. They approached cautiously. One threw a spear that went through the white man’s thigh. Barker turned in horror, and staggered forward, shouting,

‘No, no, stop. You don’t understand. I am a friend! I have no gun. Stop!’

Another spear entered his left leg. Barker ran for the water.

‘No, no! For the love of God, I implore you!’

The next spear went through his back.

Svitochka begged her mother to let her out the front gate to play. Tatiana, overwhelmed by all her new chores, snapped. ‘Play out the back!’ Svitochka, hearing the shouts and screams of the children, persisted. Tatiana relented and opened the front gate latch, which the child couldn’t reach.

Blinking in the bright sunlight, Svitochka saw a pretty girl with ringlets coming towards her. She smiled shyly. The children stopped playing. Sudden silence. She pressed back uncertainly into the gate. It didn’t budge. The girl with the ringlets approached threateningly. Svitochka’s smile faded. A torrent of words rained upon her. She didn’t understand them, but knew they were unkind. Her plaits hung heavily. She wished they would transform into ringlets. Then she caught the glint of metal at the other end of the street. Border guards on motorbikes flashed before her eyes. A big boy with guns strode menacingly towards her. A frozen scream rose in her throat. Chillingly, she knew this was her execution.

Kirrila ached to be back on her pangkarra; to laugh and squabble with the women; to gather kangatta berries; to dig for roots with her katta; to sing the songs associated with each fruit of the earth. Even the humble radish, the kandara, had its own special song. She missed her husband, who had been away hunting when she had been dragged off. Their joining had been a sparkling one. She remembered with fondness how she had to carry her own fire-stick from her family group, and join it with that of her intended. And what a ‘kindling of fire’ their marriage had been. All danced under a pregnant moon, happy faces flickering in the conflagration of the joint fire-sticks.

Enough was enough. She had to leave this bad place. She had swelled with child too many times, and had just strangled another at birth. She knew she couldn’t do it again. She waited until the moon was full, weather signs favourable, and her captors full of rum. She made up the fire as usual and heated up stones for the evening meal. She wrapped the wallaby she’d caught in leaves and placed it in the freshly dug kanyayappa containing the hot stones. After feasting on the wallaby, the men stretched out and drank copious amounts of a new consignment of rum.

Kirrila slipped away to the water’s edge. She trembled with exhilaration and fear; exhilaration that she was leaving this miserable existence, and fear of the arduous swim ahead. She doubted that anyone had ever made it, and moreover, she was not a sea person. Her people were of the land and that is where she longed to be more than anything else in the world, or at least die in the attempt. A light west wind nudged her gently as she struck out through the vast sea. The beautiful Kakirra was welling up in the east, her radiance flooding the waters. Kirrila swam slowly and steadily into her light.

Svitochka’s screams pierced the leaden stillness of Adelaide suburbia. Tatiana rushed out the front gate, grabbed her child and unleashed a torrent of Slavic abuse. The children scampered. She guided the sobbing Svitochka into the house, not noticing the ravaged face at next-door’s window. Jeanette, who had witnessed the whole scene, desperately attempted to stand on her leg irons, but had crashed forward on to the window ledge. Heidi, smiling in blonde plaits on the book cover, hurtled to the floor. Jeanette let out an agonised shriek as pain pierced her body. Tears rolled helplessly down her face.

Inside Number 48, Svitochka cried uncontrollably. Tatiana tried to shush her, as old Mrs Bressler was trying to rest. Svitochka sobbed as if her heart would break.

‘Don’t take any notice of them; they’re just stupid kids,’ pronounced Miss Bressler briskly, as she made a pot of tea.

There was a knock at the back door. It was Jeanette’s mother. She held out a tray of cakes to the weeping child.

‘These are from my daughter Jeanette. She invites you over to play.’

Svitochka didn’t understand the words but was arrested mid-sob at the sight of the cakes. They were all in the shapes of frogs. Two green, two white and two pink. She was instantly enchanted, and let her hot face and injured heart be soothed.

‘Zjaba,’ said Svitochka, smiling through tears, pointing at one. ‘Zjaba.’

‘Frog,’ corrected Miss Bressler, gently. ‘Frog.’

‘Flog,’ copied Svitochka, trying to get her tongue around the word. ‘Flog.’

1830, Newgate Prison, London

Edward Gibbon Wakefield was dreaming of a model British colony in Australia, where gentlemen capitalists would buy land at a good price even before they left Britain, and live in a ‘paradise of dissent’, freely practising whatever religion they pleased. Proceeds would pay for passages of labourers, thus not tarnishing the colony with the convict troubles plaguing other Australian settlements.

While most inmates were crammed together at the notorious Newgate Prison, Wakefield commanded a commodious cell, and even a serving maid. His habit of marrying or abducting a series of young heiresses had, as well as landing him in gaol, made him rather wealthy.

1830, Bedlam Lunatic Asylum, London

The Board of Governors were alerted to the fact that Apothecary Superintendent, Edward Wright MD, was found in the dark, in ‘the female basement... in a very intoxicated state with his clothes dishevelled’. On investigation, it was discovered that as well as behaving improperly with female patients, he had also been removing the heads of dead inmates, illegally. He was dismissed. After not being able to find a position in either England or Syria, he actively sought a role in the Dissenters’ Paradise of South Australia.

1833, Exeter, England

January 15th: John Jeffcott, Chief Justice of Sierra Leone was engaged to Flora Macdonald, grand-daughter of her namesake, the Jacobite heroine.

May 1: King William IV knighted John Jeffcott.

May 9: Sir John Jeffcott felt insulted by Dr Peter Hennis, over Flora Macdonald.

May 10: In a duel, Jeffcott fired prematurely and mortally wounded Hennis.

May 21: At the inquest, Sir John Jeffcott was found guilty of wilful murder.

This was a thorny problem!

What to do with a Chief Justice and Knight of the British

Empire who was guilty of murder?

Well, the new colony being set up in South Australia needed a Chief Judge…

Wauwe Woman: So our usurpers included a planner who was a kidnapping criminal, a judge who was a murderer, and a doctor who was a philandering drunkard with a penchant for beheading corpses?

Author: Oh, that’s just the beginning my dears. But I will be fair. There were some decent people too.

Wirra Woman: Hmmph! We are virtually extinct. Their decency didn’t save us!