Table of Contents

Title Page

Bridge of Triangles

PART I

PART II

PART III

Copyright

For Gwen and John

Bridge of Triangles

John Muk Muk Burke was born in Narrandera, New South Wales in 1946, of a Wiradjuri mother and an Irish father. He left school at fifteen and spent some years in the post office before going to New Zealand on a working holiday. After a number of jobs ranging from scrub clearing to factory work he was accepted into Auckland Teachers’ College in 1967. He has taught in primary schools in New Zealand, Darwin and outback Northern Territory, and has been a specialist art teacher and music advisor for the Northern Territory Department of Education. In 1989 he took a year off to travel in Europe, and it was in France that the first draft of Bridge of Triangles was written. In 1992 he joined the Centre for Aboriginal and Islander Studies at the Northern Territory University as lecturer in History and English Literature, and is currently an Academic Support Lecturer for Aboriginal and Islander students in the Education faculty.

PART I

The leafy town was mostly on the south side of the river. At its centre was the Empire Hotel, the important looking post office with a clock, and, around the side streets a couple of brick towered churches. The biggest church though, the Church of the Good Shepherd, stood back from the main street a bit and just down from the Empire. Back in the previous century the townspeople had cleared the land and made their wide streets in a grid pattern. The river and the trees, those great solid river gums, were much as they had been forever. Once, before the invaders came with their sheep and bags of wheat seed and working men to dig canals, the trees had grown right across the land and kangaroos and emus were plentiful. And people had lived amongst the trees and hunted on the plains forever.

By the time the boy, Christopher Micky Leeton, was born up in the hospital which stood on a rise beyond the flood level overlooking the town, the most common animals, apart from the sheep on the cleared landscaped, were lizards and the raucous grey and pink galahs. Huge eagle-hawks floated high above the paddocks but many of them had been shot out because they could easily carry off a new-born lamb. Ancient goannas lumbered through what little remained of the bush and the area is still known for its huge bull ants. Some of the relatives of Christopher Micky Leeton still lived around the area too. Chris was born and no doubt at that moment the bull ants were streaming over the red earth and the pink and grey parrots were freewheeling against the deep blue sky and the public bar of the Empire was host to those who never questioned their belonging as they drank their middies. Some of the boy’s uncles might even have been kicked out on that day too, all those years and years ago.

From the beginning he was an exile. He was pushed into this world with its immense fiery sky. The sky was an enormous hill and it seemed he’d just come over the brow and was near the river and the trees to see if he might belong there for a time. The traveller looked at that place and thought pretty early that perhaps he might not belong there. For beyond his sweat and cigarette smoke mother he saw from the earliest days the vast sky-hill falling away, away, away, and it glowed fiery white with glowing torn orange-peel edges. The woman smiled and frowned—smiled and frequently frowned with wisps of brown hair and smoke rising into and across the vast sky which framed her face. The sides of his frame were wicker and smelt of sour milk and dirty wool and the faint shitty memory of other kids. Sometimes the frame swung into darkness and the great sky-hill swept away and he felt loss—he cried long for that great open plain of sky which had so recently and yet so distantly existed. Back in those days when he almost certainly knew more of the other world than this.

His mother was Wiradjuri and of the rivers. Her own mother, the Old Granny, had dwelt amongst the trees. His mum’s father had been white and had given his name to the boy before spending his last six hours on this planet at the Empire Hotel. As old man Mick wandered back from the town he fell in his drunkeness into the swift black canal and drowned his watery death. But then as now the shining world kept spinning with its hills and streams and when the next morning it turned again into the sun and the waters were innocent and silver once more, you know what? The Old Granny painted her face and skipped to the Empire to weep for the change his going wrought and sat in the pub with her mob and the old man’s mates. Lots of them would slip into canals and rivers and fires on other terrible nights too.

But the boy knew nothing of this except the coo-ing and frowning over his wicker frame. The Old Granny painted her face with great red lips and cheeks and hung shiny metal chains that looked like gold and silver all about her thick dark throat and wore many rings that might have come from Christmas crackers and curtain rods. Her sound and smell of stale sweet sherry floated sometimes across the great sky-hill and welcomed the child and he tried to feel the welcome.

The boy quite possibly was the first of his mob to speak the exile. It was strange that those who seemed furthest away from their roots were the ones who searched the hardest to find them again. Chris early knew that he was possibly the weakest link in a chain. He had to ensure he was not the last. He looked beyond the painted faces and bright patches of colour to the softly shining home he’d left. He knew that the Old Granny walked in this world: he knew that his mum walked in this world: and finally he knew he had stumbled into a shadow world of sorrow—he did not, did not, did not—he couldn’t feel what it was he wasn’t except that a joy and longing came together when he saw the sky-hill falling away, away, untouchable and left behind.

He had been carried to a world of fire and smoke. The Old Granny and aunties and his mum all creased and laughing, cradled him in their brown, warm arms. And carried him into other worlds of fire where many smoking faces passed him along a line like a bundle. Of course he didn’t think that till later.

Everything came later—there was only the feeling in the beginning of the period of exile. The feeling and the smell and the taste. Aunties spooning Farex, the Old Granny poking her ringed finger into his mouth. Sweet bread. And brown warm breasts of Mum and aunties flattened on his face and urgent in his mouth. Everyone coaxed him to stay in the world and this world stretched off into the dust outside the lace windows and beyond the fringe of straggling oleanders.

Eventually the boy walked in this world of fire. The shadows of this shadow land grew sharper. He found little bits of fire which had fallen into the cool parts and lay there, for him. Had he brought them with him? He could reach into where the springy sharp twigs touched the ground and find the cold orange flowers on their tangy stems. He ate them all until he knew his aloneness again. Eating, shitting, playing, cuddling—were instruments of forgetfulness. But he could never really forget his sense of unbelonging.

Under the sky of fire he ran towards the enormous sky-hill past the springy oleanders to where the trough, half filled with black water had bright reds growing round the concrete. He could rest his face against the rough grey concrete and smell horses. Here were shiny little flowers—reds the three-year-old child named them. The reds were all on fire, standing in the shade of the trough like bright little suns. And so he held out his hands but they stayed cold. He raised his little snotty nosed face above the trough of slimy water and checked the distance. Away, away were the moving shadows which kicked up all the dust and made the distant crying. But this great fear couldn’t get you because the long white fences and the tall power poles moaning in the wind trailed off straight and lonely until they reached forever. And that was where the big sky-hill came down to meet the road.

He thought he nearly knew why all the reds were cold.

The boy lay down into this world. The stretched out sky quickly lost its shining and the wind rattled the loose boards on their nails. Soon the blackness was complete.

He called the shapes to their dancing and they left the great sky-hill and came in through the window and danced for him on the elevated edges of their cave. He willed them to take him to their burning smoking mountains where he would join in their wild and sacred dust stirring. He felt the heat. Surely it would happen? Nearer and nearer they came and shrieked and pointed. Dancing. He saw their eyes—red: he saw the bodies dry as dust and strangely white like smoke. Surely it would happen? The wind buffetted outside and and the cave was closing in. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. Two huge bird-like beasts were cawing somewhere near the floating curtain and a fat goanna formed where the lino lifted in the swirling air that swept beneath the house.

And then the mornings. The rain still lashed the window and the room glowed with a dampened whiteness. The vast sky-hill loomed away across the streaky world into the immense and it rocked into its emptiness and silence before the house awoke.

His mum’s name was Sissy and way back then she pushed the pram past the hedges of oleanders and the privet shrubs. The smell of leaves and flowers and dust floated in the thickened sounds of the solid rubber wheels and people breathed and smoked. Sissy walked with her lovely sister Rose and the twins. She stopped now to shove the sour smelling blanket under the boy’s chin so he couldn’t move.

“You fuss too much Sis. Give him some air for Christ sake. You’ll kill him like that.”

“He’s sick. I don’t know what’s wrong with him but he’s not right. It’s sumpin’.”

“He’s got sumpin’ bloody funny ’bout him I reckon.”

Rose dressed herself and the twins smartly and only some of their clothes were second-hand. By skin and bone and hair the women were clearly sisters but Rose’s bloke Clarrie had money enough for his missus to carry herself with cheap style and was mostly able to avoid St Vinnie’s. So Rose dressed herself like a queen in a play and always used lace hankies and people only knew they were sisters when they got close enough. That’s what Rose thought.

Rose thought herself to be someone and believed she belonged in the great big world. Red lipped and tough, she had plans and they were enough for the rest of her life. She was a woman who drank cream sherry in the saloon of the Empire, (sometimes even with Clarrie) and smoked Craven A’s, not rollies. Sissy thought her sister to be beautiful—just like a pearl she often said, especially after the terrible event. But Sissy’s own face was lined with early anxiety and a kind of seeking after something more—some place where she could belong. The unknown hurt was sometimes helped by the beer you could buy at the Empire. Her face fought each day and she felt like an exile too. Behind her deep-set eyes overhung with ancestral brow she seemed sometimes to remember with a child’s optimism just enough of an early happiness to keep her going. But mostly a kind of resignation showed in her appearance, her straggly hair and downturned mouth. It was alright for Rose, she’d got a bloke with a bit of dough behind him and she could drive off to her own place with all those rooms she talked about any old time in that flash red car they’d driven into the bush in. But she wasn’t jealous, it was just that Jesus knew she deserved a break after all she’d put up with. And Jack—useless bastard, had no get up and go even though he always thought he knew best. Sometimes enough of the child ebbed for Sissy Leeton to say she’d show him. She’d get up and go herself. With Rose. Rose had been in Sydney years now—Jesus—must be five at least since the war. Well, she’d heard enough. She’d be buggered if she was going to stay stuck here with Jack. Sure, Clarrie might have a few bob but so would she one day too. She’d show them, just wait. But then, all that time ago she still pushed the pram along its rough track to the town.

Sissy saw the other women with their mob of kids filing along their own dusty track that led up from the river. She saw their bare feet swirling up the dust around their ankles and saw the babies perched on bony hips.

These women were off to town too. Sissy noticed the slowing down of the other women, there were five or six of them stretched out in a line by the river. They were a group. Their great black eyes seemed only to look at the ground. Their hair was thick and knotted. Sissy felt her hand tighten on the pram handle and she moved a bit faster. It was as if there was some sort of agreement with this other mob not to meet at the bridge but Sissy did not want to think why this might be true so she quickly said, “They haven’t even got bloody shoes.”

“They haven’t got anything because they won’t get off their black arses and work,” spat Rose and she smoothed her skirt with her brown hand.

“They don’t get much chance either,” said Sissy and there was a tired self pity in her voice.

“They’re a pack of thieving bastards—you speak to Clarrie.” Rose’s voice was angry and self righteous.

Sissy laughed; after all they were sisters. “Well, you tell Clarrie to get a proper car—with a roof next time. Anyway, you don’t know if they took his bloody beer.”

Rose saw that her sister was smiling. “Well I hope they enjoyed them, that’s all I can say!”

The two women smiled warmly.

“Might go down the Empire and have a few myself after I get my stuff,” Sissy laughed.

They came to the white rails of the bridge and the pram wheels fluttered over the splintery wooden slats. Chris was awake in sweaty heat. From within the hooded frame the great shining sky-hill was knife cut by the railings of the bridge. He longed to reach out and touch the solid sky which seemed so close. But it swept back furiously fast and he fell back with rapid breaths of sickening green shallowness and the opportunity was gone. It was away, away—and he could only see the flickering orange border of his real home.

Way back then on that Autumn day when the wind was picking up leaves and heaping them against all the fences and the wicker pram was still of baby use before its wheels sped billy carts and Rose’s pleated skirt transformed the boy’s sister Mary into a princess, the two women came to the church. There was a big painted sign. “The Church of the Good Shepherd”. St Vinnie’s was next to it.

Sissy sensed the change.

“Are you too bloody stuck up now to come in then? Well I’m not!” And she pushed the pram savagely to the shop.

Rose sat on the brick fence nicely and took out her Craven A’s. The leaves were blowing round the Kiwi whitened shoes on her vinegar brown feet.

Sissy lifted her son out of his pram and they went into the shop. The place was stacked with other people’s junk and clothes—arranged orderly on counters and hangers. It smelled of old paper and dusty glass cups. The shop lady had displayed china cats and dogs, leaping fish, salt and pepper shakers with “Greetings from Sydney” stamped on them. They should have been with the wooden-handled egg beaters and chipped willow saucers and dull meat grinders but the tight haired woman probably thought that such nice things should stand with the “ornaments”.

As Sissy rummaged through the jumpers and old shoes Chris found a stack of framed pictures, very dusty and chipped. There were about six altogether but only one he liked. He clutched it to himself. Here was something he knew—here was something he understood. Here he saw and recognised something. He felt the sharp little lion’s feet on the corners of the tin metal frame, saw the crack across the bottom right hand corner of the glass. His picture of home. It had been snipped with scissors carefully from some magazine in an act of re-creation by hands perhaps now still forever. Faded pastels formed into a misted flatness impossibly far away—away. Somewhere above high streaking clouds was an eagle—soaring—although the boy did not know what to call the bird, and a winding track led away. The land showed no people. Years later he would know why he had wanted this picture. The missing people would return. One day. One day.

“A strange thing for the boy to want. Whatever can he see in it?” The lady waved a small toy and smiled with her teeth but not her eyes at the child’s mother. Her glasses glinted. She was doing good in her full apron and tight hair and her smell of soap.

Sissy said, “How much is it?” Contemptuous.

The lady smiled, genuine. She tried to give the toy to the child.

“This,” said Sissy, touching the picture with one broken nail. She put a heap of coins and a crumpled note on the counter. “How much is it?”

The boy rubbed the picture on his jumper. He felt a link. Like something would one day be complete again.

The woman and her child gathered up the clothes and shoes she had bought and walked out into the weak sunshine. The stuff was thrown into the pram and the boy walked. A huddle of women with dusty ankles waited for Sissy to turn towards Rose before they too went into the shop. Rose stood some way off with her back to the church. The boy and Rose’s two were dropped off at Mrs Ladell’s for the afternoon and the sisters headed directly to the Lounge Bar of the Empire.

Rose’s bloke Clarrie always belonged somewhere else. He was never really with Rose in her life. Perhaps that was why she ended up the way she finally did.

Yes, Clarrie Thompson was nearly always away but he burned in occasionally to give a kiss to his two boys and a wad of money to Rose. Then he burned away again in his red convertible. Sissy called him shifty and sly and told her sister to leave him. He had something to do with horses and it was this that occasionally brought him down from Sydney.

“Let’s piss off to back to Sydney, and I’ll come with you this time. We’re not giving up our lives for this! I Reckon I might belong there.” Sissy flicked her hand at the kitchen where the two sisters sat drinking tea and smoking. “I sure don’t belong here.”

Jack was fettling for the railway and was away for two and three weeks at a time. Sissy used this freedom to smoke and dream and urge Rose to tell her of a future somewhere else; the big smoke.

“Just think Sis—I’ll get a job; a place of me own. Imagine, Sydney. The kids can go to school and I’ll get a job. In a shop or factory. There’s millions of factories there. And the sea. Take the kids to the beach. Manly. I remember Manly.”

Sissy’s future was constructed from the best of her past. Thus her future was fairly restricted. Good times. Someone else will help. Always. Like when she’d recovered from diptheria. Train to Sydney. Ferry ride. Ice cream. Big house by the breakers. Wonder. Magic. Brown arms in the white surf. Long way off—long time ago. Tomorrow. Soon. And Rose had it all already. Apparently Rose belonged in Sydney—why couldn’t she?

She didn’t see the bare light bulb and the shit coming up the kitchen sink or the shared bathroom or the kid from the next door row of flats being carried out under a green sheet because he’d hanged himself, or the ice-cream truck that always went past watched by her big eyed kids with Sydney’s Christmas heat unparched, or the mad woman hosing her onions under an umbrella as the sub-tropic rain of Sydney eventually belted from the sky, or Rose in her grave after all the screaming and the newspapers. That was all to come.

But now they sat in the kitchen rolling cigarettes and drinking tea from a chipped enamel pot, pouring the strong brown liquid into flared cups with roses but no saucers. Floral cups with no saucers promised much. One day the saucers would come. The boy picked up this message. Promises for the future started to undo his memories of the other world.

A child insinuated itself into the kitchen crying of unfair play in the oleander backyard.

“Don’t come running to me with your bloody squabbles. Joe, you’re s’pposed to be looking after the little kids. If you can’t play together then play by yaselves.”

The backyard was his dreaming. Under oleanders and privet were six days of playing. A collection was made. “Play by yaself then.”

Small sticks, bits of glass, old tins, broken bricks, stones and small rocks. A mixture of stiff clay was made in a tin. He cleared an area of ground with a flat bit of wood. Strong uprights were driven into the earth and walls built up with smaller sticks stuck together with the clay. The roof was easily made from a flattened jam tin bent to form a gable. Paths and gardens were demarcated with pebbles and fences were made with sticks. Just like Grandma Leeton’s place. Broken lilac and oleander were urged into the ground for trees and sometimes ran in a shady line on both sides of a path. It was the best game in the world but then, he was only a little kid. That was years before. Of course it could not have all the stuff of Grandma Leeton’s house: the pretty cups with saucers, the shiny tiled bathroom and rose bushes and big china dog called “Man’s Best Friend” which guarded the funereal passage which had a heavy stained glass door and brown velvet curtains where it turned under an arched trellis. Grandma belonged in such a real and beautiful house. Funny thing was, Grandma Leeton never seemed to touch any of the beautiful things in her beautiful house.

The boy could lie in bed at night and picture his little house standing there in the dark. All safe it seemed even if the big rains came and the wind howled. Or when the white moon merely glinted on the roof and turned the lilacs silver. His fingers itched to shape it all and he never knew, not ever, if he liked the building of it better or the knowledge that he would always knock it down and start again. Whatever, it was always a going back—never forward. Back to that which was nearly lost. A long time in the dreaming and he would finally come to that other ritualistic reconstruction of a deeper now-ness; to that which came not from Grandma Leeton but from the Old Granny herself. That black ghost. A flat plain. Love cannot be walled up.

The house the Leetons lived in stood back from the street behind a hedge of privet and lilac and a decrepit picket fence. Along that road in those days all the houses were the same: one-gabled affairs with a half veranda on the front. The barge boards were chalky; the veranda supports at lazy angles with brown stains like wounds from nails etching down what remained of the paint. Paling fences between the houses were supported by dark green choko vines and grapes. In the front of the houses in those days a road stood between the stench of the saleyards and where the people lived. Pot holed and cornflour dusty, flanked by power poles on its western side, it ran straight, right down to the river to the north and along the saleyard fence to the south. There it petered out into meandering bush paths which curved and twisted back onto the lush grassy river flats which lay behind the yards. Roads and tracks.

There were concrete troughs at intervals all down the eastern side of the road right on the edge of the footpath. In the troughs was cool green water for horses. Wild red flowers sprang up from the dirt. The boy could see it all from the veranda.

He saw the road that fell away, away to the north and the south. The treeless saleyards with great dusty mobs of cattle or crying sheep. There were horse-high figures with Snowy River coats or khaki shirts and wide hats all under the vast white sky. This high thin sky loomed away to the west in an enormity which the boy knew he owned but could never hold. Somewhere behind all this were the other families—dark shadows which sometimes trailed into town along the foot trod path by the river. The Old Granny lived across there too in her little house next to the wide river and under the great breathing gums.

At night, from his bed Chris could see the the orange smudge of fires and hear the silence of the other people, and they, like the sky, were utterly away, away. He sensed an ache which stretched back into many ages and felt somehow at one with the makers of these distant fires. Sometimes he would be granted comfort from his St Vinnie’s picture. It seemed to promise a future that was nearly now. When the sun lay low behind the saleyard rails and the line of power poles was silhouetted into a lonely sharpness that fell away, he would stare and stare at the track that led to where the eagle rises. But that was a long time ago. When joy was pain. On days when the bruised clouds were piled up in the west he would go on dreaming beyond the saleyard rails and live in the essence of his other knowledge.

Chris Leeton’s knowledge was a painful memory of a memory. Unspeakable. It filled him with a certain joy and a sadness which dragged him to itself so that this world of unbelonging could never take firm hold of his soul. The clouds were scallop edged with fire and he longed to float out there into that world of fiery spinning dust storms and be consumed by the dancing sky.

Then Aunty Rose would come with her boys (but not Clarrie), and sleep in the house. And, all those years ago, the night like a dog’s breath misted all the sun and the road of posts and fences went away and left only yellow lights in window squares. Then, in that time, the boy could hear kitchen sounds steal under doors, hear laughter and smell the smoke of card games and thus continue to construct his insubstantial world by the blue moonlight which fell through the cracked window panes. Beyond his mother’s voice and Aunty’s smoky laugh lay the silence of the night and the dying fire across the flats.

And then, one night, when the world was busy serving beer in pubs and catching trains in smoking cities and leaving machines by half constructed roads for another night, there was the fire. A fire which no one in Sydney or London or even the next leafy town ever heard tell of. Perhaps it got brief mention for a day or two at the Empire.

He went to the window and across the road the saleyards were moving. He knew he had to climb outside. Somewhere in the orange glow was the old Granny’s house. He heard footsteps running, voices calling, animals in distress.

Chris walked towards a world of fire. The dust was white and thick and the air carried a sad message of cold smoke and fear. The trees’ shadows loomed where the river ran. Saleyard sounds were urgent and fearful. The string of sound wound and unwound and finally knotted back within itself across the spreading flatness.

Bellows rose from upturned heads where horn and eye glowed dull in the moving yards. The child stepped into the night of fire and fear. He passed the blocks of shifting sound and turned in under the tangled lowness of trees by the river. White branches twisted and night time foliage shifted in the orange light and the river flowed its black course on his right. All the world was full of sad and personal smoke. It floated in the air with the dulled stench of dung and urine. To the left of the river the plain became a flattened line of silent winking torches. He ran towards the burning shacks. The air was full of sparks.

The other people’s shacks burned. Sheets of flaming bags and nailed-up lino collapsed in upon itself. The wooden poles were burning. Nails stood out in dumb defiance of the flames. Each place was all on fire and the brightness showed the naked interiors with a truth humanity can hardly bear to see.

Before, when they’d walked over the flats to the Old Granny’s place he’d passed these places. He’d seen inside the gloomy shacks where people slept at night. But the other people never really lived inside—the kero tins and woodheaps and the smudge of smoking fires on the ground were the real dwelling places. But now the centres were revealed in their awful helplessness.

