Deerubin

Deerubin

One summer day, a lot of years ago, when everything was still because of a big heat, except the cicadas, which clicked and rubbed their wings, and drilled out the silence, my father, brother and I went to dig yams by the river Deerubin. It was late afternoon and the surrounding countryside was the colour of soft, yellow gold. The long leaves were soft, too, and green against the dry grass. They blew about heavily and lazily in the heat. But when the dry wind stirred them up, they flicked without pattern and the tree branches heaved hugely in waves.

If we travelled a long way, my brother carried me on his back, such as on this day. I was about four years old and he was about thirteen. He was going to be initiated soon. He moved quickly and was built lightly. He was strong, almost stronger than my uncle was. My brother moved before he knew he moved, or why, or of what might follow. These things he only thought about later.

I remember my father well from this day. He was younger than I am now. He was very strong and muscular and stronger than my uncle was. He was my brother's father, whereas I am my mother's son. Unlike my adult face, which is chubby and round, like my mother's was, my father's face was angular and handsome, and very full of wisdom and good nature. He cared for my brother and I greatly.

Through the long grass we walked, through the low bushes we walked, through the river reeds and the paddocks of corn and maize we walked. The sun was getting lower but there was plenty of light. Deerubin would lead us into the mouth of the sun if we were to have followed it all the way. My brother and I squatted next to my father at the edge of the river, Deerubin. I watched my father dig yams from the riverbank and I listened as he explained to my brother and me where to find and how to dress them. Collecting yams was a woman's work, not a man's. But my father said: "it is important you learn." Our mother was ill, and the other women were ill, at any rate. "It is important you learn our ways regardless of who teaches you." He said, "the whites won't be here forever, and when they leave, we go back to the way we were. We get on with the job and we don't trust the next wave of newcomers as friends as we had the first." When my father washed yams in the river, energy jumped from one muscle to another, like notes in a song. His hair was thick and curly and hung to his shoulders, with something like a part in the middle. I loved the way he smiled. He was a kind man. When he laughed, his whole body laughed. I loved eating mashed yams with him too. They were soft and sweet. I still taste them even though I have not eaten one yam since the three of us sat by Deerubin on that day.

What happened then? Why did my life change?

I never saw the events that followed, except through my brother's eyes. My father threw me inside a hollow log and pulled me out later when it was all over. I remember the blaze of red and yellow flame and black smoke afterwards. I remember the rush of grass fire. I remember the night inundating the space of day like the river tide creeping over the land. I remember the whinnying of the burning horse. On this day, my father saved the lives of my brother and I and, with the help of one of the deceased, he took the lives of two men, the woman's life, and that of her baby, as well as the life of a horse.

My brother hid up a tree. He hated white people. He resented the kindly nature of my father. He wanted to fight them, young as he was. My father and brother argued when the whites and their horses were still on their way; but my father made him hide. He bowed to my father's word; however, he positioned himself in the tree so that he could see everything.

The whites grew maize and corn along Deerubin. In the hot summer, the crop was tall and dry, and this particular crop was neglected for a season or more. Really, it was comprised of layers of combustible dearth. However, we needed fire to soften the yams. So we built a firebreak of mud between the fire and the upper bank, to keep the fire away from the old crop of corn and maize. We didn't take any chances.

But they rode to investigate. They were armed. When they arrived they saw my father sitting peaceably beside the fire, softening yams. There were two men, each with a horse, and a woman riding also. She cradled her infant. My brother and I couldn't understand the white language, and our father understood only some of what was said. The whites were skinny and undernourished. The infant was ill, the woman sour. Though it was hot, their bodies were cloaked in filthy thick clothes. It was the early days of their nation and no one fared well, not the whites, not ourselves. They hadn't thought to jump in the river for a wash, and I smelt their unwashed odours.

There are some things we fear, as a possum fears the dog. The possum and dog don't have to meet. The fear is sound nonetheless.

The farmers yelled violently and roughly, ''What are you doing here? This land is ours, ya nigga."

"This land is the land's" my father said. His tone was appreciative and conciliatory.

"You're burning our crops, that's what you're doing."

