Arthur Upfield: Man of Two Tribes

Both in their earlythirties, neither wore make-up, and the complexion of both was the work of the sun and the wind. The larger woman asked to be remembered to Mrs. Easter, and the younger then reminded him not to forget the mail, which was odd, because Easter carried the mailbag under an arm.

These women, especially the younger, reminded Bony of someone he had met, and he was working on the puzzle in a way one does when passing an idle moment, when Easter shook hands formally and emerged from the gate. The women turned back to the house, and Easter came to the jeep into which he stored the precious mailbag.

“I sowed the wheat,” he said, softly. “The men are out but are expected back any time now. Told the women who you are, or are supposed to be, and your reason for coming.”

“Good! Take it all right?”

“Oh yes. Said they thought someone would come some time about Lonergan’s gear, or would write about it. I’ve got that job fixed in mind you want me to do. Anything else?”

“Having accepted an assignment, my superiors exhibit astonishing impatience for results, Easter. Probably within a week or two you will receive an enquiry concerning me. Treat them kindly, Easter. Say I said, ‘Keep out and stay out.’ ”

“Or words to that effect.”Easter grinned, knowing that he faced away from the house. Bony removed his swag from the jeep as Easter climbed in behind the wheel.

That was all. The policeman turned the vehicle and without even a wave of the hand, departed.

Standing loosely, Bony rolled a cigarette and lit it like the man to whom time means nothing. He was aware that he was under observation, not necessarily by the white women, for whom he would be of little interest, but certainly by the aborigines to whom he wasn’t related, even to the fiftieth degree of tenth cousin, and had no possible totem ties. From now forward he must be William Black.

Having tossed his swag into a scrub tree, safe from the assault of the homestead dogs when they returned from work, he walked the fifty odd yards to sit on a boulder overlooking the Nullarbor Plain. It was then four o’clock.

At ease, he gazed outward over thePlain, four hundred feet below. To the south and north were other dark headlands of this inland coast. Before him was space and sunlight to quicken a man’s imagination, and behind lay the tree shadows, the rolling land and the dunes of white sand to give a sense of security and illusion of his own importance, providing comfort after the chill of nakedness imposed by the Plain.

No wonder the aborigines didn’t like leaving this coast to venture far out on the sea of saltbush. They would want wood for real fires, not brush which makes a passing flash of heat. They would need something material back of them o’ nights so that the Spirit of this land they named Ganba would not steal upon them and breathe cold air between their naked shoulders. Man made only one careless slip in this country; by instinct the aborigines were never careless, and there are white men, but rare, who never make a slip and never are caught by Ganba.

Old Patsy Lonergan was one of these. He would leave this homestead with two camels and a dog, vanish within Easter’s vacuum, and reappear after weeks to ‘put in’ his dingo scalps and be credited with the bonus. He would repeat this, perhaps three times a year, and on the money enjoy a genuine bender lasting a fortnight or three weeks.

A foolish man? Of course not! There has to be a balance. If the body is starved it must be saved from death by food. And if the mind is pounded by threats of Ganba, then alcohol is an antidote, to balance the ledger of life, for alcohol is the open sesame to social conviviality so essential for the maintenance of sanity in the victim of solitude.

It was a pity that his current diary was begun only in the previous January, and that it covered merely the last expedition and that preceding it. Otherwise there might have been further reference to the aircraft he had heard when last at the camp he named Big Claypan.

He was a bright boy, that real nephew at Norseman who had located the diary. He had nous enough to understand the implication of the old man’s note on the helicopter. His report on the mental state of his uncle, added to that of the local policeman, removed doubt that Lonergan had imagined he had seen it. Aircraft at night over that part of Ganba’s country could have had no legitimate cause, its destination not a homestead, decidedly not a town or city, for none of these are within the vacuum.

The explosion that diary triggered! The messages and signals, the conferences! Spies sneaking around the back fence to watch atomic tests! As though the spies would be silly enough to leave Canberra where they gain all they want in cosy bars and at official cocktail parties.

Nonetheless, there was official as distinct from police interest; official interest being entirely confined to the preservation of what is called Security; police interest concerned merely with what had become of a missing person. And the two interests connected only by a sentence in a dingo trapper’s diary.

A day or two at this homestead might provide a lead from the aborigines. Little escapes their observation. The head stockman had become friendly once he had seen proof of the stranger’s sealing into the unknown tribe in faraway Queensland. Bony had given nothing of value beyond the ‘fact’ of his relationship to Lonergan, and the purpose of his visit as well as the reason for being so far south of his Queensland tribe. And he had been given nothing of value excepting that the dingoes were not as numerous as some years and that they seemed to be keeping to the areas verging on the Plain.

Lonergan had owned two camels and a dog named Lucy. His gear and personal effects were still within the hut he always occupied when at the homestead and which he kept locked during his absences. His traps the head stockman knew little about and, with a chuckle quite divorced from humour, he told Bony that if he wanted to locate the traps he’d have to go out and find them. Where? In what direction? Another chuckle. A wave of the hand like a compass needle twitching from a flea bite.

No mention of a helicopter. But then no mention of the windmills, of the station utilities, of the Melbourne Cup about to be run. Black had asked no questions, not even where he might find his uncle’s traps. Like the ordinary aborigine, William Black metaphorically pulled his forelock to the medicine man.

He watched Easter’s jeep when it left the ‘coast’ and went to sea, a tiny boat with an outboard engine, producing a short wake of thin dust. Finally all Black could see of it was the tiny dust puff which soon floated away. Seventy miles to Chifley! Just steer and wait for Chifley to come to you.

When the sun was casting its shadows far out upon the Plain, a slight noise caused Bony to turn and see the large man who was approaching him from the house. He walked with the unmistakable gait of the horseman, and was dressed in the unmistakable fashion of the cattleman, the faint tinkle of his spurs having been the sound to attract William Black.

“Good day-ee! You Black?”

Bony stood and with slow and bashful drawl replied that he was.

“I’m told you are Patsy’s nephew. That right?”

Black essayed a smile of assent, kicked the dust with a boot, and from a shirt pocket produced the letter from the Norseman lawyer. He was a handsome man, this Weatherby, burned dark by the sun, made strong by the fight to succeed, poised like the man accustomed to giving orders. His dark eyes keenly examined the face of the lesser man, and his mind subconsciously noted the scuffing of the boot, the nervous reaction when in the presence of a superior. Accepting the letter, he broke the envelope and read it slowly as one habitually averse to scanning anything, be it a steer or a letter.