Chris saw in one a table, its existence being undone. Its wooden legs were burning. He saw two bottles standing, waiting for the flames. A sorrow too deep filled his young body as he stood beneath the trees and watched. All about the people stood and softly cried in the night. And that low creening went up to the silent sky and deaf moon. He saw the people and the flames shone through their cotton clothes. The babies were clutched to hips and breasts and all the people looked. To the side a huge figure moved about with a dully glowing lantern. It was black Paula. She was speaking as she helped and her voice contained a tinkle of warm laughter.

“Everything gone now—but it’s alright—it’s alright it’s alright—you see.”

Behind and to the left the bleating cattle joined in with the fear and to the right the river merely pushed this little event to one side. No one had seen him.

The boy crept back past the saleyards and climbed in through the window. The room grew slowly darker and the crying drifted further off. Aunty Paula seemed strangely near to him.

The next afternoon Sissy and Rose and the kids crossed over the road and followed the saleyard fence. They were headed for the Old Granny’s. They marched on, under the giant macrocarpas that curved and skirted round the flat following the river. Leaving the shade they struck out across the flat. Off and away in the distant smudges of white smoke were figures moving about.

The flat was cut by gullies and the path the party followed scouted the deepest of these. The sea of grass stretched away and ended in a shimmer of gums where the river swung back behind the Old Granny’s house.

As they came near her old wooden shack they saw her pegging clothes to a low swung line. She was dressed in her long white petticoat and her grey hair hung all the way to the thickest of waists. A couple of skinny dogs lay in dark dirt hollows under the shack, eyes half open, muzzles flat along the ground. Paula, vast and black, was bent over a ricketty tub, singing.

The old lady stepped across the bare earth and it seemed to Chris that she floated. Darkly she pushed her hair from her eyes.

“Where them people gonna sleep now, hah? All them ’ouses burnt up and it seem all them mob gone camp by the river. Billy and Prince s’pposed to go and ’elp but down at Empire more likely I bet.” She grabbed a shirt Paula was wringing out and threw it back into the tub. “Leave them there!”

“Sure Mum—do this ’nother time.”

The Old Granny put her hands on her hips and smiled toothlessly.

“Where’s that Clarrie in his motor car heh?” She grinned again and her old eyes glowed with a dull light.

“What the bloody hell you want Clarrie for?” Rose was quick in anger and panic.

The old woman remained silent.

“What you mean Mum? He been here? You seen him?” Rose looked at Sissy. “Jesus Sis, you don’t think he’d do a thing like that do you?”

“Look—we were there Sis—did you see him?”

The old woman floated forward. “Why you two come, eh? Think I’m blind, heh? You come to tell, heh? Well I seen everything already.” Her skinny hand waved in the direction of the distant line of macrocarpas and the river.

“Well I’m not blind—them’s our people. This our country. I know.”

The boy looked at his grandmother and saw someone he already knew from somewhere else. Her white petticoat was clay and her body was strangely light and airy.

“What you mean ‘you know’?” Rose was challenging her mother. “You don’t know anything do you!” Like two children testing for a fight.

The old woman suddenly looked small and petulant.

“That Clarrie. ’e no good that one—no good. No, I ’aven’t seen ’im and good job too. Where’s all them people gonna sleep now ha?”

The grating sound of someone spitting made them all look around. The man Harry stood in the doorway, swaying. One hand gripped the dirt-shiny frame and the other held a cream enamel mug. His face was grey and his shoes held no laces.

“On the bloody river where they always do and they belong.” He spat again.

“You shut your mouth Fenton,” Sissy turned to the man who lived now with the Old Granny. “Mind your own bloody business. Has he been hitting you Mum? By the Jesus Harry, if you lay a finger on her you’ll cop it. Now piss off!”

The kids all stood with mouths full of fingers and hearts full of fear and their eyes on Harry.

Chris edged closer to his mother but she continued to look at Harry and he felt deserted and in danger. His mother’s face was ugly with anger.

“Come on Sis, don’t start anything.” Rose’s voice was quiet and private.

“Yeh, alright. But if he hits you Mum you tell me, alright? I’ll fix him—I’ll fix him good and proper.” Her words floated through the empty door. “Miserable bastard!” she shouted at the space.

The old lady looked at her daughter. She cackled. “Harry—he won’t murder me, not that one.” She grinned toothlessly and everyone traipsed into the dark interior of her house where Paula made strong milky tea.

Sugary biscuits were in a paper bag on the table.

“Clarrie’s miles away Mum. Why do you think he’s got something to do with them fires last night?” Rose’s glass cup shook in her hand.

The old woman slurped her tea. “’e says they pinched his grog don’t ’e? Could’ve done.”

Rose said, “They might have done, but Clarrie wouldn’t do that—not that.”

The Old Granny looked at her daughters’ faces. Paula’s dark and heavy, the other two like maltvinegar. The delicate blondness of her grandchilden. Not hers really, now that everything was changing. Her world was ended. Only Paula looked like family. And somehow Clarrie was to blame. More than Jack. He was a very visible threat to her world. With his red car and Rose stuck up front with those little blond kids in the back seat. You could go a long way in a car like that. You could drive off in a car like that and never be seen again.

“He’s got the car hasn’t he?”

Rose had to think.

“Look, do you think he left the car up near the bridge, crept down by the river and poured kero or some bloody thing all over the place and then just shot through?”

Bitterly Sissy laughed. “I don’t trust him. I don’t trust anyone”

The old woman her mother, said, “Trust your own.”

Rose was angry. “Clarrie’s not a bloody murderer. Jesus, what’s everyone saying?”

“Nobody dead is they?” The Old Granny sounded strangely defensive. “I ain’t talkin’ ’bout that. I’m talkin’ ’bout us. Clarrie don’t ’long ’ere. We all ’long together. But no more. Anyway it all over now. It all over.”

Her grey hair fell about her face and her fingers were limp beside her yellowed petticoat. She stood by the back door and near her bare feet a dog rested on the floor.

This was years before the pink clay bricks supporting the old shack lay scattered and half buried in small mounds of earth and the man would scrape with a stick through waist high paspalum, disturbing lizards and wary of snakes as he searched to remember.

It was many years before the red and black and yellow flag was raised in that town across the flats and the people saw again with a new vision the kangaroo and lizard and spoke of the Old Granny as Girlie, who once lived with her mob by the river. All so long ago but all so recent. One world forever ending but who is to know how far from the beginning is the ever-present now where still live the great goannas and lightning lizards and black bull ants?

Only Paula’s heart was at peace on that day when the river flowed behind the standing house and Willy wagtails flitted round the water tap and the lush growth of mint beneath the washing tub seemed to lend a solidness to the shack which was pure illusion. Paula’s laugh broke into the day. Her huge body shook and she laid her fat hands on the table and leaned forward laughing. The falls of dark flesh under her arms rolled about and tears wet her velvet face.

“Mum,” you got it wrong again. “You worry ’bout nothin’.” She laughed and soon the children were laughing too. A couple of the little kids crawled up near her legs.

The Old Granny’s collection of kewpie dolls hanging on the wall looked pink and delicate, like they had always been there and always would be.

Billy and Prince swaggered in and banged six tall bottles on the table.

“Youse two been down the Empire. I knew you didn’t go down camp ha?” Had the whole world changed so little?

Prince stood tall and grinning at his mother. His blue shirt was open. Fine dark hairs followed the line of muscles on his arm as he ran his fingers through his thick black waves.

“Youse the laziest pair of mongrels in this world. Now Billy, git sumpin’ we can drink out of. I s’ppose them people’ll find someplace else to sleep. They can still come ’ere I reckon.”

Billy went to the sagging cupboard with its cracked frosted windows and grabbed a handful of tin mugs. Way back then the fine bones in his brown fingers gripped the world and it seemed like he might hold on forever. But that was long before the cell where his madness and his anger made those same fingers grip and tie the knot which held him at an angle so that his man’s feet pointed delicate at the unseen concrete floor where his tears and vomit had splashed.

A thick oil cloth hung over the table’s edge in fibrous little serrations and the beer bottles stood hard and brown on it. Chris saw that they should stand there just like that. Paula’s laughter seemed to wrap around the bottles. The boy saw Billy, his man shoulders moving at the cupboard, reaching up to the mugs. The Old Granny, waiting; the bottles standing; his mum rolling a cigarette; the dogs near the back door; Paula’s shapeless green dress sweat-stained under the arms. He touched it all with his eyes. Later, as Sissy and her four kids, and Rose and her two set off home across the dirty whiteness of the river flats, the sky receded to where the darkening macrocarpas pierced it hard. Chris felt the need to run to where it was, where he could be it and know it and hold on to it. But as they came into the shade and swung round towards the bridge the bitter smell of pine needles mingled with the sharp sweet smell of river grasses. He was so close—so close but when he breathed his body only filled with longing. He couldn’t get any closer. High above, the great black branches radiated against the burning distant sky. He saw the twigs and slender fronds high above, sticking out like nails against the silent sky holding nothing but a distant orange shimmering.

Sissy knew that one day Rose would return to Sydney. And that she would follow. The big obstacle was the train fare but somehow she would get it. Why this need to escape? What was she leaving? Where was she going? Her flight to a future filled with lights and nights began even before her mother, the Old Granny was born. Sissy’s unbelonging to both herself and her people started way back before her birth when the town built its first pub, and named it The Empire, and shearers and cooks needed more than the comforts of the grog. Lurching back to quarters in the lonely night-time paddocks where sheep now bleated it was easy pickings with a bottle of sweet sherry or rum. And so another wagon was hooked up to a distant waiting train to Sydney. Through shame and troubled mind the Old Granny never told Sissy much of the place where she herself had been taken as a girl. That tall chimneyed home of fatty stews and confusion so far from her river gum beginnings. Yet it had become her home and shaped her with its harsh discipline and shallow wisdom. This she ambivalently valued and tried pathetically to pass on to her own children. But that first dribble of sherry under a twinkling river night, a night which thumped not just with shadowed kangaroos nor cried out only from the lonely throats of sheep, flowed on. As her mother had become the property of uncaring white men so she too had become the property of a white man. The essential difference was that Jack cared too much but did not know how to care. But that was years and years ago, wasn’t it?

The train has left many times and still the stream of exiles laugh and frown and wait and stamp on foggy platforms or smoke in railway refreshment rooms where the sherry still says come to me, come to me.

Another landscape saw tall ships tied up waiting but impatient, with night-time calls of readiness to sail with the tide to another Sydney. And these ships too had their exiles and that too was years and years and years ago, wasn’t it?

So Sissy lived for a while in her dreamings. Somehow in Sydney with her four kids everything would be better. She could finally be her own boss. But then the horse threw Jack and as he lay in the hospital up on the rise in his own twilight of partly death and partly life, an atavistic superstitious guilt rose up and grasped Sissy in a way that filled her with a fear she’d never known. Did she love this bloke? Was that it? Certainly she was tied to him in a way she did not understand. He represented something safe for the kids although she was not sure just what.

Why didn’t he die? What sort of woman was she that she could leave now—run away from something she deep down feared she’d caused. Her fear won and Sydney would have to wait. But she knew one day she would break free. But what about the kids? She didn’t know about the kids. They seemed different from her but she couldn’t be sure. She was confused.

The Old Granny had been right: her family was moving away. But she did not dream of the changes which her world would know before her own lonely departure. Even while Sissy planned the magical escape to Sydney with the kids the gap between the Old Granny and her family had widened into a chasm which separated the black from the white; the safe from the dangerous; the old from the modern.

What was it the two women wanted? Yes, Rose had spent some time in Sydney with Clarrie and knew the bright lights. Lights that shed no light on who newcomers really were. Pub lights in the city which threw no light but a kind of freedom to forget. A jangling call to bars where smoke and music and bitter laughter camouflaged the fact that all the maps were lost. Rose and Clarrie in Sydney. How was Sissy to know that Rose only sometimes spent the night at their fibro house with its uncut grass and leaking gas out in the post-war black and white TV, fish and chips, Coca Cola suburbs? Finally Rose saw Clarrie as a gaoler, and in the same way Sissy needed to escape from Jack she had broken free of Clarrie. Only Clarrie didn’t give a damn. When Rose finally died Clarrie didn’t come to the burial. After all she had it coming didn’t she? How was Sissy to know that beyond and beyond and forever, all around her sister’s Aussie dream home, stretched countless mirrored images of their own tiled-roofed loneliness? That even the city ached for something it had quite forgotten. That the velvet seats in cinemas and the ferry to Luna Park and Manly once every fifteen months and Marks Foys’ Christmas decorations and the pub-sung Saturday nights were not enough? That the men in pubs were not soldiers recent from the war but more often those washing down shame because they’d not been soldiers ever. Or had been. Men who often cried into their beer as yet another true blue Aussie sang “Danny Boy”. How could Sissy know that even those in the city were exiled in the shadow of a half remembered world, where they once all belonged?

The details of the Old Granny’s intuitive knowledge began to take further form one morning all those years ago when Sissy sat in the pale sun going through the kids’ hair. They sat as a group on the splintery floor boards. Rose and Clarrie drove up the dusty road. Rose, in a bright yellow suit left Clarrie in the car and clicked up the brick path to the veranda. She carried a bundle of rags.

“What’s up?” Sissy’s hands rested on the girl’s head.

Rose dropped the bundle on the wooden veranda. “A few jumpers there for the kids. We’re shooting through.”

“What d’ya mean, shooting through? Leavin’ now? Pis-sin’ off?”

“Yeh. Clarrie says he’s sick of everything and, well, we’re shooting through. Car’s all packed and we’re goin’ back to the big smoke.”

Sissy looked at the children whose eyes were screwed up against the watery light. “Well, what about, you know—our plan?”

“Look. I can’t talk now. Clarrie’s waitin’, but don’t worry. You still come. But leave it a for a bit—let me get back and sort out things—but still come. Look I’ve gotta go. But don’t worry Sis, I’ll drop you a line, promise. Nothin’s changed. Well, ta-ta youse kids. Come and give your aunty a kiss.”

Rose stooped down and kissed the children on their mouths one after another. She had a lace handkerchief half hanging out of the corner of her black handbag—very smart and no doubt her renewed homage to the big smoke. Rose, in a show of affection, held the girl’s head between both hands as she kissed her. “Oh, I hope you’ve been done!” she said as she wiped her red nailed fingers down her yellow skirt. “Now youse kids remember to behave yourselves. Ta-ta.” Yes Rose had sure left sitting on the ground with family far far behind.

Sissy had not stopped looking at her sister and as Rose walked to the red car which held Clarrie and the two little blond boys she said, “Well bugger me, you might see me a bit sooner than you think.”

But Jack still lay in the hospital.

The next day Sissy got a job in Brown’s laundry. She operated a mangle and took to wearing a scarf and an even more worried face. She stored most of the few pounds she got each week in a tea caddy where the young Queen’s face smiled in its golden border. She told Jack of her job but nothing, of course, about her Sydney schemes and dreams.

It was way back then, as the winter set in and the white track in front of the saleyards turned to red mud and July clouds brought lightning that lit up all the fences and trailing power poles in the winter nights that the kids went over to the Old Granny’s place. Dimly Jack knew Sissy was working and so naturally Paula and the Old Granny stepped in. Or sometimes the kids would be taken over to Mrs Ladell’s who had a daughter who lived in a wheelchair with her legs covered by a tartan rug. The beautiful child’s feet stuck out from the rug in shiny blue satin slippers and this seemed somehow obscene to Chris. Did all the world have a secret, imperfect centre? But Mrs Ladell was kind and gave the kids rock cakes and let them help shake the rag mats that she and her alabaster daughter made. They lived near the big bridge and Chris could see its great white wooden girders standing up above the willow-swept dark waters down behind Mrs Ladell’s back fence. That was years before Mrs Ladell died in giving the life from her own bones for her child’s.

As Jack improved in the hospital Sissy felt vaguely cheated. She realised this and then felt guilty. But because whenever she was with him she had to fight him she said, “You haven’t changed. I thought you might get some sense knocked into you by now.”

Jack, who’d really stopped living just after returning from New Guinea, spoke at last and merely said, “Be quiet woman.” It was as if he thought that the woman could never become a real Leeton—ever.

And that’s the way they’d been for years. Jack loved his wife in the only way he could—with a sense of tired duty which had long since replaced passion. She’d grown to hate his solid back and refusal to involve himself, apart from when she’d come home drunk after two or three days with her mob. Then he’d hit her across the face and call her a drunk black bitch and then they could finally and briefly try to love each other.

“Now stay shut up will you?”

But Sissy never could. She hated his broad back and his acceptance of her two oldest kids. She was frightened he’d destroy in the kids that which he couldn’t destroy within her. That the little she valued about herself—her real self—and which might possibly have been born into her kids, would be destroyed. She hated him because she could not be herself. She knew she would completely forget just what that self was if she did not leave.

Sissy hated him almost as much as his own family tried to hate him for getting mixed up with Girlie’s mob. There were two things the Leetons would never forgive—marrying an Abo and marrying a Catholic. Sissy was both. But even in old Mrs Leeton’s acidic mind not even an Abo Catholic could marry a bloke while carrying someone else’s baby. Yet Sissy did just that two days before Jack flew to fight the Japanese in New Guinea. The boy was born a few shades darker than his mother. When Jack limped in from the war and saw this boy child and a girl child already crawling he said not a word. Instead he bought a strong horse and a second-hand spring cart with his final army pay. The horse was hobbled over on the flats and the cart stood in the oleander backyard. By the time the dreaming boy was born into his world of fire Jack had been fettling on the railway for a good year. Sissy at last could centre her bitterness for all the world on something real—and it was Jack Leeton.

Jack finally took to the drink himself but that was years after all the kids had grown up. It killed him in the end. But way back then, when Sissy taunted him and he himself wondered why he’d lived, he was still a young, strong man. With reponsibility for four kids. And a landlord who wanted rent for the oleander yarded house opposite the saleyards.

“Let him come and chuck us out. Just see how far he gets with me!”

“Be quiet woman,” and Jack continued to pack tea chests onto the spring cart.

“And just where the bloody hell are we gonna live? Just tell me that?”

But she knew he had plans to pitch a tent down by the river.

“You won’t catch me living down with all them blacks...” and then she laughed. “Jesus, what a joke. Anyway, I’m not leavin’ this house and neither are my kids, so tell old Cooper to go to buggery.”

Jack ignored her and kept carrying mattresses and boxes out to the cart.

Eventually Sissy started to carry things out too. “Just stay out from under my bloody feet youse kids!”

As the woman carried out blankets and clothes and a billy full of cutlery she kept at the silent man.

“A fine mess you’ve got us into. Why couldn’t you have stayed on the horse—or at least have done the bloody job properly?”

“Be quiet woman.”

Early in the afternoon the man drove the cart out onto the road and headed right towards the river. The saleyards were deserted and a dirty wind worried the puddles along the road and pushed the huge sky away so it could not be touched by the torments of this world. The kids perched on mattresses and stared with a kind of dumb trust at their parents’ backs. The horse trotted along never minding if it went through mud holes or dry dirt. Then they swung onto the tarred stretch and the feeling that something important was happening occurred to the dreaming boy. The horse easily carried its burden up the approach to the bridge and there Chris saw the great white timber triangles from which the road was suspended over the water. The cart swayed on past each ancient beam and the sound from the wheels on the wooden slats was a type of soft hammering. The man pulled gently on the right rein and they swung to where the road was bordered with tall macrocarpas. Behind the trees was the river flat with its sweet sour scent of dark green winter grasses.

A few miles on and Jack reined the beast slowly over a culvert and onto the stony verge. The cart lurched slightly and boxes of utensils shifted and settled with metallic scrapings. The rubber tyres crunched in the stones.

“Why don’t you tip us all out and be done with it?” Sissy taunted.

“Be quiet woman.”

A fine misty rain began to fall, together the man and the woman pitched the tent under a low twisting river gum. The eldest child led the other kids away to explore the area. When they returned with hands full of golf balls the horse was hobbled some way off and the man and woman were stretching the fly over the heavy canvas tent.

“Youse kids scout around and get some chips.” And the kids rushed off to drag back fine leached logs and brambles and piled them some way from the tent where Sissy directed. Jack dragged up a number of heavy logs from nearer to the river. He set about chopping them into a neat pile with his axe. He was a strong man. Sissy got a fire going and Jack made a tripod from some straight sticks. From its centre he hung a piece of number eight fencing wire with a hooked end.

“Deal with the billy while I get some kero for the lantern,” Jack said to Sissy. He was a man who never said eight words if seven would do.

“There’s no bloody snakes in them logs is there?” Sissy pushed the hair back from her forehead and frowned. She looked vaguely demented and sweat stood out on her face.

“Jesus woman.” Jack started to walk across the grass. Back along the road a mile or so was a garage. Here he would buy an imperial gallon of kerosene. His back disappeared into the winter’s afternoon. He wore his khaki army coat and carried the square battered tin for the kero.

Sissy watched him go. “Youse kids don’t go too far away. It’s gonna be dark soon. Might rain.” Sissy picked through one of the boxes and found the billycan. She looked across at the river. An abundance of logs were strewn all along the banks, left there by the constant rise and fall of the river. They jammed against trees and some hung high in the twisted forks of gums. That’s how much the great river rose when it left off from being a peaceful stream flowing broad and brown across the state. In floodtime no one could believe this was the same waterway that bubbled peacefully under soft willows or held gentle sandy beaches in its many elbows. She came to the edge and stooped to fill the billy. Sissy stared across the water.

The woman felt the optimism of somewhere in the past leap in her heart. She was opposite that part of the river the townspeople called the lake. It was here that the river seemed to relax a little as it left a spread of soft white sand in a wide and gentle curve. A bit out from the opposite bank, long before Sissy’s time, the people had moored a raft and up the grassy hill they’d erected sheds for changing and even one they labelled “kiosk”. Now the paint was green chalk and spiders lined up in the beams. It seemed the lake had been there forever. The woman saw a younger Jack, walking on his hands across the raft, showing off his strength and manhood as he flipped into the summer depths. How safe life had all seemed then.

And now the raft was there still. She remembered Lenny Dingall waving farewell to the town as the river carried him away to the mystery of his death. Like her father. But then hardly a summer passed but some youth brown and brave with muscled limbs would become another victim of the snags and sudden depths of the water’s hidden treachery.

Way back then, all those years ago, some girls had joined in the tom foolery too. But Sissy and Rose and sometimes Paula just sat and watched in their own private landscape of shaded hills and secret valleys warmed and warmed by the sun. They liked to flick their wet hair back and let the movement show the soft fabric of their woollen bathing suits taut across their form. They’d scoop up hands of sand and let it trickle through their thistle hands. The sun shone and warmed the lanes and hills and made the secret hollows dark and wild with the sweetest summer bushes. The girls knew all these places and they spoke with their eyes to each other and laughed their smoky laughs behind earth brown hands.