I think that the farmers were looking for a reason to murder. They wanted to bury a body in a vain hope their problems would be set to by the maggots also. Acts of war rarely occur in happy times.

One of the farmers unfurled a whip and struck my father, cursing him. Pink cockatiels flocked from the dark branches of surrounding trees. My brother saw his father being struck and he noted that my father was prepared to accept the punishment. He moaned indignantly, and without heed. The farmers looked at the tree where he was hiding, at where the sound came from. My brother could hide well. His body fit the shape of the tree branches. They couldn't see him but the second farmer, the one who hadn't pulled the whip, acted stupidly and aggressively. It was his turn, as if the blooding was shared. He took his rifle from the holster that was strapped to the horse and, in one movement swung it around, aimed it, and shot into the tree where my brother was hiding. My father heard his own death in the white man's effort to kill his son. My father was not a kindly man now, but a warrior. He moved quicker than the farmers could imagine, gathering every stone within reach and pelting the farmer who had shot into the tree. A large rock hit him in the chest, on the heart, with tremendous force, and knocked him from his chestnut horse backward into the maize. The chestnut horse bolted.

The other farmer drew back his whip, arched his arm and released the whip uncertainly forward. My father tore it from his hand. The farmer was temporarily unarmed and his mate was wheezing for breath in the sponge of bent, old maize. The woman might have been ferocious but she was hampered by the needs of the baby. She was thwarted by confusion. During this moment the whites were vulnerable. My brother signalled from the tree, which assured my father he was okay. To my father's thinking, there was nothing lost and there was nothing to gain by fighting. Therefore he would be victorious if the battled ceased. My father turned both his hands outward and held his arms away from his body and took a step back from the group of whites. He wanted to talk with them and draw attention away from his son in the tree. He wanted peace. The farmer on his horse tried to understand what was going on around him. Instinctively he knew my father had withdrawn from battle and he knew there might be other blacks he hadn't reckoned for and that it would be better not to incite the hidden blacks, if in fact there were any. He looked at the woman and child, towards the tree where my brother still hid, dead or not, he couldn't tell at the time, and to the other farmer, who lay painfully on the ground. The event had twisted into something awful and he wished it hadn't occurred and that he could just ride away with his cousin, wife, infant and his sole surviving livestock, namely the horses. But the woman's horse became excited and this was enough to panic the confused farmer and tip the balance back to fighting. He drew his pistol and took aim at my father and had plenty of time to clap a ball into his high, wise forehead. He had plenty of time but the woman screamed. She screamed at him to stop and, cradling her infant, spurred her horse and leaned towards her husband and pushed him in the shoulder spoiling his aim. The ball of shot missed my father and dropped with a harmless splat into Deerubin, which drank it without a worry. This confused the farmer further and his querying, hurt silence overwhelmed even the squawk of pink cockatiels. The woman saved my father and ultimately me and my brother. But inadvertently she ended her life, as well as the lives of her people, and her child.

Instantly my father turned around and scooped almost the entire fire into a shell of strong bark that he had used earlier to gather up the yams. He turned and ran up the bank in a step or two and, at the edge of the maize fields, flung the hot coals and fire at the farmer who had shot at him. The fire became a spray of hot, fine dust and covered people, horses, and field alike. The hot rocks bounced from the bodies of the people and livestock and ignited the old, dry maize and surrounding combustible undergrowth as if it was fuel inside a baker's oven.

The remaining two horses reared, throwing their riders. One horse bolted; the other toppled, falling onto the farmer with the gun, the woman and the infant. The woman took a lot of the impact and must have been knocked out, because she lay very still and quiet. God must have been merciful and prevented her from seeing her infant die in the next moment or two. Everything happened too fast. The moment shrivelled into something too small to escape from. There was the sizzle and the rush and then flame and noise couldn't be separated. Later my brother described the pain on my father's face as he rushed to the fire and tried to pull the woman and infant to safety, but the fire put up a wall. My brother came down from the tree, and when my father saw him, he came to his senses and told him to get our things. The child's crying stopped, as did the horse's whinnying. The horse and people and infant were dead, and the fire spread like the spirit of a fast horse galloping. The wind was low and gusty. My father tore his hair. He never meant to kill the people but only to distract them. But he knew he had to kill them, too.

