Читать книгу The Tom Wills Picture Show - Martin Flanagan - Страница 9

Six months later. A tent now stands where the wagon stopped. Elizabeth emerges, a basket with clothing in her hands, no longer pregnant. From within the tent a baby can be heard crying. She is a pale, nervous woman. We see a sudden look of fear on her face. The camera shows us what she has seen – a group of blacks camped round a waterhole several hundred metres down the slope to the west. Then she looks around, crying out, “Tom! Tom!” Dropping the basket, she cries out, “Horatio! Horatio!”, and runs away towards a group of men cutting redgums 100 metres away. “The blacks are here. The blacks are here and I can’t find Tom”. For the first time we see fear in Horatio’s face. He rushes to the tent, looks down, sees the blacks camp which has appeared in the night. To one side a group of four or five kids are playing a ball game with a stuffed possum skin. One of the kids is white. It’s Tom.

“Get the guns,” says Elizabeth.

“No, no, no,” says Horatio, putting a calming hand across his wife’s front. “No, no, leave this to me. I’ve dealt with native folk before. I lived among them when I was a whaler”.

Horatio strides down the slope and into the blacks’ camp sporting a big smile. He walks among them nodding and smiling, showing obsequious respect. Stopping in front of an old woman, he leans forward and puts on a performance, gesturing elaborately. “You – me – the same. Me – worship – the Sun”. He point upwards to the sky and makes a bowing motion which then becomes a little dance. “At night – big black – me worship the moon”. The old woman’s impassive face at first looks puzzled. Then a woman to her left cackles at the sheer stupidity of Horatio’s dance and the old woman laughs, too. Encouraged, Horatio continues, “Me jump-up whitefeller like William Buckley” He holds up his white skin. “Me blackfeller underneath”. Judging Horatio to be mad but harmless, the tension dissipates. Horatio believes he has persuaded the blacks he is one of them. He turns and firmly takes his small son’s arm.

“Tom, we are going,” he says.

The kid resists. “But I don’t want to.”

Horatio pulls Tom away, nodding and smiling to the Aboriginal people he passes.

The game of Marngrook, as played by the Latjilatji Aboriginals in Victoria; from William Blandowski’s expeditions, published 1857.