The shadows lengthened across the lake and a few late birds dipped towards the water and flew into the deep green gloom and the day drew in. Was it all so long ago? The water pulled against the billy and the winter wind stirred leaves above. A few sticks floated by.

Sissy cried then. For all those yesterdays; for Lenny Dingall—poor silly bugger. And for herself and all those promises which even now might, just might, one day come true.

When Sissy went back up to the campsite the oldest one had got a fire going. She loved him and she longed to fold him to her but she said, “I hope you didn’t let them little kids near the wood—bloody snakes hidin’ everywhere.”

The dark boy smiled. “It’s alright Mum.” He stood with one skinny leg bent, his foot against his knee. He was lean and muscular and already in his toughened brown skin and dark eyes there was a strength and smouldering independence.

Sissy set her jaw and hung the billy on the hook. “He’ll probably piss off forever one day too.”

She had called the boy Joe but Jack had never asked why. The great Paula had laughed and called him “that emu one”, on account of his long skinny legs. All those years ago Sissy never knew how right she would be: the young man Joe took off on another winter’s day with his car-thief mates from the long huts of Sydney’s welfare camp and was never seen again. Perhaps he’d gone back to the bush or maybe he’d died in a drunken swaying car or he might have settled down and had three or four kids in Adelaide or Darwin. Sissy never found out.

But way, way back when Joe was first born, Paula’s flesh would roll as she laughed; “Hey, let’s take that emu one for a walk in the pram, eh? Let’s go down the lake or somethin’, eh?”

They all knew that the Old Granny still half believed that just by sitting near the river a girl could get a baby. Perhaps that’s what led the girls in that direction. Sometimes Rose would join them and they’d sit on the concrete steps near the kiosk and wonder what would happen when the war was over.

“If I see that snake I’ll kill it Mum. I’ll kill it with a stick.”

“I know that Joe. I know you would. Now here’s your father with the kero. Where’s the bloody tea-leaves?”

Jack had bought some devon and bread and a tin of powdered milk. They all had hot tea and bread and jam. Over in the shadows their horse snorted in the falling mist. The years of drifting for the Leetons had started. The winter swept in. Despite Sissy’s pleas the man would not move over as a family to the Old Granny’s shack.

“We can look after ourselves.”

But in reality, Sissy spent a lot of time over behind the saleyards at her mother’s place and they would often stay the night. Jack never did although he sometimes would come and sit in the kewpie doll front room.

“’ere, ’ave a cup of that tea Jack. It’ll do ya good.” The Old Granny would push the teapot across the lino topped table.

“’ow youse gettin’ on over in that tent, eh? Should come and camp ’ere, eh Mum?” Paula would laugh. All the world was a type of joke to her. The kids loved her.

“Make’s no difference. Sleep on veranda if youse like—always room for more ’ere. Never mind ’bout that Harry. This my place.”

But Jack would always go back to the tent and if it wasn’t raining Sissy and most of the kids usually went back too.

What did the dreaming boy recall about the Old Granny’s place after all those years? Laughter and hot sweet tea and bread with syrup. Billy and Prince falling home happy drunk with a few tall brown bottles which they banged on the table. The shiny brass light switches on the dirty door frames. Black Paula bent over the washing tub. The bunyip down in the river, oh so near but never ever seen except in the imagination as the kids lay tucked up in their wogger blankets on the front veranda. The smoke and laughter of card games drifting through the yellow window and weaving past his dreams into the black night sky. With the Old Granny and the great laughing Paula and his mum he felt safe. And that’s what he remembered.

Every aspect of life in the tent was hard. The wood was always wet. The wind blew. The fly came away one night and the canvas leaked. One day Jack picked up a couple of primuses. And a radio. It was a large brown bakelite affair which needed a twelve-volt battery, and was only turned on for the news. The primuses at first were a disappointment. They kept blowing out in the wind. Sissy would not use them inside the tent. Jack made a box from rivetted sheet metal to shelter the pump-up fires from the wind. Sissy was uneasy.

“I’m not usin’ them. The heat’ll get trapped inside and the bloody kero will explode. I’m not using that contraption.”

The man had worked silently, not even telling the woman what it was he was making. He was always like that—as if he was the only one who knew what was good for everyone else.

“They’ll be alright. Here give me a billy of water.”

“But I don’t want hot water, I want to cook. Anyway what are you tryin’ to do—blow us all up? Get back youse kids.”

Jack successfully brought the billy of water to the boil. “See, that’s alright isn’t it? And it didn’t blow up.”

“Jack lifted his contraption off the primus and put his hand to the side of the tank. It’s a bit hot but that’s alright. Kero can’t explode just because it gets a bit hot. There has to be a spark.”

“Well there’s more than a spark there—what do you call that bloody flame, eh?”

“But the flame can’t get to the kero can it. Use your sense woman.” jack was getting angry.

“Use your sense you mean. How the hell does the kero get to the flame, hey? Answer me that. Out a little hole, hey? And the flame can go through that little hole no trouble. Next thing me and the kids are all dead.”

Suddenly Jack picked up the metal frame and threw it away. It landed with a metallic crumple on the roots of the twisted gum tree.

“Let the bloody wind blow it out for all I care.” And the man walked off towards the river.

The two younger kids went over to the frame. “Can we play with it then?”

Sissy was confused and sorry. “No, leave the thing alone.”

She comforted herself with the idea that he brought out the worst in her. “Why couldn’t he tell me what he was doing? Why can’t he ever listen to me? That’s what I’d like to know.”

Did the white man ever know himself what he was doing?

Later, when she had peeled some potatoes and tried to cook them the primus kept blowing out. Sissy looked around and went over to the tree and picked up the box Jack had made with his hands. She easily pushed the thin sheet metal back into shape. She carefully placed the box over the primuses. With greatly exaggerated precision she lowered the billy over the flame.

“Stand back youse kids—this thing’s liable to explode.”

“I don’t think so mum,” said Joe, “Dad’s right I think.”

“Just stand back and don’t argue. That’s the trouble with youse kids—are and cause trouble all the time. Now get back away from this.”

“What’s explode mean Mummy?”

“Kill ya—what do ya think it means? Just about everything in the world is dangerous and don’t forget it.”

Sissy put the billy full of peeled potatoes above the sheltered flame.

“Stand back youse kids—stand back.”

The family stood back and every now and then Sissy went up and looked into the billy. Eventually she said, “Well bugger me, at least they’re starting to boil.”

The man said nothing when he returned. The potatoes were mashed with powdered milk and eaten with devon and bread.

The winter dragged on. Sissy enrolled the two older kids in the school over near the garage. They went off each morning with their apricot jam sandwiches and ragged clothes. They came home with drawings and french knitting and shared these wonders with the younger ones.

Neither Jack nor Sissy were ever able to manage money. The miserable unemployment benefit that Jack picked up at the post office every fortnight lasted four or five days. He did the odd job at the garage. They ate lots of bread and jam. One morning only Chris and his father were at the campsite. The boy heard the man mumbling in the tent. “Where the bloody hell has she put the things? Man can never find anything.”

The family’s few clothes were in a battered cardboard suitcase at one end of the tent. A couple of Sissy’s dresses hung on a rope between the tent post and the tree.

“Socks, where the hell are my socks?” Jack was preparing to go over to the garage.

“Christ, these have got bloody holes in them. And they haven’t been washed for a month. Man’s got a good mind to piss off by myself.”

His voice was close to breaking. The boy heard his father. He walked to the tent flap and looked in. His father’s shoulders were heaving—his back was to the boy.

“Daddy,” the boy said.

The man did not turn around.

The child was encouraged—at least he wasn’t shouting.

“Daddy,” the boy whispered again.

The man half turned.

“Go away son, go away.” He sounded different, washed out and helpless. “Go away, your father’s alright.”

Confused, the boy backed off.

It wasn’t for years and years that the boy understood how much love was locked up inside the man—how much pain he’d buried. How his humanity would not, could not ever express itself. How afraid the man was of seeming weak—after all, wasn’t he responsible for people who needed help? He never accepted the trappings of the old lady Leeton’s Christianity but he sure as hell picked up her sense of being right. After all, wasn’t he white?

Sissy came across the grass. “Gee it’s windy. Where’s your father?”

Jack was still sitting on the mattress in the tent staring at the stiff socks he held in his rough hands.

“Hadn’t you better get going?” the woman said.

The man did not answer.

“Aren’t you doing any work today?”

The man was silent.

“What’s the bloody matter with you?”

The man raised his face. It was gaunt and tear stained.

“I can’t find any decent socks.”

“Is that anything to cry about? Well bugger me, a pair of bloody socks.”

The man looked at the woman and said not a word.

He knew somewhere he was not crying for a pair of socks.

Kookaburras laughed down on the river bank.

As spring arrived so too did Sissy’s brother Mick. He pulled up in his wagon quite close to the Leeton’s tent.

“Mum said you’d be here. Good spot.”

Shirl and the two boys were with him. Sissy was delighted. The Leeton kids had not met Mick and his family before and it was years since Sissy had seen Mick. He usually spent his time travelling around in his wagon doing a bit of tomato picking here, a spot of fruit picking there. Mick was a big man with dark wavy hair, large white teeth and and friendly open face. He was the only male in Sissy’s family Jack had any time for. He and Mick had been in New Guinea together. Even so he was not happy that Mick looked like staying.

The first thing Mick did after he unharnessed the horse and hobbled it out on the river flat was set about cutting gum branches for a shelter. Expert with an axe he and Shirl and the boys soon had a springy green pile a little way off from the Leeton’s tent.

“You’ve never seen a house like mine before,” he promised the kids with a twinkling eye and slow smile.

In the spring all that time ago, as the broad river flowed and the light breeze picked up the scent of newly cut branches and the tent flap moved lazily as the canvas dried out in the sun, Mick built his family a shelter. Four straight branches, fairly stout, were stripped back and fashioned into posts. Forks were left at the top. The posts were sharpened at the base and driven into the ground. They became self-supporting when long, straight branches were placed between the forks, making the framework for a box shaped room. Rope was attached to each forked upright and, tent fashion, the whole structure was pulled tight when the ropes were secured to angled short, thick sticks driven into the earth. Mick had everything he needed in the wagon—twine and wire and pliers. More poles were laid across the top and then bushes were placed on top of them. Heavier logs were used to weight the whole roof down. By the time Shirl had spread a canvas sheet on the ground and thrown a few army blankets about the family had a home.

The Leeton children were wide eyed and wanted their father to make one for them too. Jack grunted and muttered something about not living like a tribe of blacks.

Shirl unloaded a few tea chests from the wagon. The kids’ astonishment and delight grew as various boxes and flour drums were lined up under the shelter.

The two families settled down together and Mick and Sissy soon got into the habit of spending a day or two at a time in the town pubs. Their favourite was the Empire. Jack would leave the kids in the care of Shirl and comb the bars looking for Sissy.

“Don’t youse kids worry ’bout your mum. You’re alright with your old aunty you know.” She had a curious smile—full of sadness and resignation. Many of her babies had died but she stuck with Mick even though the welfare eventually took the living kids.

TB finally caught up with her frail body. Mick spent his last few years pedalling round the countryside on a bicycle, a bottle of sherry buried deep inside his coat pocket.

“Don’t you worry ’bout your mum.” Shirl would smile and her toothless gums would show. All the kids loved her. She could make crepe paper roses of yellow and red and surprising blue to sell down at the Empire. She let the kids wind green paper round the thin wire stems.

The boy especially grew to love and rely on his aunty. When the others kids were asleep in the tent or the wagon and only Shirl was there to keep watch, he would creep out with his stained face and let her cuddle him. Shirl smoked a pipe and she would take it from her lips and say, “Come on sugar—can’t you sleep? Well you just come over here to your old aunty.” And she would rock him to sleep in her arms.

Way back then Spring arrived, Mick arrived and the floods arrived.

Sissy and Mick were off at one of their sessions in the Empire. Jack was doing some casual work at some place or other. The sky was low and roaring, yellow and sinister. Shirl was looking after the six kids. Joe and little Mary had not been to school since their mother had taken off with Mick.

The wind whipped through the long polished grass and the children sensed the electric tension in the air. It was quite dark at about three in the afternoon. Shirl’s toothless mouth was tight. Her deep set eyes kept scanning the sky and her forehead crinkled. Every now and then she would wander off to look at the river. The wind ironed her red cardigan flat against her slight body. The cardigan was but-toned up to her chin with tight little plastic rosebuds. Shirl fancied the river was rising. Bobbing sticks and leaves went swirling past. She pushed a stick into the mud. Chris pushed another little twig alongside the worried woman’s marker. “Good boy. We’ll test this old river.”

Mick’s horse stood cropping the grass and the hobbles’ clink was blown into the wind as the animal moved a step or two at a time. The rushing wind made its coat shiver—cold, muddy brown.

Shirl was a placid woman. Calm and wise she went again to check the marker. The boy’s had gone or was covered. Her own was now showing just the tip, and even as she looked it disappeared. She climbed the bank and said quietly to Joe, “We’ll go to the Old Granny’s. The river’s up a bit.”

Joe shouted to the kids. “Righto youse kids—we’re going to the Old Granny’s.”

“What’s wrong?” the younger kids wanted to know. And Shirl did not say anything.

As if to confirm the general feeling that something was wrong there was a hideous crackling of electricity like a rag being ripped and a roar of thunder that made everyone stand quite still.

“Jesus,” said Joe.

Shirl and the kids set off, whipped by the wind across the flat. The Old Granny would know what to do.

By the time the party could see the shack great drops of icy rain were beginning to splash onto their skin. The old woman and Paula were around the back between the house and the river. Shirl and the children found them there.

The boy saw the Old Granny with her face set like a rock against the wind. She was encouraging the activities of Paula. The wind pulled at the great woman’s clothes but her bulk seemed immoveable.

Without looking at the new arrivals the old woman said, “Youse come. Well reckon youse should go straight back to tent and wait for Jack. Flood’s comin’ but not yet. Reckon you go back and Jack will pack up, leave river. We goin’ Pine Hill I reckon. That’s right Paula, give it a good shake.”

Paula was shaking the wire of the chicken coop. She was laughing. “Come on youse chooks—run away and save yaselfs. Get outa there.”

The hens jerked sporadically about the scratched earth making urgent noises. Their small black eyes glistened and their white feathers were brilliant in the strange electric light pushed down by the heavy clouds. One hen suddenly found the opening and flapped out into its freedom. There was an instant following and the rest jammed and bustled in the doorway. As they rushed out there was an explosive separation of the birds. They fanned out in all directions and the coop was empty.

“Where they goin’ Old Granny?” asked the boy.

The trees along the river were making a huge rushing noise. The grey wooden walls of the old shack were washed clean by the wind and the galvanised nails were polished cold.

“They probably gonna die!” shrieked Paula, “If they don’t learn to fly real quick.” And she laughed her enormous laugh.

The boy saw the retreating white feathers lifted up from behind and blown against the grain. Soon the hens disappeared, small and white and separate.

The Old Granny gave them a cup of hot tea and then bustled them outside into the wind. The air was exploding.

“Gee, there’s gonna be a flood, everyone in town says.” It was Sissy smiling and leaning on Mick. Brother and sister stumbled up to the veranda, cigarettes drooping from their mouths. Sissy looked windblown and drunk. “I thought you’d be over here. Good old Shirl, eh?”

Shirl looked at the floorboards.

“You look after them kids.” The Old Granny spat the words at her daughter. “Paula and me goin’ to Pine Hill. Reckon you and that Jack go to showgrounds.”

“Wherever he is. Not at the tent.” Sissy was smiling and her words were slurred.

“Sis and me just went there,” said Mick and he drank the last from a sherry bottle’ he’d taken from his pocket.

“We was just going back,” said Shirl quietly. “The Old Granny says the floods won’t come yet.”

“I can see that, I can see that.” Sissy’s mood was swinging as the grog did its tricks. “Hey—what ’bout a drink for ya little sister?”

“Sorry Sis, all gone.” And Mick threw the bottle into the oleander bushes at the end of the veranda.

“You old meanie. Anyway there’s gonna be a flood you know. I gotta get these kids back to their father and pack up the tent. There’s gonna be a flood.”

“Well git goin’ then,” said the Old Granny.

In time Sissy and Mick and the kids with Shirl made their bedraggled way back to the camp. It seemed the wind separated each one of them from the other. As the group came up to the tent they could see Jack doing something.

“What ya doin’ my old Man? Tightenin’ the ropes? Well ya can just bloody untighten them ’cos we’re not staying here to get drowned.”

Chris felt frightened and eyed his father.

Sissy continued beligerent as the grog wore off. “There’s gonna be a flood and I for one am pissin’ off. And the kids are too.”

Jack continued with his task of securing the tent pegs. He did not speak.

Sissy continued to build up like the storm all about, waving her arms wildly.

“What about you Shirl—you not staying here are ya?”

Shirt’s eyes were downcast. The ribbing on her thin red cardigan ran between her flat breasts and the wind flattened her hair. She was silent. It was Mick who spoke.

“What ya reckon Jack? Reckon that river’ll come up over the bank tonight?”

Jack spoke for the first time. “There’s not gonna be a bloody flood—a bit of a downpour and everyone’s runnin’ round like a chook with its head cut off.”

Mick had a bit of time for his brother-in-law but he said, “Gee mate—I don’t know.”

“Please yourself,” and Jack started to hammer the pegs in again.

The grass cut the wind and the tight ropes shuddered in the air.

Chris felt fearful. Every hit his father gave to the pegs increased the tension in the air. His father was a solid wall of defiance.

“I reckon we’ll pack up the wagon Jack,” said Mick all of a sudden.

Jack kept securing the tent against the universe.

“Well piss off then!” Sissy threw the words at her brother like a stone. “Leave us here to drown—go to buggery.”

“You could come too...” Mick looked sideways at his brother-in-law.

“We’ll be right, we’ll be right.”

So Mick and Shirl began piling stuff into the wagon. It did not take long. Mick harnessed up the horse and it looked impatient to be gone with the wind tearing at its mane and rattling the harness. Their two boys were lifted up inside the wagon. Mick and Shirl climbed up. They sat there foolishly hunched as the wind cut across them, Shirt’s red cardigan was cold and thin.

Sissy would not look at them. Instead she walked off and sat on a flour drum with her back to the others.

Mick clicked his tongue a couple of times and the wagon jerked and then rolled away over the wet grass. The Leetons were alone with the river and the wind.

The night closed in and the river continued to swirl by, dark and dangerous. It became a beast that waited in the shadows, growling and threatening.

The man slapped some devon on four metal plates and cut some thick bread. After the kids had eaten he said. “Get into bed.” They crawled under the blankets in their clothes and shut their eyes in a pretence of sleep. The rain beat solidly on the canvas. Sissy came into the tent then. The man lit the kerosene lantern. and the tent shadow moved as the boy’s parents sat there under that great wet sky, rolling cigarettes in their own private agonies.

In his half sleep Chris heard vague shufflings and mumblings as the man cursed and fumbled. He was pumping kerosene into the lantern. Jack adjusted the wick and the tent danced in a dull yellow light. The boy fell alseep.

When he awoke the world was chaotic. Gone was the soft light of the lantern. Now a great white light moved not within the tent but outside in the black and it picked up flying leaves and driving rain. Mixed with everything was the thudding of an engine.

“Hold me neck, that’s it.” His mum’s voice.

“Here, give me that one.” A strange voice—a man.

“How many are there?” Another man’s voice—lower.

“Pass her up.”

“Up you go.”

“Here’s another one.”

Light in the boy’s eyes. Cold cold rain on his face. Knees scraping on cold hard metal. Laughter.

“Here you go mate, get this round you.”

Rough blanket down to bare feet which touched slatted boards.

Sissy’s voice. “Yous sure ya got four up there? Don’t youse move this bloody thing till I’ve counted them.”

“We’re not leaving anyone.” Serious voice—like telling off.

“All here, righto, best take her over towards the bridge.” Strange voice of authority. Beating cold rain. Swirling world in black moving night.

“Youse kids alright?” Sissy’s voice—softer now—less edgy.

The floating vibrating machine with its strong white light pushed its way through the flood. There seemed to be a great many people. They sat on the slatted seats of the machine, all safe. The machine floated towards the approaches to the bridge. Its wheels fluttered as they found the solid wooden planks. It rumbled across and Chris saw the great white triangles slowly moving overhead. Above the whining engine and the driving rain a soldier shouted,

“Jesus, its a floating farm out there—chooks and every-thing.”

It was the smell more than anything that seemed to wrap around the boy and claim him and yet exclude him by its strangeness. It was a smell of damp and cloying heat, of cabbage and wet concrete. The echoing tin hall was filled with people. Practically the whole of the northern side of the town’s population had arrived at the showground. But the Old Granny, the great Paula, Billy and Prince and all the other people were nowhere to be seen. The rest had been rescued by the Army—as the Leetons had. They’d arrrived by tractors, horse drawn carts, on foot, car and even bicycles. They clustered in groups under the thundering corrugated iron roof of the pavilion. In other summers the same people had wandered through this hall, commenting on the vegetables and animals and flowers which they raised in the surrounding countryside and which gave meaning to their existence within the landscape.

All the people were together under the glaring bare bulbs which hung from the cobwebbed angle-iron high above. Some sat on forms waiting to be ordered around. Children slept on the bare concrete covered with coats or whatever was at hand. At the end of the pavilion stood a long trestle table with tall piles of thick white china plates and cups.

The flood had tumbled down the river in the night and no one had had time to sandbag their houses or lift side-boards onto drums. Many of the people muttered about the Godforsaken land and how they were going to pack up and go. How they didn’t belong. How they were losing their fight with the land. Of course afterwards they would go and push out the mud and scrub down their walls and grow old and bitter in the memory of their losses.

No one understood the floods except the other people of the river. They lived not by a river but in the whole world. The landscape was not separated into hills, valleys, rivers, flats. The river was the sky. It lived for a time in the sky. But there was no time. It hid and played under the dry flats and flowed across the face of the burning sun. It filled the space between the stars and as the whole great play of light and dark, of shifting water and wind-swept earth rolled around with its birds and lizards, kangaroos and snakes, everyone moved effortlessly like shadows in the bush, just as the sun moved away for the wind. Floods do not arrive either catastrophically or quietly—they are always here. The river is a tide.

Sissy looked at the wet miserable huddle of people: Jack was standing over with his sister. She looked at her kids. She felt lost.