My father called and shook me from the log. I scurried out like a chubby possum tipped from bark. I was thrown across my father's back and told to hold on. My arms and legs were like straps, and I strapped myself to him. We ran along the bank of Deerubin. There was no field, no land near Deerubin. Everything that once had looked like land was now a yellow and red flame. Towers of smoke twisted madly to the sky.

We arrived back at camp close to dawn. My father circumambulated to avoid being followed. Our tribe had about two days to live. Around two hundred people would die. The exact number would be two hundred and three. My grandmother must have known I would survive. It was the reason she kept me to herself while we broke camp and moved through the bush until the white murderers found us. During these two days she told me our stories.

She said: "Your name is Mirawong." Your name means ''teller of our lives". Don't forget it. You tell everyone about us. We always had food and we never fought amongst ourselves. We were friendly to the Europeans when they came because we thought they would leave. They stayed and were as cruel to us as they were to one another. They killed us and poured our blood into the land and prayed to their gods of ownership for a good crop. For us, everything is the present, including the past. They will keep taking our blood, my son, and they will keep killing us, because they are greedy and their land gods are thirsty. The camp dog gets the scraps from the fire by restraining itself from biting the hands of the merciless. Thus it survives."

I hope her spirit forgives me for not having the stamina as a four-year old to remember everything. I confess it is all so unclear. However, her spirit can't chastise me for lack of trying to find out about our history over the years.

We did not have much time to talk; we only had time to protect ourselves and talk about matters that would keep us alive there and then.

It was a grey dawn, and cold; we were high up in the mountains, the weather changed. If the happiest memory from my infancy is my father's kindly face, the worst is my brother's death. There was no reason for him to be chosen. The white killers who arrived on that grey, cold morning didn't know he had hidden in the tree two days ago while their people burned. They simply pulled him from our captured tribe, higgaldy-piggaldly. My brother was never initiated. It was irreligious for him to die uninitiated, and I saw this pain expressed on his face as the killers gripped him. Watching my brother die, my father died also, his soul died, before they could kill him too. My grandmother witnessed prior massacres and she had survived them. Still, her heart could not bear this further massacre, and I think she died outright. Through a vast body of hot coal they dragged my brother and they kept him there until he died, agonising slow death that it was. My poor brother. The earth took his blood, and the blood of all our remaining tribe, scant though it was at this moment of our existence, and the whites claimed our land.

In recent years I have noticed that nothing much grows on the white's sacrificial land. The land is poisoned. Deerubin is poisoned. The farmer can't kill everything and expect a good life. Soon the land dies, he dies, and he kills our god. Or, is it that we kill our god first?

On the grey, cold morning the hearts of our people were opened with guns and knives. There were about eighty white people, including boys no older than my brother. Within an hour most of us were dead. Maybe only I survived. I don't remember anything for the next three years.

Then the white people said, "you're seven, and your name is 'Penrith, Penrith Eugene McGrath.'" I lived with the McGrath family. They owned land in the Southern Highlands and ran twelve thousand sheep. The old man, the grandad, even then dead, had worked during the early days of the Colony with the government and managed to secure himself a large tract of land. Some of the livestock was killed for the Colony's food supply, but not much. Most was used for wool exports. I remember staying in the servants' quarters for a short while and I ate and slept with the servants' children and I was supposed to help with the sheep muster. But the McGrath family thought I was too young to work. Moreover, the servants, mostly Irish convicts, in the scheme of things, and in their own minds, lower than a black, hated me, and didn't want me sleeping and eating with their children. So I went to school at the McGrath household and grew up in that home as well. They never had children and I believe I stood as their own child, sooner or later.