Sissy was a small girl. The river was in flood. The sky was black as she walked up the hill with Paula. She held Paula’s sweaty hand. She was wrapped around with love.

Pine Hill: the Old Granny and Paula were there now. Not here with strangers in a raining night all wrapped up in Army blankets. So she cursed the man. She knew she was alone.

But she remembered, half remembered when everything just was.

She walked up the hill to Aunty’s. The floods swirled in the droughts and the earth was parched in flood. The sun shone at night and the moon whitened the world by day. There was no yesterday or tomorrow. Now was when Paula let the chooks out. Now was when they sat up at Pine Hill eating damper with the big quiet faces all around.

She hated these people because she did not belong. Did she belong with the big quiet faces?

She wanted to run. She wanted to smash the tall towers of white plates and run away into where the shattered fragments of white crockery fell quietly, and as they fell they changed into a broad hot white plain where two still kangaroos with little burnt front paws stared across the distance—across all time—and stared at her in the eternal silence. And all was alright again.

Sissy knew then that she would leave Jack. She could see him now talking with his tight haired sister who nervously clutched a large green handbag. Sissy knew that Jack and his sister were silently cursing the river. But Sissy did not curse the river. She cursed the man. Sissy was not one with the river, but she understood her mother, and as Sissy would have said, her mother understood the river. Unlike the man, Sissy had an instinct for survival. But her bitterness grew when she finally realised she could never go back to when she hadn’t seen the difference between her mother and herself.

“Only the whites drown—unless they take us too,” her thoughts were abjectly bitter.

And her bitterness and hatred and self-doubt all came together in a sickening surge of half-knowledge that made it impossible for her to hold on to any concept of “us”.

Earlier that day, when Sissy had told Jack that the river would flood, her words had been utterly unable to cross that vast gulf between her world and her husband’s.

The waters receded. The people went back to their private battles. The Leeton family was dropped off at Waterbag Road by Mr Dawson. (It was Mr Dawson who had employed Jack at the garage.) The dwelling was one main room with a corrugated iron lean-to attached. At one end of the lean-to was a flimsy tin cooking area. The main room, where cows had been milked, still had a few stray bolts sticking up from the concrete floor where a separator once stood. There was one window overlooking a red dirt lane running by a wheat field. Outside was a furphy which Dawson would tow away every now and then to refill at the cattle trough.

The family settled in and the sun shone. The wheat across in the paddock turned from electric green to rusty gold. The lane glowed rose pink as the surface dried out and broke up.

The hot Christmas arrived and settled with its magic and flies over the landscape. The small gums scattered down the lane stood milky green. Sissy took the kids and they broke off a branch. Back in the shed they decorated it with coloured paper. Sissy cut “Merry Christmas” from pretty paper and strung it across the top of the window.

The wind moved over the ripening wheat and lifted the light paper message.

The kids had fizzy drinks and Sissy and Jack floated bottles of beer in the cool water of the furphy. Later in the afternoon there was a summer storm and heavy rain drops punched into the red earth and washed the gum leaves. The family moved inside and the smell of dust and rain came through the window and all the wheat across the lane moved as the storm rolled in from the west.

It was the last Christmas before Sydney. Chris asked why his name sounded like Christmas. Sissy and Jack laughed because they didn’t know.

PART II

The voices faded in the fog like a short-wave radio. Chris could not see any name for the town but he could make out dark lettering on a suspended sign where an amputated hand pointed to REFRESHMENTS. The window panes were black. The boy stirred irritably as the inconsiderate business of stopping the train proceeded. A short hiss was followed by a final jolt of the couplings. The dead stillness and a different light suddenly moved outside his head and Chris became aware of the figures on the platform. Grey shapes breathing smoke and moving silently past the window. Families arriving—leaving. And yes, there was a father. Did all the groups have a father? Big coat collars turned up to nearly touching low slung hats, and tops of heads just above the window. Families—families—leaving and arriving. Coming and going. Going—leaving. What strange words. Words that should have been exciting but were in the reality of this moment sickening and lonely. Yet Brian had left England. Perhaps that was why Brian had been his friend. Could Brian tell something about his future—that he was a traveller too? No, that seemed like nonsense. And Brian had spoken of his trip across the great ocean in the ship which had a swimming pool; laughed of it in his funny accent and shared sweets as he told of the biggest adventure of a life. Perhaps big ships were different? That had taken six weeks—six weeks! And this leaving, on a train, was taking forever too. Would he see Brian again?

The train sighed as if all its systems had been turned off and it would rest here forever. Chris could still taste the meat pie his mother had bought eight hours before on another station—another refreshment room—another world. There the wintery sunshine had seemed full of promise and he hadn’t really thought of the others back at school. But the excitement was now replaced by a movement in his stomach which he fought to control. He saw Brian’s face smiling a crooked confused little smile as Mr Webster, hand on Chris’s shoulder and looking worried, had led him out of the classroom.

His mother, in her best dress but looking terrible, and, strangest of all his older brother who should have been in high school, stood with Mary and Keith in a broken little family group. They stood there waiting and Chris felt something move in his total being. This shouldn’t be like this: something feels wrong: his mother never came into the school. Rarely she would meet the kids after school but then she would wait, across the ditch and under the dark monkey-nut trees that lined the metal road in front of the school. But here, right outside his classroom, inside the school—no. Chris sensed an impending horror. Was his father dead? Were they all going to jail or something equally impossible but somehow happening?

The wall behind them was covered with carefully mounted paintings. He could see his own painting swirling around and fading in and out of focus and Mr Webster’s hands, hands so white, on his sleeve, pushing him gently towards his mother and the rest of his life.

In this moment there came across the world a dreaming quality—a deep feeling that somehow no one, not anyone, ever again could ever be trusted. “Are we going home?”

Sissy would not look at him. “No, just don’t ask questions.”

Chris appealed with his eyes to Joe—that skinny dark boy with the shadowed black eyes and softly waving hair. But Joe looked only at the wide unpolished boards that Brian’s mother mopped every afternoon after school. Joe knew something but merely shuffled his feet. Mary, in her raggedy print dress and cardigan with the elbows worn out stood gently swinging a shoddy leather school bag in little sweeps by her turned down socks. She would not look at him. Keith seemed unaffected and kept straining away from Sissy’s hand and grinning at those bigger kids left sitting in the tall ceilinged classroom.

The carriage gave a sudden jerk and Chris heard the whistle, floating flat and dull through fog. His body touched against Keith’s sleeping shoulder. Tears stung his eyes as he realised that the sickening movement was about to start all over again. As the carriage gathered speed the passing lights flickered on the row of photographs where six trains were trapped forever in scenic parts of the state. The carafe of water, which the children had wanted to drink as soon as they saw it, rattled in its chrome cradle. They had drunk some too and it tasted of soot and leather but it was on a train—a train going to Sydney, so it was made to taste wonderful.

The lights now stopped and Chris could see the dark shapes of railway tents. He thought of Errol who would be asleep now with his family, who laughed all the sunny day. And he felt a great distance from him and all the others who would be sliding in the muddy playground in the morning, as though the fury of their play would delay the bell. He felt an emptiness he remembered from somewhere else and wished he might hear the bell too.

The smoke streamed past the window—its magic now merely a damp presence which tasted of meat pie. The beat of the train became a sudden roar as a tall bridge carried men and women and children across a deep valley. Somewhere far below in creekweeds and muddy spreads of reeds the frogs stopped their own noises as the bolted girders carried through their cold strength that relentless beat. Fireflies twinkled in the shaking air.

He saw his father’s back with the thick leather belt holding up his trousers and this threatened to push the other pictures out of the frame of his mind. What was it he felt? Pity? Guilt? Whatever it was floated around like an irritating wisp of smoke which would not form into anything definite. Somewhere in this smoky vision he saw the man sleeping or perhaps huddled and confused at the makeshift stove in the shack at Waterbag Road with its cold empty beds.

Keith’s knee was a rock in his side and he remembered the warmth of his back when they’d fallen alseep together. Was it only last night? The boys had slept together since ever he could remember. How they had warmed each other and breathed warm rings on each other’s backs on cold nights when the wind drove the rain against the tin walls of Waterbag Road. And how then he had lain awake and heard Keith’s breathing—like now, except that now he could only hear the crying of the train. This train which rushed and pulled them behind its great searching light that sought out sudden trees and glimpses of roads and left behind the occasional slow car with little yellow lights. This train that surged through the night and lit up its own path which you could see when it was coming to another turn in the track. This train predestined to travel a track laid down by men now forgotten.

His mother’s head was thrown back, mouth open. Her light snore was interrupted by sounds which were like indistinguishable words. Words which sounded vaguely angry—telling someone not to bother her any more. She had sat smoking and speaking quietly with Mary. First Keith, then Joseph and finally Chris had fallen asleep in the rocking carriage which carried them through the winter night further and further away from their father. And the Old Granny and Aunty Paula and Billy and Prince.

The boy knew he would be sick. Staggering and falling on Keith’s legs he somehow got to the cramped lavatory. Afterwards, his stomach empty and his head light, the seven-year-old boy slept. And through all that fitful sleep was the movement of the train and a mixture of sick excitement and knowledge that they were all doing something utterly terrible.

When he awoke to a strong grey light he could see into backyards with fowlhouses and paths leading to lavatories. Brick and tile, the houses swept past. Large signs attached to brick walls spoke of ice-creams he had never heard of; shops he’d never seen. And there, on the roof tops, were dozens of wire frames—they must be television aerials. He tried to feel the excitement, force the excitement, but the aerials mixed with the taste of broken sleep and sooty water and the sickening feeling was returning. Still the train moved and swished past backyards and over bridges with early cars crawling under.

“Nearly there son, nearly there.” His mother’s voice spoke to him.

“Television,” he smiled. And felt sick again.

Central Station could not be comprehended. Ice-creams of light winked just below the high roof. Kiosks lined the centre, piled with fruit and magazines and sandwiches. People—so many people—not knowing or caring about anyone else. Rubber-tyed trains whirred past stacked with suitcases. They had carried their own battered cardboard case, tied with rope, in the carriage with them—lifted up onto the wire rack above the framed pictures of trains. But somehow these suitcases looked far more important; leather some of them and pasted with labels and tied up with proper straps. They whirred past and everyone stood back and Sissy gripped Keith’s shoulder and looked worried.

It was still early morning yet the great room—the largest the boy had ever been in—was already a purposeful place of moving strangers. Chris stared up at his mother and saw her worried face as she looked about, her jaw set and eyes squinted as they always were when she concentrated. But he was alright now, the sickness had gone and he was still with his mother—that big person who was a grown-up. And grown-ups always knew what to do, even if they looked worried. Didn’t they?

Suspended in the centre of the vaulted space above their heads was the legend ASK THE MAN IN BLUE.

“Look Mum,” the boy pointed.

“It’s alright son, I’m looking for the electric trains.”

The boy’s stomach heaved—not another train ride.

“Can’t we walk?”

“There they are,” Joe pointed to the sign leading to tiled stairs going below the floor.

“Come on youse mob, we’re nearly there now.” Sissy heaved up the large case and moved to the gaping passageway leading down. It smelled of the musty earth. Is everything rotten in the centre? Where were the televisions and the huge ocean he’d seen pictures of? Chris hoped that just around each twisting passage he might glimpse that great blue water but instead there waited another train. Only this one didn’t have smoke or little rooms. But it moved. Silently it moved and the boy’s insides twisted and ached and somehow sent into his mouth a metallic taste of this new and dirty world.

They got out of the blotchy red weathered carriage and stepped onto a windswept platform where oleanders straggled at intervals down the centre of the gravel surface. Again Sissy looked around. Of course she didn’t expect Rose to be there or anything like that. Jesus, she didn’t even know they were coming. But you never knew.

“Well, this is the suburb where she lives. I wonder if it’s far. I s’pose we’ll have to get a taxi.”

Sissy led the little group out through the gate where a uniformed man took their tickets and threw them in a bin by his side. He was seated on a solid varnished chair and didn’t look up.

They walked out into a suburb and over the street saw a couple of taxis.

“Come on youse mob—not far now.”

Clarrie came to the door in his blue singlet and his pants hung below his belly. A cigarette, no longer alive, hung from the corner of his mouth. He pushed open the tattered screen door.

“You’ve come then. I thought you and Rose were cookin’ up somethin’. She’s out the back somewhere.” He looked at the family without affection and regarded the suitcase. “Ya sister’s here!” he called, turning his head and scratching his stomach.

“Well, can we come in or we gonna stand on the bloody step all day?” Sissy thought of this house as Rose’s and this showed in the proprietorial tone in her voice.

Before Clarrie could answer, Rose ran across and pushed him out of the way as she hugged her sister. Both the women cried.

“Just look at them kids—’aven’t they grown. And look at Joe—he’s so tall. ’Ere, come in, come in. ’Ow’s Mum and Paula? Whendya get ’ere ’eh? Clarrie, bring that port in. Jesus it’s good to see ya, Sis. And all these kids too. Just look at them—’aven’t they grown? Rose dabbed at her eyes and Sissy and her lot went inside.”

A Sydney house. Yes, there was a television in the corner. Its screen was a dead dark grey and the cloth grid covering for the sound was silent. The house smelled faintly of leaking gas and stale toast and poverty. “Jeez, I don’t know if we got any bread left Sis. I mean I’m sorry but I wasn’t expectin’ nobody. I’ve got some tea. I can make a cuppa tea.”

Rose saw Chris eyeing the television. “You won’t get nothin’ on that till six o’clock love. But the kids are round somewhere. Youse can play with them. But I’ll make a cuppa tea first. ’ow many cups we got Clarrie?”

Chris looked again at the TV. A Sydney house, with a TV. He kept thinking—a Sydney house with a TV and he looked up at the ceiling. Yes, there was an electric light. It had a fly-blown shade with yellowed tassels hanging from its scalloped border. It must be real because it was on even though it was daytime. A Sydney house with a TV and electric lights. It must have lots of rooms too. These wonders somewhat allayed the gnawing feeling of hunger which he had. But when Aunty Rose and Sissy came out of the room where the gas smelled strongest they banged a plate onto the laminex table. It held a pile of broken biscuits which Rose had smeared with butter.

They sat around and ate the food and drank sweet tea. Clarrie fiddled with his cigarette and matches and rubbed his rough chin while making little clicking noises of disapproval with his tongue. Rose seemed not to be the queen the boy remembered with her clothes and cigarettes and lace hankies. But she had a TV, he reminded himself. And electricity in this Sydney house.

Later Rose’s two boys returned from the neighbour’s house where they’d been playing. They were both older than Chris by about three years so they showed little interest in him. After filling their mouths with biscuit they ran off again, taking Joe with them. The boy explored the backyard which was wrapped around by tall straight paling fences which separated Rose’s place from three other houses. The houses all had thick corrugated fibro roofs and low brick chimneys. A few had TV aerials.

There was an outside lavatory, which made him think—after all this was Sydney. Even Grandma Leeton’s house had a toilet inside. But this one did flush, so that was nice. But it still smelled, and had a few dirty newspapers strewn about the wooden floor. Manton Street had had an outside lavatory which was emptied once a week by men on a horse-pulled cart. And Waterbag Road had a can which his father emptied into a hole he dug and covered with earth.

He explored the wonders of the yard: concrete paths; a clothes line which spun around. It had some pegs on the wires. And wooden steps leading down from the back door and an old fridge lying under the house. There were several bikes under there too, with flat tyres and bits missing. He poked around until he couldn’t think what else to do. Keith and Mary were still inside. He tried to feel the excitement of being in Sydney and sure, there was something—a waiting feeling—but it was not anything like he expected. He didn’t know what he expected but surely Sydney should be more than this. He kept going up to the power pole that stood outside the front fence and looking at the wires which were attached to the fibro wall, just to the right of the front door, under the eves. The wires hung down in a gentle sway across the yard. Somehow, mysteriously, they connected up to the television set which stood inside waiting. Perhaps Sydney would get better at six o’clock. But six o’clock seemed as far away as Christmas.

There were a few straggling shrubs lining the front fence which someone had planted with the best of intentions. They still held a few torn looking leaves and a couple of plain grey sparrows flitted about in them. There were ants on the footpath. Ants in Sydney, now that was something he didn’t expect. Fancy ants living on this concrete foot-path. Perhaps there were lizards. He would look all around, he would look everywhere for lizards. The boy looked as the screen door made its little sound. There was Clarrie, leaning against the frame. “So, youse ’ave come to the big smoke, eh? Pissed off from the old man eh?” It was more a statement than a question. Chris remained silent. His head hung down and he raised his eyes a little to look at this man who seemed to pour out so much hostility.

Later on that night, after the disappointment of the grainy television and Aunty Rose had made up a bed on the floor in her boys’ room for Keith and himself—lucky Joe was sleeping with Paul—he listened for the sounds of Sydney. It seemed like the middle of the night. Five boys in bed in the small room, but he couldn’t hear them breathing. He could only hear the silence, like a buzzing, ringing sound which was not exactly in his ears. The room was black. Aunty Rose had not shut the door but all the big people were in bed. His mum and Mary in bed with Rose. And Clarrie, well he didn’t know where Clarrie was sleeping. But even with the door open the house was black and silent. Was he the only one awake? Why was he left watching the dark and wondering? Why was he left listening to this silence? He could feel Keith’s side. It was a little comfort in the silence. The air seemed full of tiny grey dots that swirled about in the blackness. The faint smell of gas seeped along the narrow hallway and into the air he breathed. What made that sound which seemed to be inside his head? Could it be an insect in his ear? No it wasn’t on just one side. Perhap he got an insect in both ears? It didn’t sound like an insect. Once an insect had got in his ear at Waterbag Road and his mum had poured some melted butter into his ear and he heard and sort of felt the poor thing squelch around till the high pitched screaming stopped. Then he’d kept sticking a finger in his ear to see if the insect had floated out on the slippery butter. This noise, he decided, was the sound of silence. He lay there thinking about that in a vague sort of half sleep. His mum’s face and trains and the TV and ants on concrete drifted all around a lonely man huddled in front of a smoky fire in a little place in a lane a great distance from here, and none of it would go away, not even when he finally slept his first sleep in Sydney.

The Sydney days at Rose’s became weeks and Clarrie was getting sick of everyone. Sissy had been led by Rose’s two boys to the low cream painted school and enrolled her four kids on the first school day after the family arrived from the bush. She fidgeted and spoke in low little whispers in the school office when answering questions about the birthdates of her kids and where they’d been to school before and everything. But the bespectacled lady was helpful and had a kind smile and the only thing Sissy had to do was sign her name. She did this slowly and rested her free hand carefully on the enrolment forms. Keith was led off to the infants in shuddering sobs and Joe went off to the big school and Chris and Mary were put into different classes.

No one seemed to notice Christopher Micky Leeton, not even the teacher very much. He was given a free-standing table and a chair with a curved wooden seat to himself. Sydney seats he thought of them as. All the seats in the room were like that. The kids scraped them about and had different haircuts and seemed smart and probably had TV’s. He saw a few of them furtively glancing at him. A couple smothered giggles into their hands and he thought he heard them say something about his hand-me-down clothes. He looked out the window at the grey scudding sky and the few birds. Sydney did not have many birds he decided.

The teacher seemed not to care if the boy did any work or not. Perhaps his mum had said he was only staying a few days or weeks.

Routines at this school were different from the one he’d known back in the bush. Here the huge crowd of kids had a big assembly every morning and the teachers sat up on a stage. Songs were sung very loudly and uniformed kids carried flags to the platform and stood there holding them until the assembly ended. Even prayers were said. The Leeton kids had barely begun to adjust to these new requirements when Clarrie kicked them out of Aunty Rose’s place.

The first the kids knew of it was when Sissy, for the second time, came to their school and took them out long before home time. The only thing he really liked about that school was that if you put some money in a brown bag first thing in the morning it came back late in a box with a pie and a cream bun in it. Chris had never eaten a cream bun before. And the only school work he ever remembered was when the teacher drew with his hairy hands a map of Australia and marked where first Captain Cook arrived and then Arthur Phillip had settled the country.

“But what about the people who already lived here?” Chris had said.

“Well, they didn’t really live here. Not properly—not like us. They just moved away a bit further into the bush. You’ve got to understand, they just wandered around the place—there was plenty of room for everyone. Now let’s get back to how the first people in the new settlement set about clearing the land and building their houses.”

Something disturbed the boy deeply. Sitting in a strange room surrounded by strangers a vague recognition that something of enormous importance had just been said, but he couldn’t identify just what it was. It was somehow connected with the accepted convenience of the teacher’s explanation—the dismissive tone and the neccesity to now get back to a discussion of things that really mattered.

A vivid memory of a fire by a great flowing river on a night when the moon sailed across the wintery sky, flooded his mind. No, something was wrong here, not just in this room but with the whole world. He looked out the window and the sky seemed not to reach away to forever but to crouch down low over this room, this school, this suburb and the whole great sprawling city.

“Christopher Leeton, will you go to the office please?”

Chris could hardly remember where the office was. Sissy stood outside the headmaster’s office looking more angry than worried this time. The headmaster was standing beside her, looking not unrelieved.

“Well here’s the last of them. Goodbye Mrs Leeton, and good luck.”

A quite new car with a lady stood waiting just outside the schoolgate and Sissy gathered up her kids and led them to it. They all squeezed in and they were driven off by the lady who chatted all the way about furniture arriving later—although it wasn’t much it would do—and she hoped that that would be alright—but it should be—and they would soon settle in—it was only temporary she was sure and anyway there were lots of families there with children and it wasn’t too bad all things considered.

The car joined a wide arterial road and stopped frequently at lights which changed colours and there were people crossing the road while all the other cars and trucks stopped too. They drove past a very long building with two huge wrapped lollies on the roof and under bridges that had trains going over them. And Sissy said, “Jesus, I don’t know if I like Sydney. It’s a bit bloody busy for me.” Chris looked at the lady driver and wondered what she thought of a mother who spoke like that. The boy was learning that the world was very big and that not everyone was like all the people he knew best.

Even Mrs Ladell spoke differently from his mum. And Grandma Leeton never said bloody or Jesus. The teachers at school never spoke like his mum either. Words fascinated him. Why did his mum sound so different from the rest of the world?

The lady just smiled and said, “Yes, Sydney’s like that. Never mind, we’re nearly there.”

The land was quite flat and the road was wide and busy. There were buildings everywhere, big ones with triangle shaped roofs all along their length. Along the side of the road some people walked; old people mostly, with dull coats and hands in their pockets. One old man was waiting at a light and the car stopped so he could cross with his little fox terrier. The man had grey stubble on his face. He was a Sydney man. So, Sydney had old people and dogs too, thought Chris.

“There” soon came into view.

“Here we are. Doesn’t look much from the outside—but it’s not bad once you’re inside—and when you get your furniture all arranged and everything...”

The lady smiled as she edged the car along a muddy track which curved and followed a line of grey power poles to a long building which carried the memory of dull green paint. The flimsy walls were weatherboard up to the window line, then fibro. The windows were small and some of them were open, swung out from either side. Chris saw that power lines hung down and connected to the end of the long house.

“Is that ours, is that ours? Isn’t it big. It must have lots and lots of rooms.”

For the first time in Sydney the kids seemed excited.

“It’s bigger than I thought too,” said Sissy with a puzzled look on her face. She went to the back of the car and lifted the large suitcase out. “Jesus that’s heavy.”

“Well, let’s go inside then, shall we?” and the lady picked her way over the muddy holes to a door of green boards. Stepping up two small steps she put a large key into the key-hole and turned it. There was also a grooved brass knob which rattled as she gripped it.

“Well, you go in. I’ll be off now. Your furniture should be here soon. Well, ah, goodbye.”

Leaving the key in the door the lady carefully weaved her way over the puddles. She wore high heels. She hunched her back and her head shrank into her neck as she walked away to the car in her cheery red suit.

Sissy stepped into the house. The four kids crowded around her. They stood in a large room with walls that went only partly to the roof. The windows were tightly shut and there was an unused stale smell. The kids hurtled across the wooden floor boards exploring the place. That didn’t take long. There was one large bedroom and a smaller one.

“Aw, it’s not very big,” said Mary, with a look of disappointment. “Where will I sleep?”

“I’m sleeping here!” announced Joe, as he stood under the only window in the long room. “Then I’ll be able to get out the window!” He’d already thrown the windows open and was pivoted on his waist across the sill.

Meanwhile Chris and Keith were exploring the front room. They delighted in the enamel sink with its dull terrazo draining board. Chris turned the single tap; cold, discoloured water sputtered out and eventually cleared and flowed. It smelled like no other water Chris had ever smelled.

“Look Mum, look—a tap inside—a tap inside.”

“Don’t waste water youse kids.”

High up in the roof was a single bare light bulb. It was operated by a long dirty string trailing down. They took turns at pulling the cord until Sissy told them off for wasting power. These words caused a ripple of excitement to run through all the kids. They took up the admonition with each other for the sheer joy of the words, “Don’t waste power youse kids—don’t waste power!” They now lived in a house where you could waste power because it had this mysterious power. Chris looked at the dirty string and was full of wonder. He looked again at the tap. The furphy at Waterbag Road had been the training ground for careful use of water. But power, this was a new idea which would take some getting used to.

The walls were simple divisions made from sheets of fibro and in the bedrooms the painted framework could be seen. The kids continued to investigate—tapping on walls, pushing the windows open, checking the lights in the three rooms over and over.

“Where’s the lavvy?” asked Keith.

“There’s another key here—it must be outside,” Sissy said.

The combined bathroom and lavatory was at the end of the long block and was shared by each of the four flats. It smelled of rancid soapy water and mould and other people. A water heater with an inverted funnel for dropping paper and sticks into its interior stood at the end of the stained and chipped tub. Chris remembered the shiny bath at Grandma Leeton’s gloomy house—the bath where once the old lady had scrubbed him till his skin hurt. That was the only proper bath he’d ever had. He wouldn’t rub so hard if he had to get into this tub. The excitement grew as each new discovery was made. Only Sissy looked worried as the incomplete family sat about the front room; three kids on the floor, with Joe perched on the terrazzo sink and Sissy on the step rolling a cigarette. They could do nothing else till the furniture arrived.

“Can we get a TV Mum? It’s got power,” said Chris.

“We’ll see son, we’ll see.”

A ute loaded with the furniture edged its way as close to the flat as it could get. Two men unpacked the pile of stuff and carried it inside. There were three single beds and one double, all with stained kapok mattresses; a dressing table with many small ornamental looking drawers; a wardrobe with a cracked mirror; a kitchen table and five chairs of a scratched dark green colour; a collection of mismatched crockery, and a cardboard box of cutlery and cooking gear. The flat already had an electric stove but there was no fridge. There was another box with sheets, pillows and thin grey army blankets.

A single bed was set up in the front room for Mary. Another went into the long room under the window for Joe. It had jangly black knobs decorating the rails at its head. The double bed, which had many more and larger jangly knobs, but of brass, was set up in that room for Chris and Keith. The remaining single bed went into the small room. Sissy would sleep there. The boys had the dressing table and Sissy had the wardrobe.

“You and me can have this one Mare,” said Sissy.

Joe took great delight in arranging the furniture in the boys’ room. He used the dressing table to divide his bed off from the two smaller boys. The family had never used sheets so it went unremarked when Sissy hung these at the windows. Her dream of living in a flat in Sydney had started.

All she had to do now was find a job.

The fragmented family began to shape this new beginning with the little routines which map out lives. Sissy cooked sausages on the electric stove. The trailing cords became for the kids merely things which worked the lights. Despite the meanness all about Sissy set her jaw and told herself that everything would be alright—alright.

The Leetons had been allotted this flat by the Welfare. The flats were, strictly speaking, for immigrants, but an exception had been made for Sissy. She was treated as an emergency. In fact there were a number of Koori people scattered about that sprawling, regimented, ramp-connected collection of huts. But Sissy would have nothing to do with them. Her determination to make it by her own efforts had no room for the memories of the life she’d left far far behind. Sure, she’d write to the Old Granny—Harry could read the letter to her and Paula. But they were all down there and she was going to make it here—in Sydney. No, she’d left all that struggle and suffering behind her. If only she had known what struggle and suffering lay ahead.

Not a dozen miles away the crashing waves of the ocean beat against the tall cliffs and surged around the rocks as they had done for thousands of years, utterly beautiful. Softly quiet, the thick bush held the twinkling glow of campfires. And then the gaolers had arrived. And the bush had rung with the torment of men and women in irons as the trees were felled and the ground dug up. One by one the twinkling lights went out—never, ever to be re-lit. Until in dumb imitation Sissy cautiously fiddled with the electric element to cook a few sausages.

The night was not silent like at Rose’s. Here was a spread of humanity all doing human things. Children crying, adults swearing, television sets urging their messages, pots being banged, dogs barking, older kids tearing along the ramps shouting, and all the thousands of sounds and smells blended together into a common mass with a common purpose—a new beginning in a new country. Even after the lights were out and only a glow from the street lamp outside Joe’s sheeted window shone yellow into the long room, the noises didn’t stop. While Chris lay in half sleep, disturbing, strange sounds—human sounds—flowed easily through the thin fibro walls separating each flat. This was the closest he had ever been to strangers.

The boy was being re-formed, like soft clay under the feet of the city: pushed into shapes by others who passed and pressed into his flesh and soul in the darkest of nights. And when the light came in the mornings he would be twisted into something quite unrecognisable; no longer known as a bush boy—one of Girlie’s mob—part of her family, part of the old gnarled river gums and part of the broad flat river over which those gums had leaned forever. The worst part was that the boy had only begun to get a notion of how the world was seen by others. Now this view threatened to overwhelm and smother him. Intuitively he feared that the smell and taste and promises of this new world were foul, shallow and ultimately treacherous. He moved closer to Keith’s warm back and felt the rough wool of his jumper.

The Sydney days warmed and the two smaller ones learned various ramp routes to the school. Joe and Mary had to catch the electric train along a few stops to their high schools and they quickly learned the way and the names of the stations. Sissy learned that finding a job was not as easy as she thought. No matter how she pleaded and insisted that she would work hard the answer always seemed to be the same: washy smiles which said there was nothing at the moment. No, they had just stopped taking on any more until some time next year. So the woman walked around the industrial suburbs or took buses to not too distant factories in her search for work. Although she collected the child endowment and had Welfare assistance with the rent money she knew she must get a job. The Sydney dream was not coming true.

Meanwhile the family lived largely on devon and bread and jam.

The older kids had train tickets provided weekly, but the shame of going to school with a lunch of jam sandwhiches wrapped up in scraps of paper or sometimes without lunch at all kept them home more often than not. Chris felt deep shame at going to school in old torn clothes and would pretend to be sick rather than feel the stares and taunts of the other kids. Of course if Chris stayed home then Keith did too. And then it was an easy matter for Sissy to let Joe and Mary stay home to look after the smaller ones.

After a few months of frequent absences the authorities came round to investigate. The authorities came in the person of a short little lady with a rosy face and a handbag which contained a blue-backed notebook. On the day she arrived the kids were all playing in the bullring. The bullring was a circular area about the size of two tennis courts. It was between the puddly road under Joe’s window and the scrubby wasteland at the end of the settlement. Its surface was uneven with clumps of cutty grass and be patches of earth. Kids had been calling it the bullring forever it seemed and although its original purpose could only be guessed at it was now perfect for scrappy soccer, bike races and gang wars. The wars could be plotted and waged from the safety of forts partly buried in the deep red clay trench which circled the bullring. The short little lady must have followed the noise all the way round the flats until she found its source. The sight awaiting her made her grope for her notebook. With shrieks and warlike menace Joe was in the act of jumping from his window. The others were riotously celebrating the razing of a rival fort. The sheets of thick lino which had once been the roof over their enemy were now well alight with viciously hot orange and yellow flames.

The lady shouted, “Are you a Leeton boy? Stay there, I want to talk to you.”

Joe was instantly suspicious and took, off up the ramps. At his cue the others ran too. The roof of the fort flared up and acrid black smoke belched into the air. Drips of flaming liquid lino plummetted into the gully floor. It was the best part of the fire but the other three kids didn’t wait around to see it. They took off after Joe. Up the ramps and away through the maze of huts. The lady would have no hope of following. But she would have plenty of time to write her report and make her recommendations. Her face grew rosier as she scribbled into her blue-backed notebook. That very day Sissy had found work in a frypan factory. It was just as well.

Before many more days had passed the rosy faced lady arrived again. This time it was evening and Sissy was at home. The kids saw her as Sissy opened the door. They bolted into the long room and Joe climbed up the frame-work and peered over the partition, all the while making silencing signals with his fingers over his mouth. The lady spoke long and quietly to Sissy on the doorstep. She handed Sissy some papers. She wrote in her blue-backed notebook. She seemed to be peering in behind Sissy’s back to the front room with its meagre bits of furniture.

Sissy Leeton received notice of the court case a few weeks later. She ensured the kids were in their tidiest clothes and they got the train the few stops to the self-important suburb which held the district courthouse.

A stern brick building with a flag pole leaning out over the footpath, the court house had rounded arches supporting verandas on three sides. The children sat on slatted brown seats while a policewoman hovered nearby. Sissy had gone into the building. After some time another lady came out and Joe was led through the double doors with their frosted glass crowns into the gloomy interior. Silent minutes passed. Mary was then led away. Chris feared that his turn would come soon. He edged closer to Keith. Keith edged closer to Chris. The lady kept watch over them, smiling occasionally. But his turn never came. After a little while Sissy and the older two came out.

“Now let’s get back ’ome. And none of ya bloody muckin’ round from youse lot. Ya lucky you didn’t get sent back to ya father. Or a ’ome.”

“What happened?” Chris asked. But what had gone on behind those frosted crowns he never was told—not even by Joe or Mary.

So home the family trod and trained. And the vast city swallowed them up in its disregard for the reality of people. Radios shouted of lawn-mowers that could be had if only you brought your money with you. Newspapers screamed of rapes and murders round the railway stations and scared everyone, including Sissy, with their wire-enclosed warnings of a maniac they called the Kingsgrove Slasher.

The Leeton mob saw little of Aunty Rose those days. Sissy left for the frypan factory each week day before the kitchen window turned from black to grey to reveal the night-damened ramps that connected the flat to all those hundreds of others. The kids were left sleeping. Later they would eat their Weet Bix with lumpy mixed-up milk and dawdle off to school with the packages of newspaper-wrapped sandwiches Mary threw together—or if it was the day after pay day, Sissy might have left a few coins to buy pies.

Joe and Mary set off to the station and Chris and Keith joined the throng that grew in number and noise as the network of ramps converged into the main one that ran like a backbone through the settlement. The Leetons lived at the end of one of the last ribs and on their way to school Chris and Keith passed a number of huts before they saw any other kids.

One of the first kids Chris met was Barry. It was Barry who soon told them to meet him on the main ramp up near the shop at night and he would show them where they could watch TV.

Just as in the mornings dozens of kids wound Pied Piper like to school, so too at night they filed to three of four of the flats where there were television sets and where the owners seemed not to mind too much if fifteen of eighteen kids squeezed into the smoky front room to stare at the flickering grey and white images. Some of them would let the kids stay till “God Save the Queen” was played. Afterwards they might go and throw stones onto the roofs of the huts where the funny people lived. Funny people were those unfortunates who lived by themselves and wore sallow looking cardigans even in the heat, or those whose doors were never opened but TV’s could be clearly heard inside.

One hut that got pelted fairly regularly housed a grey looking woman with her teenage son. The boy was gangling and dim looking. He wore heavy boots and khaki overalls. He could be seen sitting on the step of their flat staring—just staring right ahead. His mother was sometimes seen shuffling along the ramp on her way to the shop. She carried a cane shopping basket and looked only at the floorboards as she went. The boy seemed never to leave the step—he sat and stared all day every day.

It was Barry too who first showed them the quarry that gaped into the earth behind a stand of wasteland trees and tall reedy grass. Barry seemed to know everything about that settlement.

Life for the Leetons found its own routine. Sissy never missed a day at the frypan factory. For the first time in her life she bought some new clothes and covered her face in make-up. On Friday and Saturday nights she would go to the pub. To prepare for this ritual Sissy would sit at the kitchen table in the low hut and apply powder and lipstick before a small round shaving mirror. The kids watched, fascinated. Rose started coming around. She might arrive mid-afternoon and by six o’clock the two sisters would be dressed up, made up and excited as two kids. Rose would advise Sissy on which shiny gold necklace or which tinkling bangle looked best with her outfit. Sissy would try many and the kids would offer their own advice. The background was filled with the strident calling of horse races on the shiny new radio Sissy had bought after working a few months.

And so as the two sisters set off in their bright clothes to the bus stop on the busy main road in front of the settlement, the kids would marvel that their mum had given Joe paper money to buy their tea and Aunty Rose might have given Mary some silver coins, “So’s youse kids can go and buy yourselves some lollies later.”

Sometimes on Saturday afternoon the kids would go to the pictures. It was Mary who’d come home from school full of talk about the pictures. So with no discrimination they would run and walk to the next suburb and watch whatever was on. After they would traipse back home vaguely disillusioned. Often on their return Sissy would have already left for her night out.

Saturday nights marked the start of the saddest intervals for the smaller kids. Joe was old beyond his years and had already discovered bowling alleys, cigarettes and girls. Mary spent many hours away with friends in other parts of the settlement. Chris and Keith roamed the ramps looking for someone who would allow them to sit on their floor and watch television. They nearly always found a place and settled down between the bodies of other kids the owners had also taken pity on. Sometimes, when the two boys would knock sheepishly the answer would be, “Yeh, alright, but I can only take one.” Then Chris would push Keith through the door and go along the night ramps to where he knew someone else owned a TV. The worst parts of these Saturday nights was when the owners prepared their own suppers. Cups of steaming Milo and a plate of cake or biscuits. Very rarely would the visiting kids get a biscuit, unless someone arrived drunk late in the night clutching a bag of chips or a chocolate.

Sundays were usually hungry days. Sunday was often the day when Weet Bix were eaten. There was food in the house but the kids just ate what was quickest and easiest.

It was Barry who knew all the places to go. A boy who was never one to sit around, he introduced Chris to everything going on in the settlement. He knew where men were putting in a new light pole; where a dog had been splattered on the road; where some people had only just moved out of their hut because a Commission Home had come up for them, and they might have left something good behind. Barry could always get through the windows. There was something light-headed and unreal about creeping through a deserted house which still held smells and signs of the recent occupants.

“This was the room where the mother and father slept,” said Barry when he and Chris had shinned up the wall and through a window which was conveniently broken.

“This is where their bed was,” Barry grinned at Chris. “This is where they made babies. Do you know how you get babies?”

Chris had asked his mum when he’d been very small but he’d been told that he had been brought home from the hospital. Since the lady in the hut next door had been the subject of Sissy’s and Rose’s speculations as to when her baby would be born, Chris had pondered hard and often on the matter of babies’ origins. Now Barry was about to tell him. At last he would know just how the hospital was able to give a lady a new baby. A baby which had once floated beyond the great dreaming sky-hill where the magic and light of orange peel scalloped clouds promised hints of other worlds—where all things began and to which all things belonged eternally.

There was nothing anatomically wrong with Barry’s explanation. The basics were absolutely correct. In that empty room, standing on those stained floorboards, listening to this grinning eleven-year-old Sydney boy whom Chris had no doubt knew everything in the world, a turmoil and a grey floating unreality gripped the atmosphere. The last stage of Chris’s arrival in the world had been reached. Was there really no magic? Did he not begin beyond the great looming sky-hill which dipped down to touch the rim of the world? No, everything screamed that Barry was wrong—and yet perhaps he was right for Sydney. Yes, that was it—in Sydney everything was changed. But back home—his real home where the Old Granny’s kewpie dolls had hung around the walls and the great laughing Paula had stooped over the mint-perfumed washing tub and where the rocking sky was huge and clean in its infiniteness—why back there things were as they really were. Sydney was all wrong. His soul tried to resist it.

When Jack started sending maintenance Sissy allowed Joe first and then Mary to take the train to the court house and pick up the money. But Joe returned with practically none of it and Mary with about half. So it was established that Chris would go. The money was due for collection every second Wednesday and Sissy could not be away from the frypan factory so regularly. The boy missed half a day’s school to take the dull red train across the sprawling suburbs. He would make his way to the courthouse. At the end of the veranda was a glassed-in office. Here Chris learned to sign his name in a large book in exchange for the precious brown envelope. Sissy had told him to fold it up and carry it in his pocket. Chris knew the money was from his father.

Who was his father? Chris sensed that he was a man more acted upon than acting. That his father resented being organised showed in the man’s quiet determination never to find merit in the actions of others. After all to recognise any inherent goodness in others might allow them to come too close to him—to discover that his bullying strength was a flimsy front. That they might not find he was all good in a world he sharply divided into good and evil. Jack Leeton was a man who could not live with his own faults, the awareness of which drained him of his life energy. His children were there—constant accusers of his culpability and weakness. He attempted to deal with his perceived inner emptiness by instigating a simple formula for what he called honesty. And this worked when dealing with horse flesh or the man who sold chicken mash, or the general store which permitted him to put things on tick because “Jack is so reliable”. The subtlety of his dishonesty in relationships naturally eluded him because of his fear of human closeness. He never discovered that he could work out his own rules for living. He lived by the rules of others while all the time telling them to get fucked. Yet where Sissy was concerned things were different: she could stick around if she wanted to. But she must question nothing. She must never attack the fabric of his flimsy fortifications. And for a while it seemed to do. He was a strong man not afraid of hard work. He was the father for her kids. He might really love her. In the beginning she did not realise the price she was being asked to pay—how far she would move from her country and people.

When Jack was a boy he’d been led off to where the Good Shepherd lived. He early perceived that this invisible man was white. And the Good Shepherd’s Father had the face of Jack’s father and probably spent his time too sinking wells in heaven. No time for talk or sitting. No need for Grandma Leeton to sit in the cane chair and search the hair of her children. God was made of soap. Oh yes, the Good Shepherd taught her all about right and wrong. Her lot got three good plain meals a day and a bed with cold white sheets to sleep in. And learned their prayers.

So Jack grew up secure in the values of those who were right. And then the jungle floor soaked up the bright frothing blood of other honest men. Was there enough soap in the universe now? Unquestioned obedience to duty. God, King and Country.

And so when Chris signed the book, and the court official handed over the brown envelope with a bewildered expression, the most fragile link between man and boy was maintained. Every second Wednesday was a feast day in that small hut all those years and years ago. Bags with juicy peaches, a big bottle of drink, the extravagance of a whole pineapple and the largest block of chocolate were carried triumphantly by Chris into that low mean hut. And if Jack Leeton ever knew then it is certain he approved of the joy with which those kids attacked the stuff his labour had bought.

It was Barry who told Chris about the cordial and the biscuits every Sunday morning. It only cost a penny he said. And so it was that the boy went to his first church service. And so it was too that the first awakening notion of the real cost of sustenance and nourishment was formed.

Across the main road was another sprawl of huts. Over on that side there were no ramps connecting the huts. There was a barbershop with a red and white pole where it cost two shillings to get a hair cut. Here too was a doctor’s surgery and post office. One end of the block had wide double doors. These opened into a long room across the width of the hut. Above the doors a wooden cross was bolted to the wall. A faded sign announced that a meeting would be held every Sunday at “9.30AM GOD WILLING”. Chris wondered about that. He was beginning to wonder more and more about all things.

His relationship with Barry had subtly changed since the talk about babies. It would be years before the ineffability and utter mystery of the physical world worked its way into his conscious mind: until he accommodated the inexorable truth that he was to walk the earth for a time and that the innocence which Barry’s words had cut into like a jagged bread knife was no real innocence. So much pain in accepting that there would never, could never be the return his child soul yearned for. It would be years and years before he dimly began to see that notions of forward and return were ultimately without meaning. That all is a constant now. Fragments of a memory of a memory, felt at first as a consuming pain, filtered through the voices of birds and lizards, the moving air and leaves and even the rocks themselves. Something of what he’d learned to call the past informed him. And in the centre of all this confusion was a tiny light which no matter how much it flickered and threatened to go out, danced back with fitful flames. It seemed to say that somewhere a meaning to the swirling events which were the sum total of his walk on the world was waiting to be found. He reached out for any rock which that light happened to flicker on and illuminate.

So he tagged along with Barry because now there were empty days that yawned into what he’d learned to call the future. His memories of the past became ghostly and insubstantial. It was a strange liaison because Barry showed a certain contempt for everything, especially school. Chris had grown to like school, most of all the reading and art. Maths was a mystery, but later, after Barry’s parents got their Commission Home and Chris became friends with a boy who was good at maths, he got a little better.

The interior of the place where you could get cordial and biscuits for a penny smelled a bit like the flat when the Welfare lady had first taken them there; musty and unused and yet slightly of other people. The place echoed if you even thought and every sound bounced back from the small windows and the high roof. Black steel rods tied the upper portion of the room together and the bare board floor had wooden forms arranged so they focussed on a cloth-draped table at the front. A large book stood on the table along with a wooden bowl. There was a tall wooden cupboard labelled “Sunday School Press” over in one corner.