Mrs McGrath was taller than her husband. She had thick honey coloured hair that she wore in a bun when people visited. Otherwise it hung in a ponytail. I never heard her raise her voice. She kept good company with Mr McGrath. The man drank but I never saw him drunk. Overall it was a good life and I stayed till I was 17 years old. I enjoyed running. I was a good runner. I ran all over the property delivering various messages. Sometimes I ran all day, 8 or 10 hours at a time, with minor breaks. While I was on my own, especially while I was amongst the uncleared mountains, I thought, or tried to think about my past, but I was generally unable to recall too much. My parents tried to perceive my dilemma but were unable to get far with their understanding. I couldn't hold it against them. Thoughts and the way we see things can give us freedom, but more often they confine us through no one's fault. They did what they could and provided me with a privileged upbringing. I was given more liberty and love than the children of white neighbours. I was their child, the McGrath's child they were never meant to have, but in fact had, and were responsible for, and therefore loved as if they were thankful of a blessing. I was their secret child and they were gentlepeople.

One day I returned from meandering and my mother was sad and distressed. Father was sitting in his old armchair in the small sitting room to the side of the main dining room. It looked like Dad was dozing. My mother was upset. I went and sat in my usual chair next to my father and looked at him. He smiled, laughed a little and patted my hand, holding it, and looked awfully at peace. This was the night we found out he was dying of cancer. In two months, he died. It was soon after my confirmation in the Church. I gave the eulogy at the service. The church had accepted me also.

But there was a day when I wasn't found acceptable, or rather a day when I became conscious of being different. It was the day of the funeral, rather the afternoon of the funeral, during the wake. On this day I was conscious that I was not a Southern Highlander, or a Churchman. How could I ever be?

I had a good friend. His name was Harry. He was one year younger than me, fatter than I was and much, much whiter with what seemed a dozen freckles to every blade of my body hair. He stuttered. On this warm afternoon, as we moved to high summer, for some reason I splashed water at him from a bucket, and teased him about his stutter. I can't remember; I might have been bored. He promptly c-c-called me a 'black stump'. The 'stump' refers to my short and stubby build. The 'black' referred to what is obvious.

We were juvenile and followed the law of an eye for an eye, and his jest was fair enough. More than at any other time, but, I felt that my blood was a sign of my history. I was 17 years old and very confused. It wasn't that I wasn't white and that I didn't fit in. It was that I had had a different life, one that came to me in dreams or obliquely whiles I ran in the Highlands and was alone. I wanted to understand more about it. Who wouldn’t?

I stayed with my mother about a year and looked after her. She wanted me to stay and run the property until her brother and his family arrived from Scotland and then I was to stay on as an owner in equity. My mother saw me with the eyes of love. The law couldn't care for me and saw me as a black. It wouldn't even let me in its courtrooms. Or, if by decree it did, the currency would cut me down while the law wasn't looking. Law, equity or whatever, the law was someone else’s.

I waited till Mum's brother arrived. I left with little more than a bag over my shoulder, a day's supplies and my mother's tears drying on my shoulder.

I travelled down the coast where the remnants of a number of tribes had gathered in what was called a 'government reserve'. I had big ideas. I would teach these people to read and write and they would tell me our general history.

I found sickness. Measles was ripping its way through several hundred people, killing and blinding them. I stayed one winter, helping where I could until the disease abated and then I left.

I roamed several years and was frequently imprisoned. It seemed I needed an identity pass to be allowed the liberty to live and proof I was innocent of any crimes that had been committed local to an area that I was passing through. It was the height of the bush ranging days and a wanderer was a foe till cleared, admittedly. Being a black didn't help, though. Being an educated black was a mixed blessing, very much so. For example, the constabulary at Cowra thought I would make a good tracker and I was employed as one, until Her Majesty's Men found out I couldn't track. They were good about it and offered me a job in the kitchen and the book keeping office. Yet I left from here also once I mended my wares and got together my travelling viands.

Instinctively I made my way to the place where Deerubin bends at the foot of the mountains and heads for the ocean. I was twenty-four years old. There was a handful of my people left. In white terms, they were cousins to my own extinct people, and had lived to the north of Deerubin at the time my people were wiped out. They wore poor clothes that gave them boils, and they dragged ragged families behind them and clutched bottles of rum. Measles and other diseases afflicted them also. I once knew these people. My name means that I tell our story. The story is broad now, like the increased width of Deerubin, and it is less deep also, like the waters of Deerubin that grow shallower as the river grows wider, under the influence of European agriculture and dams. My European families have changed the river but it is still the water of Deerubin. So I must tell their story as well. And I do.