The man’s eyes were set close together and his ginger hair grew sticking up and thick above a high earnest forehead sprinkled with freckles. The twenty or so kids had wonderfully raised the dust in the room and now they seemed determined to drive the floor into the earth as they confirmed that, yes, they were happy and glad by stamping their feet. They’d already clapped their hands, nodded their heads and as Barry had whispered to Chris in the back row, shown their joy by “waving your dick”. Barry was daring. Chris eyed him like some sort of city hero.

Canon Wilson seemed not to notice any of the present tom-foolery, pinching and plait pulling. Instead he spoke of the utter wickedness of all people and how they were going to be cast into the everlasting pit. Yes, even little children unless they knocked at the door and heard the shepherd and became as little children and turned the other cheek as they passed through the eye of a needle.

“What’s he talking about Barry?” Chris’s knowledge of the other had always been there—unformed but certain and sure. Barry’s seemingly simple bonding to the earth had first awakened the thought that people attempted to give shape to the unformed knowledge. Chris was beginning to see that these other people—these whites—were grasping to grasp some notion with which he had been born. The certainty that there was more than this sad sad world where people hated and killed one another, where little children were left hungry and lonely and reaching out to be loved, where everyone died and that was that. And now Canon Wilson seemed to say yes—there is more than this but it can never be now. Perhaps he was right. It never could be now—now that the old families were all but gone. The big faces wise and accepting—the big hands breaking the bread and sharing—the small hands clutching secure thick black curls as babes were carried strong and safe across the earth’s surface. Yes this was all gone. And the only hope was in a place called heaven.

“Bullshit,” whispered Barry, “got your penny? Ya gotta pay now.”

Canon Wilson passed the wooden bowl to a child and led the crowd in a song about pennies dropping one by one. As Chris’s penny fell down amongst the others with a bright clink, a mixture of relief and anticipation swept over him. Had he bought a little time away from the bottomless pit? And had the time come at last for the drink and biscuits?

Canon Wilson gave everyone a little card with a gold border. Chris’s had a picture of a sheep carrying a red and white flag. He looked at Barry sideways and knew he would have to find out what all this meant.

One sunny Saturday morning after a night of Sydney showers the boys set off as usual to the quarry over behind the wasteland. They were a cheerful enough band, punching each other and laughing in the light. As they swung back and forwards and finally sailed from the ramp rails they saw the gangling boy sitting in his overalls. He sat on the top step leading into his hut and his feet in their big boots lay at angles on the bottom step. He looked up at the shouting happy kids. Chris saw his face. His eyes had a distant haunted look and untidy downy hair grow on his cheeks and top lip.

“There he is,” whispered Barry. “Just sitting there.”

“Yeh,” breathed the others, “what a gallah.”

The gangly boy did not look up. The kids ran laughing between the huts and away to the quarry.

The great scar in the earth surrounded by its wasteland attracted kids from both the settlement and the real houses which started on the other side of the school. A few of the kids from these other houses went to the settlement school but most attended toffs hill school. As usual a gang of toffs hill kids arrived at the quarry and the two groups of boys spent a glorious morning throwing rocks and abuse at each other across the yawning hole.

Barry was by far the best thrower. It was a harmless enough game though because the kids kept the width of the quarry between them and there was always time to dodge the coming barrage of rocks and clods. Each boy gathered up his ammo in a pile beside him. By a silent agreement only throwing was allowed. Each kids owned a shanghai but these were only taken from their owners’ pockets when birds or lizards or jam tins or bottles were the targets. Chris hated it when the kids shot at the animals and hated it even more when the broken body of a starling or sparrow was hurled over the gaping walls of the quarry to fall in an un-bird like flight to the bottom of the pit. But this was only a small part of the morning: there were car bodies to play in and fires to light and new routes to the bottom to discover.

“Ya don’t like killing things do ya?” Barry observed.

“Naw, not much,” and Chris felt his face burning.

“But you’re from the bush and everything.”

“Yeh, I know but...” Chris didn’t know what to say. He wished he could want to kill things like the others. He feared that this difference would cut him off from his friends, that he would lose them.

“Doesn’t matter mate, I can kill enough for everyone—I can kill everything. You stick with me.”

Chris looked at his friend and felt a surge of ambivalent gratefulness. He became expert at finding tins and bottles to aim at with their shanghais. He never once wantonly killed a thing that flew or ran or crawled. Years later he would go rabbitting and fishing and shoot magpie geese and learn the differences between cruelty and hunting.

About midday the sun and the need for food got the kids filing with their various little arguments back across the wasteland to the settlement. It was as they came out of the low scrubby she-oaks on the far side of the bullring that they saw the ambulance. It stood a little way off from the boy’s hut. A huddle of people stood on the ramp looking. A couple of the men up on the ramp were smoking. Women with snotty nosed kids clutching at their dresses stood and stared. The two back doors of the ambulance gaped open.

“Jesus,” whispered Barry. “He’s kil’t himself.”

Even as he spoke two uniformed men came down the steps of the hut with a form covered by green material. The little crowd on the ramp breathed in. They stared harder.

A cold dread gripped Chris’s guts. His head was suddenly swathed in an icy bandage. What insight did Barry have into human nature that his utterances were so brutally correct? Later the whole settlement would talk openly of how they had to bring a ladder to cut down the rope in the kid’s room and how his mother had walked in and there he was hanging cold as anything already and how she’d been carted off and locked up because you never knew, she might do herself in too. And the rough wooden ramps echoed as the explanations and theories grew wilder.

“Poor bloody bugger,” said Sissy, as she got herself ready to go out that Saturday afternoon. “Now youse kids stay away from that place. I don’t want youse pokin’ round there. I’m not surprised with these bloody rafters up in the roof and everything.”

Chris looked up at the exposed beams and joints in the roof. Their triangular shapes held up the deep grey speckled fibro of the roof. Sissy had the bare bulb burning to help her with her make-up. It was quite unneccesary.

Suddenly Chris saw the green sheet being lifted gently by the sunny breeze and there was one big boot at an angle on the end of the stretcher. And the yawning doors of the ambulance were a gaping hole in a wasted landscape and a poor little broken bird was slowly floating to the rubbish at the bottom of the pit.

Outside the hut it was still quite sunny. Sissy was nearly ready.

“G’day youse lot, ’ow ya goin’?” Aunty Rose, whom everyone said later looked just like a lovely pearl, came into the hut.

“’ere I am, dressed to kill.” She carried a shiny black bag with a lacy hankie showing nicely from the folded-over top. Tucked into her hair were a few shiny feathers emanating from some sort of golden ornament.

The Sydney days for the Leetons drifted towards their first city Christmas. The radio screamed its messages as hollow as the snow was unreal. It played the music which was sweeping the world and changing it forever. It told them of plane crashes and wars and the world grew into proportions never dreamed of down by the slow flowing river where the disasters were floods or dry winters. Joe grew tall and refused to go to school any more and got a job serving in a big variety store. After three weeks he was sacked when he couldn’t explain how he had five pounds in his pocket and his till was short of five pounds. He bought a shiny yellow guitar with a fancy curved plastic scratch board and sparkling tuning pegs. He picked up some of the radio songs as he sat on his bed under the window, with his back against the window sill and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He strummed and gently sang his songs until his fingers hardened and his confidence grew and his heart and body reached almost breaking point in its animal need to expand out into the huge world he now knew to be there. Occasionally he would pin his cigarette onto a stray string-end and shut his eyes. He would sit quite still against the window. The cigarette smoke climbed towards the window in the thinnest, purest line of white. His brown hands were at rest on the warm timber of the guitar. The square behind him was a frame for the bluest sky with wisps of bleached clouds. Out there the whole planet existed for him with all its girls and beaches and cars and roads that led off to anywhere and everywhere and possibly nowhere. He got to staying out later and later and sometimes returned home through the pre-dawn settlement to the back room with hamburgers and fizzy drinks for the other kids. “Boy! youse kids should’ve ’eard me tonight. In this club in town and everyone was clapping for more and me and Johnny—well we just gave ’em what they wanted. And it was like a competition youse know—they ’ad other blokes there too but they wasn’t as good as us. Everyone clapped us the most. And Johnny, ’e gave me this sports coat before we sang and afterwards we went everywhere—just everywhere, eh. Youse shoulda been there.”

Frequently Mary failed to return to the hut at nights. She had pasted pictures of filmstars and singers onto the wall with a mixture of water and flour, and roamed around with her lot who’d done the same and crimped their hair and swapped tight peddle-pusher pants.

Sissy and her daughter argued.

“If ya don’t like it ’ere you can git out and find ya father.” Mary had been told about her father back when she and Joe were led off into the courthouse.

“Yeh, well I might do that one day too. Don’t tempt me—just don’t tempt me.”

“Don’t ya speak to me like that—I’m still ya bloody mother ya know.” Sissy softened, aware that the city was winning both against herself and her kids. “Anyway Mare—ya gettin’ to be ya own boss now. I don’t wanta argue with ya all the time. Ya growin’ up—youse are all growin’ up I s’pose. ’cept for my babies.”

“We’re not babies,” shouted Chris and Keith together.

“Yeh youse are—you’ll always be my babies—my little babies all of yas. An’ I’m ya mum and that’s that.”

So Sissy clung desperately to those who were still too young to walk away and find a path through the myriad offerings of that metropolis with its tall canyons carrying grit and paper and the silent screams of its citizens past shiny windows full of cars and televisions which they could never have. But still these things attracted—perhaps one day a substance might form from the dream. For Joe and Mary Leeton, just like their mother, the essential lie that was the city, began to work its subtle promises. Began to seem as true as the cheap sparkling wine, or third tall brown bottle of beer clouded the littleness and limitations of the Leetons’ reality.

At first Sissy never thought that she would not be able to transform herself into someone new. Years ago, when the kids were younger, before Sissy saw herself clearly mirrored in their life pattern, she imagined that she would take them, and they would take her, into that new place and time where the change would happen. But it wasn’t happening. But she had to live in the happy lie of the song-sung pub evenings even though they were never part of her conscious plans. Sure, she had more money now than she’d ever had before; a few nice dresses; an array of shiny jewellery; high-heeled shoes and packets of stuff to set her hair. And there was always a few bob left for a drink, or at least to get to the pub with the crowd where someone would buy you a drink or lend you the wherewithall.

Eventually of course, Joe drifted off more and more with his Koori friends and finally took the soft tartan bag down from the top of Sissy’s wardrobe and filled it with a few clothes and his bottle of after-shave. A mate revved up and they piled the bag, the guitar and their bodies into the patchy wreck of a car and took off. With the lingering smell of blue smoke floating over the bullring and in through the square window the battered car joined the stream of traffic on the main road. Sissy never saw her eldest son again. In the first few weeks she would not let the other kids speak about Joe or speculate where he might have taken off to.

“Let him go to buggery for all I care.” Her eyes and her increasing frequency at the pub showed she did care. And that was years and years ago. The ache of his leaving moved in to live permanently in Sissy’s heart.

Jack turned up to take Chris and Keith out for a day. He’d driven up from the bush in his first car but his courage failed just outside the city and he’d taken a train for the last leg of his trip to the settlement and his two sons.

Jack and the two boys took the train to the city. He allowed them to eat whatever they wanted in a cafe. Later they walked over the great steel bridge. Chris and Keith peered down the airy distance to the water. Below the bridge the water stretched away in a huge polished sheet of black and silver flatness. The sun shot silver and blinding white as the little group moved past the rails and wire mesh of the walkway. Overhead the great triangles hung grimy and salt-encrusted against the sky. Trains roared across this steel ribbon which floated in the air.

“We’re higher than the birds,” said Keith.

Chris looked sideways at his father. This stranger in a coat and hat who was now saying to his brother words which tried to connect him to them.

“Yeh, that’s how high we are.”

This was followed by a barrage of words. There were more words from the man that afternoon than all the afternoons of years before. He told them of the midget submarines and torpedoes and a ferry that had been sunk.

“And look, now, bloody Jap tyres advertised everywhere.” He seemed abjectly bitter, truly confused, a pawn in a game others were playing. A game others would always play. The man stood, small on the mightly steel bridge. And looked and glimpsed himself. He felt used.

And how the man on a horse cut the ceremonial ribbon when the bridge was being opened and how there were white cats walking around the top of the pylon of the bridge.

“Can we see them—can we see them?” chanted Keith.

“Alright, we’ll go up on the way back then.” So the day was filled in. They returned to the hut and Jack left them near the bullring and walked off into the early evening. On the road beyond the patch of wasteland cars sped after their own lights. A bus protested at gear changes as it edged its way into a stop. He knew he could not get there before it pulled out. He silently swore. Bloody city. No place for a man or his kids. In the gathering gloom of an early Saturday night he waited for another bus.

After Jack’s departure Sissy felt a kind of foreboding. Something was about to happen—some event of shattering significance. She wasn’t only worried about Jack and what he might do with the boys. But for a time things went on normally: Sissy rose early and travelled to the frypan factory, returning in the late afternoon to try to give the dregs of her energy to the boys. It was all she could do to peel a few potatoes and fry some chops. The boys were at home more often than they were at school but Sissy hardly had the energy to argue. They lied to her in any case. Rose arrived periodically on a Friday night or Saturday afternoon and, while the races blared out from the radio the two sisters would spend time on their faces and clothes. One Saturday Rose arrived with a new boyfriend. Sissy didn’t take to him and said she wouldn’t go out that night.

“Alright then Sis, we can look after ourselves, can’t we love,” Rose looked at her new man. “Anyway if you’re not comin’ then I’ll take your coat. It’s gonna be cold tonight.” The fluffy white coat had been much admired and touched when Sissy finally took it off lay-by. Sissy went and got it from the wardrobe.

“’ere ya’are then Rose—don’t forget who bloody owns it!”

She put the coat on straight away, and with her hair piled up and decorated with a spangly clip which held a couple of lemon-coloured feathers, and the big chunky beads around her throat everyone agreed Rose looked lovely.

“I’ll bring it back tomorra—about dinner time. Give meself a chance to recover from tonight—won’t I love?”

The boyfriend wrapped an arm round Rose’s shoulder. “Yeh, sure, I’ll make sure she gets it back. I’ll be sticking round from now on won’t I—won’t let her out of my sights.” His oiled hair gleamed under the electric light and his fingers tightened against the soft cloth.

Rose pulled back slightly and gently pushed him in the centre of his chest with a long polished nail. “Who’s a fast worker then, eh?”

By dinner time on Sunday there was still no sign of Rose. It was about three in the afternoon when Sissy was sitting out on the ramp having a smoke to try to dispel her sense of unease. She was joined by her neighbour who clutched a young baby that was crying.

“Can’t get the young tyke to stop. Rockin’ him all bloody day but it’s no good.” She settled down on the ramp next to Sissy. “Here, hold him a sec will ya, I’ll just roll a smoke.” Sissy took the crying child. It looked up at her big face and the crying subsided.

“You’ve sure got a way with kids Sis. Terrible murder in the national park last night wasn’t it? All over the front page this mornin’.”

Then Sissy knew. The baby was smiling by now. She looked at it and wondered why it was smiling. Her head had gone quite cold. She held the child perfectly still. A pale blue sky framed the child’s head. Sissy saw the line of little yellow buttons down the middle of its jump suit.

“Did himself in too—after. Here—I’ll go and get it. I’ve read it. You can have it. Jeez you’re good with that kid.”

At the same time the woman returned with the newspaper the police car began to edge its way through the winter mud behind the straggling geraniums that more or less marked off the Leeton’s own bit of yard. That’s when Sissy started to scream.

Not long after Rose’s funeral the Welfare lady turned up at the flat. It was no good arguing, there had been a complaint from the children’s father. They would to go a Home until everything had been sorted out. And a record had been kept over the last two years she would have to realise. Yes it would need a court case and yes the complaint had come from the boys’ father and it was no good abusing her—she was only doing her job. The boys would be picked up next week. In the light of what had happened to the older two it was unlikely that Mrs Leeton would be permitted to keep the boys—but that of course was up to the courts. But look at them—wouldn’t it be better if they had a bit of security in their lives—good hot showers—a thorough check up at the doctor’s? Yes she realised she was their mother but sometimes the hard decision had to be made—and there was those who would make it too if certain people couldn’t or wouldn’t see reason.

Perhaps it was the smell of Aunty Rose, and the memory of Joe and Mary, a sort of madness in that low hut, which made Sissy pack the battered suitcase with the barest collection of necessities for herself and her two boys.

Perhaps she thought she could avoid the courtroom and the welfare and her pain and somehow keep the remnants of her little family close to her. Whatever the reason, Sissy felt she had to move out to go on living. She had to act. Yes, Rose was dead, Joe had gone and what in God’s name had happened to Mary? Had she found her father?

It wasn’t for years that Sissy heard that Mary had found her father out in the opal fields. He’d been a drifter all his life. Drifting into small towns and leaving them and his women as easily as a drained glass of beer is left in a closing pub. Mary hadn’t had much chance to know her father though. Not long after they had met he was caught cheating a mate who retaliated by bashing his brains out with a pick.

Sissy’s actions were those of a desperate woman. Every new flat she looked at was dearer than the settlement huts. Eventually she rented a bed-sitting room in a worn, paint peeling inner suburb. It was the closed-in veranda of a converted suburban house which had once stood proud and neat in a row with others almost identical. It dressed itself up with weathered floral curtains and brown lino worn paper thin, a chest of drawers and a bulky ornate wardrobe. When the landlady learned that the two boys shared the double bed and Sissy slept on the floor she insisted that this flat was “for a single lady only—no pets or kids allowed—I told you that. I’ll have to speak to the Child Welfare about them kids you know.”

“Don’t you worry yaself lady—I’ll be speaking to them meself.” Sissy knew she was finally defeated. Deep within herself she had known it would come to this.

From Rose’s house Sissy had taken almost nothing other than two white and gold ornamental angels, possibly won in some coconut shy years before. These fragile little figures finally enabled Sissy to speak to her kids—it was some weeks after the funeral.

They were eating their tea. Sissy had moved the tiny kitchen table between the bed and the one chair and put a loaf of bread and devon sausage on a plate. She let them eat a few slices of the bread and meat before she told Keith and Chris that they would have to go away. Like a sort of trip or holiday. Now that Aunty Rose was an angel, and she held one of the shiny little dolls to her breast, then she didn’t know what was going to happen anymore. She couldn’t go on. Anyway they were going to a place where they could swim in the sea and it would be nice. And why were they looking at her like that? Keith began to break up a piece of bread. His little fingers rolled the doughy pieces into soft grey pellets. Chris looked at his mother and saw her. This woman whose big round face was wet with tears. On the radio a man was singing about a girl called Mary Ann. The woman and the two male children were silent, thankful that there was a radio. Chris looked at his young brother. He tried only to hear the song.

The Welfare came with a voucher for brand new clothes for the boys. Sissy and Chris and Keith returned from the shop with the strange smelling short pants, shirts, pyjamas, underwear—a new suitcase. Tomorrow Chris and Keith would go away with that suitcase. It was now dark in the little room so Sissy reluctantly switched on the electric light.

A government car’s back door was slammed by the Welfare lady. She lowered herself into the front and neatly arranged her nylon legs. The mother rushed towards the house. As she wrenched open the screen door the car’s engine started. A mother heard a car drive away. On the back seat were two boys leaving their mother. A small boy’s hand reached out. An older boy took it and smiled through his tears. “Don’t cry, don’t cry mate, please don’t cry. She’s gonna be alright. Everything’s gonna be alright. You’ll see.”

And indeed the great trees still stood immoveable by the river. The bridge with its strong white triangles still stood solid above the treacherous swirling waters. The bull ants still swarmed across the plains and logs and goannas lumbered through the bush. In the clear blue sky the cry and scream of birds still floated to the clouds and echoed in the woodland. He would feel and see and touch that again and then he, the boy, would remember that there was his home and he would return because he had never really left. His vision of the oneness had been cut off for a time. He would feel again that joyous ache which so powerfully had filled his heart and soul. And somehow the unbroken threads which tied him to the Old Granny, Paula, Prince and Billy, Aunty Rose and his mum—all the young world—would come again into view and all would be well.

Life in the Home for Chris and Keith indeed seemed to be a never-ending series of hot soapy showers. The kids had never showered before and after a few of these sessions where all the naked little bodies lined up shivering and shyacking, they grew to enjoy them. The Home contained many other ritual to be initiated into as well: cooked breakfasts, fruit, crisp white sheets on a bed you had to yourself. Marching up the curving white staircase to the big airy room where Chris’ bed stood neat and stiff with the others.

The teachers took them on long rambling walks along the beach and they discovered octopuses hiding under rocks and star fish and scuttling crabs. They had ice-creams and swims and learned to wash their hands before meals and were given toothbrushes and pyjamas. Chris decided he liked the clean smell of bedtime.

He was being molded to forget. Bit by bit his world over the past years had been undone like an onion being peeled back and back. In the end there may be nothing. He tried to cling to the memory of the knowledge he had once felt—that knowledge he seemed to share with the Old Grany and Aunty Paula. But here around the Home there were no trees which had existed forever to remind him. To inform him that the place where was once more real than reflected water in a rough really did exist. He had merely forgotten how to touch it and drink deeply of it.

In his upstairs dormitory a wide window opened out to a view of the ocean and let its roaring in to inhabit the Home. The sea drew him into its mystery as he lay and listened to its ceaseless pounding. It was crashing against the sand as he waited for sleep, reminding him of a story his mother had told of long ago, about when she was a girl. He was disturbed. The vastness of the sea and his mum and Canon Wilson’s talk of God all got mixed up. He tried to recall what the man had said about praying. He must pray to this God—this Grandfather Leeton figure, and ask him to look after his mum and brothers and sister. But what about his dad? It was years before he decided that his dad and all that lot needed prayers far more than his mum’s mob.

And Aunty Rose floated on the sound of the sea and came into that long upstairs room. There she was, in her polished box being lowered into the earth. Surprising how it should be so dry when you get down a bit. Now he wondered what it meant. Death. It only exists for the living. And since Rose’s death Sissy was only partly living. Pray for us now in the eternal moment of our partly dying. He dreamt—remembered the boy in his oversized boots and the talk of rafters and ropes and a fear rippled across his young mind. He tried to concentrate on the indistinct flowers sprinkling across the wall and listen to the gentle moving slatted blind but death kept coming back. Chris fell asleep frightened and in the white-sky mornings the great ocean’s sound was still there.

It was years and years before he realised that the great tragedy was not that Aunty Rose had died but that her death had been so alien. Sissy needed the Old Granny and Paula beside her to wail and keen for the death of Rose. But they were not there. The people were scattered—scattered into separate little sprinklings who did not know, could not remember, who they were. They were liked caged birds, suddenly released into a storm. The screaming wind tore at the flimsy fabric of their being and scattered them terrified and one into the chaotic landscape. If only the people could have buried their dead like a people—with the flag and soul-rending singing and a real gathering back in a loungeroom or backyard where big friendly faces kissed you and great fat arms embraced you and contained your pain. But no, poor little Rose was all one and Sissy was all alone. Mockingly the surrounding black of that day was the shiny car and the huge massed summer clouds behind the pines fringing the cemetery.

He came to realise that at that time all things in the city—throughout the land, for his people, had lost their meaning. Even death. But finally he would see Aunty Rose in her own time. He came to understand that her time was when the soil was prepared. His people had been pushed back by the invaders. They had resisted until their numbers fell to almost nothing. The remnants had been rounded up and caged, like birds. A scattering of food was thrown their way each day through the wire of their cages. And within the prisons and reserves and fringe camps, many, many in their time were lost. But the ground was being prepared. The scattering into a landscape which had almost transformed itself into something forever alien slowed, and in pockets about the land, reversed into a movement. The movement would grow and out of a desolate landscape would spring up a garden nourished with the blood of a people. All the lonely graves would finally be remembered and the spirits of the sad victims they contained would be truly mourned and honoured by those who had given them life. When the boy became a man Aunty Rose’s death would grow into its fullest meaning. Not, after all, a little tragedy in time but a tragedy which flowed on and on through years and finally reshaped itself into a healing unction and an inspiration. There were those who would never forget. Years after when the paraphenalia of a white funeral had long been forgotten the death itself would take on a new life.

And so it was that a childhood was ending. The court had decided in favour of Jack. The car arrived one Saturday morning. It stood on the crunch gravel of the Home’s driveway. The doors stood open, waiting for the two boys who would be taken to the railway and put on the Limited to speed through another long dark night behind a trail of streaming smoke. To cross over many bridges under the huge sky with its million lights. To float on the black lines like a leaf being carried by the strong and powerful current of a river which flows to the sea.

And as the train was sweeping over bridges and past gentle cows with upturned heads in a mist-filled golden sunrise, the man was shuffling round the shack in Waterbag Road and wondering where his boys would sleep that night. He threw a few sticks into the makeshift fireplace and got a dirty fire going. He still had enough time to eat a bit of breakfast before he got into the car and drove to the station.

PART III

The boys were entering a phase where the Koori contact with their mother, their daily reminders of their origins, the connections, tenuous though they had been for Chris, who was the one who sought them, were about to be denied. The invasion continued and for them it gained intensity. At Waterbag Road it was as if the Old Granny had indeed become a ghost. As if the great bulk of Paula were a chiasma which floated somewhere in the imagination of a heart which had partly died. And which threatened to completely die. The man looked at his boys and refused to see anything of their mother. The man was completely white. And so, in his ordering of the whole universe, were his boys. The older boy, Joe, with his stark reminding skin and hair, was gone. Where had he gone? When would he return? The man neither cared nor worried about these questions. Like a mistake in spelling he’d been rubbed out and rewritten.

“Don’t you worry about that Joe. He’s got nothing to do with your life now.”

“What about mum?”

“Your mother’s in bloody Sydney. She’s happy. Don’t think about her now. You’re with your father now. That’s all that matters.”

“And Mary? I suppose she’s gone away too?”

Mary had gone away. Taken buses and trains to distant, hot desert parts in search of her father and stability and love. In a wind-swept mining town she found him. A gambling drunken man whose stability was secured by a wet topped bar of imitation marble. A man whose love was buried deep beyond bloodshot eyes which squinted hatefully at a world that had given him nothing. He clung to the slightly rusted chrome stool and teetered on an edge.

Mary was to spend all of her life searching for the Real Father. This child was to find many fathers. False all of them. Truck drivers wiping remnants of steak and eggs against dark blue overalls in smoky roadhouses; hair-oiled refugees from Europe scratching through the outback dirt in search of the big break; small men with fresh combed dirty hair drifting through caravan parks and social security offices.

Mary the mother of God, squinting under a peppercorn tree where pegged to a rope a sequinned dress dried on a Saturday afternoon. Mary who would learn to create and shape a sustaining myth of her own, which she glued up around her rented house like some latter-day filmstars to inspire her onwards and away from memory.

Children learn what they live. Christ is the head of this house. The unseen guest at every meal, the silent listener to every conversation. A friend is one who strengthens the heart. Don’t give up when your luck is out. In resisting untruth I will put up with all suffering. I will pass this way but once. Peace—be still. A smile costs nothing but gives much. The eternal God is thy refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms. Be patient—God isn’t finished with me yet.

“Youse kids ask too many bloody questions. Now get your boots and polish them for school tomorrow.”

Jack Leeton established a new routine for the boys. Outside behind the furphy stood a wooden box with an enamel dish of water. It was Chris’s job to walk down to the dam every afternoon and reach into the still green water with the bucket. The water was carted back to the shack where it became the means of the new male family to wash itself. The bucket was set on the ground and water was dipped out with a tin mug and poured into an enamel dish, a cake of washing soap was next to the dish. A towel hung from a nail hammered into the supporting framework of the furphy. With his solid ways the man set about establishing habits and values which had about them a certain immoveability. There were potatoes to be peeled and washed so that the white flesh was without blemish. Every night. And wood to be split over on the woodheap which straggled across the yard next to the vicious blue heeler’s kennel. The big kettle needed to be filled as soon as the boys arrived home from school. Struggling with its weight Chris placed it on the rough brick hearth of the blackened tin fireplace. He lifted it up onto the dangling hook and arranged chips of wood and slender sticks so that the man could easily light the fire when he came in from the pad-docks. He came in from his labour with his work-worn hands.

“Don’t let me catch you lighting the fire. I don’t want the bloody place burnt down.”

“I can light the fire dad.”

“Don’t be cheeky and quit your answering back. Listen and you’ll learn.”

And every so often the man would recite the legend contained in the circular writing on the end of the furphy from which the drinking and cooking water was taken. “There it is there, plain as day for youse to read.” He pointed to the convex end of the wheeled water butt and read with solid satisfaction:

Good better best

Never let it rest,

Until your good is better,

And your better best.

“And don’t forget it. If you live by that rule you won’t go far wrong.” The man’s reading of it was mechanical—like a tired prayer.

The boy wondered how he would ever get good if he were never allowed to try anything. Even the kerosene lantern was out of bounds. At night the man would wait until the interior of the hut was grey and it was impossible to make out the lettering on the jam tin. Only then would he solidly move with the lantern over to the lino-covered table and raise the glass with the wire lever. The lamp gave its familiar metalic protest. The match was struck and applied to the saturated wick. It caught and flared. The glass, partly covered on the inside with black soot, was lowered and the yellow light caused shadows to dance around the walls of the shack. Tom Piper Apricot Jam. The table’s shadow gently rocked on the concrete floor.

Over in one corner the man kept a circular incubator in which he raised chickens. This contraption had a kerosene-fed flame in its centre which warmed the cheeping fluffy birds.

“Can I hold one Dad?” Keith’s eyes were large.

“Don’t be so bloody stupid. They’re not bloody pets. When they’re big enough I’ll knock their heads off and they’ll feed us.”

The world was closing in. The great sky-hill was being dragged down into dimensions controlled and manageable. The whole world was to be ordered about and contained. The great sky-hill was in danger of losing all its wonder and hugeness. It was in the man’s safety that the greatest danger lay.

“Can I get a guitar Dad? Joe had a guitar...”

“Don’t be bloody stupid. You can’t play a guitar.”

“I could learn.”

“Don’t be so bloody stupid. Howya gonna learn? You can’t even play one. And besides, money doesn’t grow on trees.”

The logic was purely his own.

The man had bought a radio. In the evening he carried it out to the ute which stood in the lane. Methodically he lifted the bonnet and wired up the radio to the battery. The strident orchestra introduced the news. As the important voice finished its urgent speaking and began in a far more relaxed tone, “In just a few moments we begin our evening’s programme...” the whole process was reversed and the wireless was carried back into the shed. “Don’t want that rubbish on—waste of a bloke’s battery.” The announcer’s voice died.

“Don’t know what’s going on with the world. Whole place’s going mad. Man needs his head read for being alive.” And so in the deepening night they would sit—two boys and a man. All of them waiting.

In the night a few crickets sang away off amongst the grasses and laneways. Around the group their shrill song pierced into the silence. And away and above it all if Chris listened hard enough, he could just hear the distant distant stars humming in the vast black immensity of sky.

“Where does it all go to Dad?”

“Where’s all what go to?”

“Behind the stars?”

“Don’t be so bloody stupid.” The man looked at the boy and scratched his head. “I reckon you’ve been out in the sun too long.”

Somewhere in his memory a flickering recognition of a young man in the leech crawling jungles of New Guinea asking a similar question as the open staring dead eyes of a soldier mate momentarily shone in the light of the moon as thick tropical clouds scudded overhead. But in a time long long gone. No, it won’t do you any good. Don’t ask, don’t ask. What’s the fucking point?

The man reached out his rough hand. He touched his shoulder. He added, “...son.”

The wooden chairs on the dirt outside the shack sighed in the darkness. Then, strangely, the man started to softly sing a song he’d remembered from somewhere in that deep hurting past,

The strangers came and tried to teach us their ways

They scorned us just for being what we are...

Somewhere, in his heart, the man did know. He knew he had been used. He knew he was a user.

And so a pattern of days and nights formed. Days which held a promise at their close. A promise that tomorrow might be somehow, miraculously, better than today. That the all-consuming meanness of the life these people lived would transform itself into something wider, broader, lighter. Chris didn’t know. While he held vague hopes for the future there was no plan. His mother, although finally taking off to the big smoke, had never included her kids in any of her planning. Likewise the man, his father, never spoke of the future. Never thought ahead except to worry that tomorrow would no doubt be bleaker than today.

“We’re out of wood for the fire. Get over and split a few logs up.”

“Jesus, that wood heap’s looking a bit low—you been wasting wood again?”

“Get down the lane and scout around for bottles.” The man would have run out of money. Half a ute load of beer bottles and soft drink bottles might bring in a couple of pounds, to get them through till he got his next pay. This towards the end of the long Christmas break.

“I s’pose there’s not much bottles left lyin’ round the lanes. I s’pose you bloody kids been down there and collected them already!”

“Right then, get your boots on and hop in the ute. And run a comb through ya bloody hair. What are ya, blacks or something?”

“Where’re we goin’?”

“Just get in the bloody ute.”

The man eased the ute down the rough lane. The red rutted road was fringed with the bleached grasses of a summer’s ending. Slender gums cast deep shadows over scrubby saplings. The boy breathed in this landscape which was there—just out there, beyond this dusty ute with its three occupants cramped against the sweating leather seat. He pictured the roof of the ute, slightly dusty, with the sun, the heat, beating down on it; on the roof of the shack they’d just left behind. Over there, behind the darkening trees, the fence wire shone dully. And beyond the gentle hills curved away. And further—on the crest, were the rocks, massive boulders, blocks of whitened grey rising up from the cracking thistles and clumps of milk grass. Those rocks with lizard-green lichen that could be peeled back in small pitted sheets. And from the rise the shack, with the wood heap and the furphy and the waterhole, now black, now silvered by the sun, all viewed from above.

The ute travelled through the landscape. The man was retreating, groping around for some sort of strength to live with the awful knowledge of his own ignorance and powerlessness. Something to relieve the inexorable power of the forces which had shaped him. If only he could get through this day.

The boy too was retreating—escaping—surviving. He would survive by dreaming, by holding on to the, what was it? To say the land was too simple and not enough. The land, like him was always retreating—was always just somehow beyond. And yet what it was, came, emanated, began and dwelt in what the land really was. Or what he suspected it to be. But it, whatever it was, could never be known, nor seen, nor satisfy the pain of his need. Strangely, as with his father, there was no future. Who were the destroyers? at had the boy forgotten that might have carried him joyfully into the future? The man neither willingly lived remembering a past nor for a future. Nor in a present. His was the real tragedy. Not to have taken his youthful sex seriously—was that it? Was he just another in a long line of mindless rapers of land and those whom the land gave life? In what agony of secret guilt did the white man live? What was the war all about? It is certain that he never knew with his brain. His heart felt that somehow he was paying for the unknown evils of a system which turned relentlessly and was fed by what was ultimately a deep contempt for the earth and all who dwelt thereon.

Long after, when this ute was a rusting carcase in some backyard near a levy bank overgrown with sticking grass—then in some strange way the boy came to understand a little. That this man had eventually sensed the forces which had led them all to this present time and place. Chris could understand how the heart of the man came eventually to reject these forces. Nine words could never be enough to speak of the evils he came to perceive. And because he rarely used more than nine works he dwelt in silence and suffered for the part he had unwittingly played in putting his caloused hand to the wheels of human misery which those from across the sea caused to turn in every league of this invaded earth. Invasions are escapings.

“S’long time since we saw Ted. Run’ll do the ute good. Charge the battery up a bit.”

Ted was over in the next town.

The ute left the dirt lane and swept itself of loose dust and leaves as it geared up to the tarred surface of the new road which stretched forward into the summer day; between fenced paddocks cleared of most trees; across man-made culverts of concrete where reflectors flashed on the dust white posts. Above, the arching blue-white sky shone like a new sheet of cartridge paper on which black crows drew their slow lines.

Ahead lay the town with its towering grain silos and dark green kurrajong trees; its squat long railway station; the verandaed shops with their corrugated iron side walls stained with ghostly aftershadows of advertisements for tea and ice-cream.

Chris knew that Ted was his father’s brother and he could vaguely remember him as a young man who had lived with old Grandma Leeton in the big dark house in town. Now Ted was married and had a couple of kids and worked on the railway in this two-pub town. It would be good to meet his cousins and his new aunty.

“Me brother’s married now. You call her Aunty Vera.”

As the ute neared the tidy cream railway cottage Chris saw that there were two cars—one under an attached roof and another, shiny and well cared for, next to the trimmed hedge. Jack saw the shiny black car.

“Well, I’ll be buggered.”

“What’s wrong Dad?”

“Be quiet, be quiet, nothing’s wrong.”

Ted came out from the house. “G’day stranger. Bugger me if it doesn’t rain but it pours.”

Vera came and lounged on her husband’s arm. She squinted up at Jack. “G’day stranger. Bugger me if it doesn’t rain but it pours.”

Ted looked at his wife. “Hey, mind your language.”

“Oh phu to you—just ’cause ya mum and dad are here.”

Chris had thought the car was Grandfather Leeton’s.

“Anyway, you better come inside. We’re just having a cuppa.”

“Thought I’d charge up the battery. Take the boys for a bit of a run.”

Vera squinted at Chris and Keith. “You must be Chris and Keith. Which one’s Chris?”

“He’s Keith,” Chris whispered.

“What’s the matter, cat got your tongue? Anyway, I’m your Aunty Vera. Come back to live with your dad, eh? Bit different here from the big smoke I bet.”

“You’ll be better off here too,” said Ted, “as long as you behave yourselves. Father’s gone to a lot of trouble to get you boys back. Hope youse appreciate it. You’re lucky boys I reckon.”

“Got company, eh?” Jack jerked his thumb at the fly-screened door.

“Mum and Dad’s been here about an hour,” said Vera.

Chris wondered now if it was his grandfather’s car. Vera had said mum and dad—perhaps her parents were here.

“So are youse comin’ in or what?” continued Vera.

The group moved inside. Grandfather Leeton sat massively on a chrome chair. He seemed to dwell in a place far off. He stared ahead with his eyes unblinking. He was in the room. He was not in the room. His wife, in soft pink and white clothes was in a deep red sofa. A flowered hat was placed on the cushion next to her. As the boys came into the room she patted the hat more firmly over the vacant seat. The centre of the floor was occupied by a wooden playpen in which a small child sat shaking a toy. Another child was in a high chair.

The table was set with good looking china and there were cakes and biscuits on glass plates.

“I can’t get up with these legs so come and kiss your mother,” announced old lady Leeton to Jack. He bent over his mother and kissed her forehead.

Quite suddenly the old man stirred. His eyes came to life. “So you’re out for a bit of a run are you?” was the greeting of his father. “You’ve got the boys with you.” His bald head nodded in their direction and the heavy chain of his watch swayed. The room was suddenly silent.

Chris and Keith moved closer together, hovering near the door. what was wrong, Chris wondered. Even as he wondered the old man seemed to retreat back into himself. His eyes staring once more into the space of the room and beyond.

“Yeh, that’s right,” replied Jack.

There was a long silence.

Vera coughed. “Well, what about a cuppa—how’s your’s Mum?”

The old lady looked at her daughter-in-law and said, “No thank you, but if you’re giving Jack a cup then you’ll need to add some hot water—mine was far too strong—and not quite hot enough.”

Vera’s face flushed and she glanced at Ted. Ted was staring at his boots.

“Well I don’t suppose you were christened while you were away from your father—so that’s the next thing to be done. To think, boys your age not christened, and Leetons too.” The old lady angrily picked cake crumbs off her lap while speaking.

Again the old man seemed to arrive back in the room. He cleared his throat, “What do you expect? Nothing but nonsense—nonsense from the start.” Then silence.

Keith moved over and tickled the baby under the chin.

“And don’t start that baby off again. Its only just settled down. Get away from it—we don’t want any of that screaming noise again.” The old lady was looking at Vera as she spoke.

Vera averted her gaze and said, “Here, you boys—would you like a glass of cordial to drink in the garden?”

Vera made the boys a drink and said, “Have some cake if you like.”

“Only one piece now, we’re civilized aren’t we?” The boys’ grandmother said with a shake of one bent finger.

Chris and Keith moved out into the backyard. Vera slipped them a handful of biscuits as they passed through the kitchen. She winked.

Out in the yard the brothers found a dog. Their spirits rose as they fed the dog some biscuit.

“What’s christen mean?” asked Keith.

“It’s something they do in the church. Put salt on ya tongue I think—or in ya ear. And they tip water on ya head too.”

“What for?”

“Dunno.”

“flint doin’ it to me.”

“Me neither.” But Chris pictured his grandmother’s face and didn’t really believe himself.

Contact with Jack’s various family members was rare. Sometimes Ted would drop in at Waterbag Road with a bottle or two of beer and his wind-up gramophone. The men would relax and Ted would play “Peg Leg Jack the Sailor” over and over until he sobered up. And then the boys would seem to stop their laughing. Vera was never with him. Sometimes Jack would take the boys into town on Saturday mornings and after he’d bought his chicken feed and kerosene and other essentials, they might call into old lady Leeton’s where she would give them a cup of tea and make the boys eat their half a rock cake in the backyard. Outside the old man would be sitting on a cane chair under the apple tree staring at nothing. He would stir every so often and mutter what sounded like, “Yes, yes, yes.” Vacant staring. Then, “No, oh no—oh no.” The cane chair uttered small creaking sounds. Its legs pushed a little into the black earth under the lawn.

It was after a Saturday morning trip to town that old Mrs Leeton announced that she’d arranged with the vicar for the christening to take place.

“He said he’d do them on a Wednesday afternoon—just the two of them. They won’t have to go to church as such,” the old lady said. She had in fact insisted on this procedure. She was glad the boys lived with Jack right out at Waterbag Road and that they were not generally known in town. She was so ashamed and might not have insisted on a christening at all if she did not believe that despite certain unfortunate events in a past now best forgotten, all humans should be christened—and Jack was their father so they were human beings weren’t they?

“Are you sure about this christening business? I haven’t been near a church for years,” Jack said to his mother.

“That’s got nothing to do with it. Of course they must be done. It’s all arranged. Should have been done years ago, like any decent Christian folk. Every Leeton has been christened. Now no more nonsense.”

“All nonsense—stuff and nonsense,” muttered the old man, but it was not clear just what he meant. The old lady glared at her husband. He sat and stared.

Jack supposed it couldn’t hurt the boys and once it was done it was done.

“I don’t suppose you’ve got ties for the boys—you can borrow a couple of your father’s. Now you boys be careful with these ties. Your grandfather’s had them for years but they’re still quite as good as new.”

Old lady Leeton’s planned Wednesday dawned and became another point from which so many events would stem. Chris would look back to this point. Or choose countless others as starting places to make the patterns for a life—his life. And this event, was it the same for Keith? For Jack? Old lady Leeton? No doubt they all looked back at some time and saw completely different stories.

The boys of course had not been told before. In keeping with Jack’s manner he merely said, “Get yourself washed and put your school clothes on.” The two dark ties were tied around the boys’ necks and tucked into their pants.

“What are these for dad?”

“Don’t ask bloody questions. Just do as you’re told. And don’t get dirty before we leave.”

“Where we going?”

“To town.”

“What for?”

“You’ll find out. Now stop your bloody questions. Always wanting to know everything.”

The deep red brick building rose up from the green earth importantly with its statue high up in a niche of the tower. Headstones and crosses reared up from a tangle of rosemary bushes and oleanders. It was cool and quiet inside with strange smells and colours splashed across the chalky white walls. There were dull brass memorials to townspeople from the earliest days of the invasion. The font stood near the entrance to the church on a raised platform. Both boys nervously glanced around to see where the salt might be kept. But they saw only a little pile of books, some folded cloths and a flattish spoon fashioned from a shell. No salt. The minister smiled at the group with a genuinely welcoming, friendly face. The tall man gently swept the boys under his wing-like draped arms and positioned them around the marble basin. His highly polished shoes sank quietly into the deep red carpet. He picked up a long cloth and kissed it in the centre. Keith glanced at Chris. The minister then continued raising the cloth up so that his eyes were briefly cut off. He moved it back over his head and the reinforced cloth with its dull burnishing of gold thread was lowered and settled around his neck and shoulders. It fell in a rich swathe down his front. Chris raised his eyes towards his father and wondered if it were alright that he wasn’t wearing a tie. Jack was shuffling awkwardly. The boys stood dead still until the vicar finished the prayers. He was saying something about welcoming these children into the family of God and how those responsible had to guard them from the Devil and the sinful desires of the flesh. He then beckoned Chris closer to the font. “Name this child.”

Chris was alarmed. Was he going to get a new name?

“Say his name,” the minister whispered to Jack who was also mystified. Surely the kid already had a name.

“Christopher Micky Leeton,” mumbled Jack.

“Christopher Micky, I baptise you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.”

A shell of cold water was splashed onto the boy’s forehead and the sign of the cross made.

When Chris stood back and the process was repeated for Keith, he looked down at the dark brown tie. A stain of water was spreading over the centre of the widest section of it.

“Oh shit,” whispered Christopher Micky Leeton to himself.

The minister’s white hand stopped momentarily in mid air. Keith’s head was bent over the basin. Jack shuffled his feet. The faintest trace of a smile crossed the minister’s face as he continued.

“Keith Edward I baptise you in the name of...”

The outside world hurt their eyes. Jack dug into his fob pocket and fished out some coins. “Now go and get an ice-cream and play around the park for a bit. I’ll see you back at the ute so wait there.” The boys marvelled at this aspect of getting christened and rushed down the street like pups. Then Jack did something quite out of character: he headed straight for the public bar of the Empire and downed several glasses of cold beer quickly.

And so the boys were being to some extent remade. Although they didn’t see a lot of old Grandma Leeton, she seemed to inform the consciousness of this strange little family. Every now and then Jack would drive into town and the old lady would inspect the boys as she handed out a portion of rock cake and watery cordial (to be consumed outside). Did they have clean boots, haircuts, clean hands, only speak when spoken to and generally as she put it, mind their p’s and q’s? She gave them a little prayer book each and urged Jack to bring their frayed shirts and worn socks into town to be mended. She had a lot of correcting to do as she saw it.

Jack never told the boys in advance of anything he would do. This was quite possibly because he rarely planned any aspects of his life. So it was another mystery that began to unfold the day Ted came and took Keith away in his car and left Chris with his father.

Jack drove straight to Grandma Leeton’s. Chris sensed something was wrong. The house stood in the pale sunlight, its wrought iron gate and front door closed as usual. On the trellis, rose buds shivered in the chill breeze like small red hearts tightly closed. Jack pulled up in the ute and Chris felt the familiar gut wrenching resentment as his father said, “Wait here.” Chris felt the urge to run up to the screen door and charge inside announcing their arrival. Or to make it even more fun, to bang the big brass knocker and belt some life into the house. But of course, the screen door would be clipped. Jack had always maintained a distant respect for his parents and their house.

On this winter’s day, Chris had a feeling of unease. Everything looked too normal. Why had they driven into town and why had Keith been collected by Ted? The house was silent as Jack Leeton walked up the pebbled path bordered with sad wall flowers and small white rocks.

Jack never used the knocker. He had an unrecognised distrust of all that was fancy or frivolous. Instead he knocked on the doorframe. Only then did he call out to Chris to “Get over here.” The boy joined his father at the shut door and he felt the cold from the concrete veranda creeping up through his feet. Grandma Leeton could be heard muttering her way down the funereal hall past the life-size plaster dog called “Man’s Best Friend”. Her usual greeting, even on warm sunny days was, “You haven’t got mud on your boots have you?” She spoke to the air but it was meant for children.

The old lady’s wedding ring was in the form of a buckled up belt and Chris could see it now as her fingers unclipped the screen door. Her squat figure blocked most of the the gloomy interior from view and, with no mention of mud, she said in a slate-grey voice, “He’s not going.”

Chris sensed a movement in his stomach as he felt with even more certainty that something major was up.

“He’s not going.”

Who was not going where?

Jack’s reply, disjointed as ever was, “Aren’t you going to open the door?”

“Alright, don’t fuss. I don’t know what to do and I don’t care. I wish Peter were here. He has to go but he says he won’t so I don’t know. I suppose I’d better make you a cup of tea.”

The old lady led the visitors through the hall where all the side rooms were shut off. She shuffled into the velvet dining room. “You sit here and don’t go getting mud everywhere.”

Chris looked at his boots which were clean He dared to mumble something vaguely defensive.

“Don’t give your grandmother cheek,” roared Jack.

Grandma Leeton began to bang the tea things about in the kitchen. She was treating the china as though it were responsible for all her worries. This day the crockery came in for a particularly heavy hand as the tea and rock cakes were brought into the dining room.

“I can’t say too much you know—walls have ears and tongues wag. Go outside with that cake and don’t go getting dirty. Your father and I want to have a grown-up talk.”

After quite a time the old lady came out and emptied tea leaves on the hydrangeas. Chris took this as a signal for his return. He waited a bit and then went back inside. He saw his grandmother standing, like an old pillow, her wrinkled hands twisting the cloth of her apron as she sniffed. His grandfather stood immovable as a stone by the sideboard. He had his hat on. Jack sat drinking tea and breaking bits of rock cake and putting them into his mouth slowly and deliberately

The old man suddenly said, “I’m not going into a bloody mental home.” He looked ridiculous in his dark woollen suit, watch chain looped over his waistcoat, hat just plonked on and his feet in fur lined slippers which zipped up the centre. “I’m not bloody mad.”

A small suitcase with a tartan rug draped over it stood by him. He looked at no one as he whispered again. “I’m not mad.”

The old lady started sniffing quite loudly. The old man said, “I won’t go to Sydney. Peter can wait.”

The big clock prepared to strike by cranking itself up and whirling like something would break inside its dark wooden box.

“There, it’s eleven o’clock and you haven’t gone. Are you leaving or am I going to ring Peter?”

Chris looked at his grandfather. His face was set, his jowls hung heavily down the sides of his womanly smooth face, pulling his mouth into an eternally sad droop. His shoulders sagged and his hands hung big and fleshy, suggesting that they had not moved anything in the world for years and years. All his body sagged. The old man looked now at his wife of many years. His eyes turned to Jack. Slowly he took in the room where this grandson, Jack’s boy was it? sat with his legs dangling. The polished wooden case of the clock emitted its brittle tick ticking. The beige blind with its tasselled fringe was almost fully lowered behind the lace curtains. Dark lionclaw feet of the heavy chairs pressed into the over-patterened woollen carpet. Quite suddenly the old man’s smooth white hand stretched out and clutched the suitcase like a lifeline. He gave a friendly looking pat to its worn polished leather and said, “Alright then, Sydney.”

Old lady Leeton’s hands again began to twist the fabric of her apron. Her movements were jerked and fluttering. Tiny little bluebells worked onto the cloth were being squashed.

“Jack, you take these things and put them in the back. Leave the rug in the front—he’ll need that for his knees—put that over your knees in the car. And keep this up the right way, it’s got the thermos in it. And oh, yes, there are some rock cakes in this cloth and if you need more hot water ... oh I don’t know, I don’t know. Just go will you. I wish Peter were here.”

The old lady hobbled down the passage which smelt of polish and brown velvet and darkness. She started to cry again.

It was then that Chris realised that his grandfather would not be coming back from Sydney. He thought he saw and partly understood the utter tragedy of this situation. Chris then saw this family—his family weren’t they? as strangers one to another, standing apart like boulders on a high hill, each one silent in its own space rising from still grey earth. And was he too as a stone?

Outside, the ute was parked under the winter-bare branches of the plane trees which lined the quiet solid street. His grandparents didn’t even kiss or say goodbye. The old lady merely stood there, softly crying, her bent old hands busy at the cloth of her apron. A solitary willy wagtail flitted about the garden. The old man, her husband, plonked himself into the centre of the leather seat and waited to be delivered to he cared not where. His wife didn’t see the great wet tears that fell down his marbled cheeks and he didn’t brush them away. Neither did she see the curiously sad little smile.

As the ute gathered speed the old lady shuffled back up the stone lined pathway then checked to make sure she did not have any mud on her slippered feet.

The trip to Sydney was punctuated with frequent stops for the old man to relieve himself onto the roadside stones which grittily moved beneath his slippers. Often it took a great effort for Jack to convince him to get back into the ute. They drank the tea from the thermos and ate the sandwiches and rock cakes old lady Leeton had wrapped in a tea towel. Chris glanced frequently at his grandfather and wondered what was wrong with him. He’d said he was not mad and this phrase kept going through his head. I’m not mad, not mad, not mad. The boy thought, but you are—and you want to be because you are escaping. He wondered about his father’s family—this family which somehow seemed so unable to tell each other of their love in any form other than to gleam the lino, mend the shirt collars, put three decent meals on the table every day. And the children who were taught to reciprocate these coded love messages. Love me—don’t spill anything. Love me—don’t eat too much. Love me—don’t speak unless spoken to. Love me—don’t laugh. Love me—take care not to do anything wrong. Love me—be perfect even as your Father who is in heaven is perfect.

Could it be that for these people just to be alive—to have been born at all, was somehow a great wrong? Existence was a burden. He looked at his father. The boy’s heart ached to love him. But how could he ever get close enough to try?

His grandfather had at first not seen the opportunity as representing the chance for escape. Then the possibilities started to make themselves apparent. Yes, in the hospital he would do and say all those things he had felt like doing for years. He’d throw his piss bottle on the wall; swear at the young women in their clean white dresses; refuse to put his slippers on; toss food around; wander off against rules.

Perhaps everyone needs to escape? Where had his father escaped to and when and, that question which the boy achingly asked himself, why? And why couldn’t the old man stay in his own house and wash his car and sit under the apple tree. And why couldn’t the old lady perhaps even break a branch off one of those scented trees at Christmastime and hang pretty paper on it? Had they ever done anything like that? And if he was mad why couldn’t the old lady just scream at him and tell him to piss off into his garage and go to buggery out of her way? His madness would be seen for what it was—a constricted tortured silently screaming need to relate. But she had no time for talk like that: tight lipped, there was always the washing to be folded or the hallway runner to be beaten on the clothes line and heaven to be gained. Everything untidy, dirty, not under control must be washed and scrubbed and stored away in a cupboard which had been wiped out with disinfectant and scattered with mothballs. The anger must be controlled.

But what was the source of the cancerous anger? Was it an anger and hatred directed at their betters, blacks, God and the Church? Didn’t they know they had no betters; that at least the blacks could believe happiness was attainable—even if at the end of a bottle or in holding paper money or learning a few chords on the guitar. Didn’t they know that their God needn’t have been living in a heaven where crumbs were never dropped on the floor and children never laughed? Yes, that was the wearing sadness—to try to escape into respectability and goodness. Yet was their misery the formula for a kind of happiness? Had the Old Granny and Paula been happy? Hadn’t Billy died slowly swinging from the end of a rope in a stinking piss-smell cell? Hadn’t lovely Aunty Rose been brutally murdered by one of her good-time men? A man who didn’t want to play life by her rules—a white man who owned her in life and death? at was it that was different? Certainly the Leetons and those like them would never say the Old Granny was respectable. But were they not somehow more real, closer to the earth, able to laugh and cry and get drunk and hate and love and take risks with an intensity these others would never know? Would old lady Leeton ever be unhappy in the deepest blackest sense or was she wrapped up in a constant sort of grey unhappiness, a world weariness, a form of security? Would she ever know that the minister, lightly pressing the wafer into her arthritic hand sometimes had a hangover and that when he awoke for service he sometimes thought fuck, to himself and then smiled at his humanity? And he a white man? No, the Old Granny and Aunty Paula were never world weary.

“Will we see Mum in Sydney?”

“Don’t be so bloody stupid. We’re dropping your grand-father off. That’s why we’re going to bloody Sydney. Not for nonsense and wasting time.” In controlling the boy the man was attempting to control himself.

The boy knew they would stay at Peter’s, the old man’s brother. Then his grandfather would be driven to the hospital. Packed away out of sight. He’d had a whiff of mothballs when the old man lifted the tartan rug and small suitcase. And that’s where he was going. Into a mothball drawer with other carefully washed and folded old people, like a grey cardigan the owner couldn’t quite manage to throw away.

The boy pushed himself into the leather of the seat and the windscreen wipers brushed back the drizzling rain. There was an aftertaste of rock cake in his mouth.

It was Keith who dared to escape first. Keith who showed no interest in school and didn’t so much hate the teachers as find them an irrelevance. This boy and his Koori mates whom the teachers classed as unruly and incorrigable. Little escapes at first, like wagging school to spend the afternoons swinging from the trailing willows that strained the froth from the broad brown river; stealing Chinese apples and milk money; roaming with laneway-swearing mates and shanghais and laughter. The truth was that often not a few teachers couldn’t have cared less—one less trouble maker to deal with. Let them muck around the river all day—at least they’re not mucking around at school. Those who did care knew that this kid was from a home with no books. No lights. No homework table. No conversation. They knew more than the kids did, that under those conditions school was pretty well meaningless. But what, they asked, could they do? They were part of a system which would eventually destroy them if they didn’t, like Keith and his mates, escape from it.

Keith had always liked machines. It was he who could get a decrepit bike back on the road by tinkering with a couple of spanners through a foggy afternoon when he should have been at school. Or pass the right bits to his father when he helped strip down the carburettor of the ute. Keith early set his heart on driving a car. He’d never really wanted to own one—just drive and have fun. And so it was that one Saturday night he and his mates got one. Five Koori kids who’d palled up at school and drew courage from one another.

They’d driven a good distance towards the town Ted lived in. Away over the paddocks great displays of sheet lightning lit up the late afternoon clouds. Speeding on. Passing cigarettes and a bottle of warm beer around inside the car. Nervous laughing and eyes averting eyes. Chance glance in the mirror.

“Jesus Christ, coppers.”

They were approaching with intentioned speed.

Five separate boys with a warm bottle of beer.

Having an interest in machines was not enough to bring out driving skills which had not yet had time to develop in a fourteen-year-old boy. Keith’s whole body urged the accellerator towards the floor. The back wheels gripped the tar and the shiny mascot in the form of a plane rose aggressively higher into the air. The five boys withdrew into their own stomach-sickening feelings and elemental perceptions which replaced all thought.

The police pursued the stolen car for about half a mile before Keith saw the lane on the left. He veered the car savagely off the tar and hit the gravel. The first thick black rubber stains appeared on the road as it attempted to obey the laws of physics and continue on the tarred surface. It behaved as if it would wrench itself into two separate parts: one hurtling towards the rutted laneway, the other determinedly aimed at the kurrajong tree town where red-caped nurses were changing shifts in the small local hospital.

The five boys inside sensed rather than thought that something of significance, something utterly irreversible, something mind-numbingly terrifying was accompanying their floating towards the fawn felt roof. Was it up? But sharp stones were striking skin and glass. One boy, in seemingly slow-motion, floated right on out through a back door which had wrenched itself open. His slender brown neck with its soft fuzz of black hair in a line down to his shirt collar cracked like a springtime sapling when his head hit the ground. The packet of cigarettes, the first he had ever bought, fell out of his shirt pocket and squashed against the dirt. The car continued to roll and the heavy chromed back bumper bar gouged a large portion of his young chest out like an ice-cream scoop. A second boy had both legs snapped and his left arm almost completely severed as he too was hurtled out and onto the stone embedded track. His blood pulsated out into the encroaching night as he, with a sense of calm mystery and wonder and a little sadness he could not quite touch, melted into the towering blackness. Away off somewhere in the distance he could hear the dying hum of a front wheel still spinning as night closed in. Already ants were lightly wavering their feelers towards the thick dark liquid.

The other three didn’t die along that red dirt road on that early evening all those years ago. The lightning flashed intermittently beyond the horizon and the dull crack of distant thunder seemed to be completely separate from this little little event.

With the help of steel pins and plates and bits of catgut Keith and the other two were eventually made whole enough to be sent to separate correction centres. Keith had to give eighteen months before he completed his escape. It was not too great a price he reckoned. The deaths of his two mates were contextualised in the brutish environment of his prison. An environment which kept all the pain at a manageable distance. But, like a storm which is stripping leaves off the screaming gums to send them flying wildly to where the storm is still merely threatening, there were connections. Or when, up where the waters rise, a deluge pushes the muddied flow at a disturbing pace with a few too many sticks and twigs, down towards the innocent town, there was a way in which the human hurt and pain could never be separate. Not from those closest to the events nor to those who seemed furthest away. Connections are finally made. The cry echoes out into the deepest recesses of the galaxies and star clusters and unimaginable distances. But distances are only such because of the patterns of those pieces connected by the distances.

Chris tried to hold on to the thought, what if there were nothing? Nothing. Fleetingly he felt the is-ness of it all. And he knew that the idea of nothingness brought into inseparable being the little that was everything. He knew his brother suffered. Much later he would ask himself if the patterns his other knowledge revealed were indeed patterns. Or if the chaotic division of time and space and events were cajoled into an order which pitifully diminished the suffering. An order which gave those who walked upon the earth a sense of control. But had he glimpsed the chaos? He came to feel that he had. That in rocking through the vastness he’d seen that order, safety, predictability and the ensuing moments’ certainties were merely fictions. Oh yes—what if after all the is-ness was a fiction? at of the rituals of feet stamping into a sandy soil, kicking up the dust on ochred shins, lifting high the ceremonial feathers past the dancers face. Or the ritual of an old lady shuffling down the stone-bordered path to bring in the milk. Was there much difference ultimately? Were not both these actions merely degrees of ceremony that seemed to tame the chaos? That promised a kind of salvation?

But Keith—how did he live his life in the up-at-six workaday life of the prison through which he continued his escape? Everyone there it seemed had matching stories of death and mayhem and escapes. And he early learned to glibly assert that when your time was up it was up. It seemed that Keith’s time was only sort of up. The ripples from his youth would travel their own vast distances and times and the connections would not be made for him for many a year yet.

Christopher Micky, male-child of Sissy, Wiradjuri woman and Jack Leeton, Irishman, drifted towards his manhood. At the age of fifteen he began his own wanderings. He discovered some fleeting little deaths through girl-warm imaginings down among the creek weeds. He tried standing at the mirror with a cigarette. He started to shave and push his hair this way and another. School didn’t want to know him after he reached the legal age for leaving. But that didn’t matter: none of his friends was going on and most had left anyway. The time for his escape was approaching. Bigger than his father now, although not as strong, a type of silent agreement that the boy would leave was reached. Strangely, the Chinese market gardener whose apples Chris had raided gave the boy a job picking the shiny fruit and packing it into splintery boxes. The pay was miserable but it was constant. Chris carefully stored the bulk of his earnings under a brick where the concrete floor had broken away. He allowed himself a little for cigarettes.

The apples were finally all packed. The deep green trees stood robbed of their fruit and the pickers, mostly women, were payed off.

“You stay if like, help sweep and odd job round tree. Cut grass.”

But the boy had enough to take off.

Not many days after his leaving the Chinese orchard he knew the time had come. The brick was edged out of its concrete socket and the notes dusted off and folded with his last pay. As the boy began to replace the brick a glistening lizard, with its quick jerky head and shiny black eye dots scuttled from the recess and slipped under the tin wall gap. Light shafted through old nail holes in the grey metal. The boy noted the stamped crown on the undulating wall.

Jack gave his son a lift into the town.

The two were almost silent on the platform.

“Smoke?”

“Yeh.”

Jack smoked cigarettes with the young man.

“While since you were in the big smoke?”

“Yeh. It’ll be alright.”

“You be right now?”

“Yeh.”

“Right then. S’pose it’s time to say hooroo.”

“S’pose.”

“Yeh, well, hooroo then...”

The man reached out with his right hand. Rough. Chris reached out with his right hand. Still young, slim. It was one of the rare times the two had ever touched.

The man walked in through the waiting room and out into the winter sunshine.

It was a winter afternoon. The boy lit another cigarette and waited alone for the train. A sprinkling of others waited too. And travelled through the night, separately. On one train. Perhaps he would run into Sissy, even Joe? Would he know them? Recognise them? He was still young enough for Christmas to be a long way off. Mary was who knows where, but Keith’s time in the correction home was nearly up. Perhaps he’d meet that one of his family? Did he care much either way? Time was when family seemed fixed as the stars and the sun. A long long time past. But now—was he not growing up? Did adults need their families? He told himself he didn’t care. Who was his family now anyway? It would be years and years before he cared again. Before the story of his roots would become an urgent need again. Now he needed no one. And he remembered when he felt the need and how much it had hurt then. He was glad he had left such weakness behind him. He felt glad he was alone anyway. He was a man now and now he was going to the city. Alone. To what? Who knew? Something would turn up. Sydney was a big place. Oh yes, he was glad he was fifteen and a man and able to leave his childhood behind. He caught a glimpse of his face in the train window. A dark face in a dark window. And suddenly his face seemed so small. Framed by sooty varnished timber. Yes, I’m so glad. I wonder if I’ll be able to find Mum? The train thundered over a tall bridge carried in the cold night sky by its great steel girders.

Christopher Micky Leeton ambled down the street of an inner city suburb. The trees looked cold and bare and dead but the earliest swellings of brand new buds were pushing through the black bark. In a few places there were even a few leaves of the lightest, purest green.

It was late afternoon. A gritty sort of breeze was at his back. The collar of his corduroy jacket was turned up to his ears. His hands were thrust into his pockets. His fingers felt the bit of paper with the address on it. Clarrie had thought that yes, maybe she was still at the last address he’d got. But no, he hadn’t seen her for ages and didn’t particularly care if he ever did. And what was he going to do now he’d come back to the big smoke? Chris knew the man didn’t really want an answer so he just mumbled and shuffled until Clarrie gave him the dirty slip of paper.

At first he walked past the gap in the yellow fence where once a gate had swung. But when he saw the number on the next few places he knew he’d gone past where he wanted. He turned back and looked up at the dry orange brick house with its black wrought iron veranda. He crossed the tiny cemented frontyard. He touched lightly the slight bulge of paper notes in his pocket. Taking the cigarette from his lips he tossed it down among the scraps of paper and pushed down on it with his shoe.

The wooden door, its fairly new red paint slightly grimy didn’t seem to be completely shut. A milk bottle stood on the concrete step. The door had two narrow panes of golden frosted glass in its top half. The thumping bass of a radio’s song pushed out into the city air. Running his hand through his thick hair, the boy went up the three steps to the door. A carton of empty wine and beer bottles lay to the right of the door at the top of the steps. A couple of bottles stood next to the box too. He touched the notes in his pocket once more with his left hand while his right hand prepared to knock on the door into whatever waited ahead.

First published 1994 by University of Queensland Press

PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

www.uqp.com.au

© John Muk Muk Burke, 1994

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

Typeset by University of Queensland Press

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

Publication of this title was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The David Unaipon Award receives financial assistance from the Queensland Government through the Minister for the Arts

Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

National Library of Australia

Burke, John, 1946–.

Bridge of triangles.

I. Title.

A823.3

ISBN 978 0 7022 2639 7 (pbk)

978 0 7022 5022 4 (pdf)

978 0 7022 5023 1 (epub)

978 0 7022 5024 8 (kindle)