Capricornia

Mark stepped up to Nawnim. As he put out a hand to seize him, Nawnim shot from the wall, collided with the bed, stumbled, dashed to the door. Jock grabbed him. He shrieked, fought furiously, wriggled free, and darted to the back door. Jewty was on the veranda. As Nawnim bounded past her she dealt him a cuff that sent him sprawling on his face in the sand. In an instant he was up and flying, shrieking, to the bush.

Jock laughed heartily, slapped scowling Mark on the back. As they were sitting down to drink, he said to Mark, “Fine stahmp of laddie, that. What ye goin’ to do wi’ him?”

Mark answered with a grunt that was intended to give the impression that he did not wish to discuss the matter.

“Ye leavin’ him behind here when ye gaw awee?” asked Jock.

Mark looked at him, and after a moment, said, “Well—as a matter of fact I was thinkin’ of sendin’ him to the Compound. He—he’s not really mine, you know. I—I found him in the bush.”

“In the bulrushes, eh?” asked Jock, and winked at Chook.

Mark blinked, fingered his glass.

It was true that he had thought of sending Nawnim to the Native Compound in Port Zodiac. He had thought of doing so for years whenever his conscience was pricked by the thought of the boy’s growing up as a savage. He had been prevented by fear that the Protector of Aborigines might discover that he was the father of the child and charge him with the cost of his maintenance. He did not know that the cost of maintaining a child in the Compound Half-caste’s Home—indeed of maintaining any inmate of the Compound—was, even there where the necessities of life were expensive, only fourpence per day. Had he known it, he surely would not have been troubled by the thought of his son’s growing up as a half-starved savage.

“I could do wi’ him if ye dawn’t wawnt him,” said Jock. “There in’t many yeller-fellers doon my way.” He chuckled, and added, “I in’t been there long enough yet. I’ve got one yeller-feller meself. Boot it’s a bluidy gurrl. I wawnt boys.” He laughed.

He went on, “I wawnt yeller kids to train as foremen. The Government cawn’t mairk a bloke pay wages to his own soons—see?”

“What—you raisin’ a herd of yeller-fellers?” asked Chook.

Jock swallowed a mouthful of Ambrosia, gasped, blinked. “Gawd!” he breathed. “Wha’s thaht—kerosene?”

Chook frowned.

Mark grinned, and said, “Yeah—you can have the kid if you want him, Jock. But don’t go tellin’ anyone where you got him. Dinkum, he’s not mine——”

“Aw I wawn’t say nawthin’,” said Jock.

“Give’s your word on it,” said Mark. “And give’s your word you’ll treat him decent.”

“Right!” said Jock, and grasped his hand. “There’s me worrd. You can rely on me to bring him up like he wuz me awn soon, cos then I wawn’t have to pay him wages—see?”

Mark thought that a mean motive, but was satisfied that by reason of it Nawnim would be well treated for the rest of his life.

Jock’s station was about two hundred miles inland from Port Zodiac. It covered some two or three thousand square miles. Such a holding was not thought vast in Capricornia, where there were some of even more than ten thousand square miles. Such land was put out to lease at a purely nominal rent, the Government considering itself under obligation to the lessees for their courage in developing the country; indeed so deep was the Government’s sense of obligation that it exempted the lessees from taxation on the profits—often vast profits—of their business. The joke of it was that by no means all the lessees were settlers like Jock. A good number, among whom were included practically all those who controlled the large stations, were English or other foreign companies, who had never seen the land they controlled, but put men on it to work it for them who had to pay taxes out of meagre wages. Indeed many of these big companies controlled similar properties in other countries that were Australia’s rivals in the meat-trade of the world. Thus they were never troubled by competition.

Jock intended to place Nawnim in a stock-camp, in which he would grow up to learn the ways of horses and cattle as the business of his life. He would take to the saddle as soon as possible and work with native stockriders as one of them till he became a man, when, should he prove to be more intelligent, or rather, perhaps, more selfish and purposeful, than a native, he would be made a foreman. By growing up thus he would save Jock the expense of employing a whiteman. The natives made the best of stockriders, but could not be relied upon to remain at work. Jock often had to track his black staff down and bring them back to work at the point of a gun. Nawnim’s status and pay would never be much better than a native’s. The pay of Jock’s natives was tobacco and food and clothes of a sort, their status not that of his horses. He and the many graziers like him excused their meanness by saying that it was useless giving the natives money when they did not understand the value of it. They took pains to see that the natives were never taught it.

Jock had no difficulty in securing native-labour, for all his meanness. On the contrary, he secured it easily. For, when his cattle came, the native game was scared away, or if not scared then starved away, because, during the lean times of Dry Season, the cattle, themselves hard put for succour, would take possession of all permanent grazing. This state of things would greatly affect the natives whose country the Government had leased to Jock, so that they, who, unlike their game, were prevented by tribal laws from wandering out of their domain, would be put to the alternatives of starving or eating Jock’s cattle or going to work for him. The second would be their choice till the police came and shot them. All over the land were bone-piled spots where lazy Aborigines were taught not to steal a whiteman’s bullocks. For natives who were unable to work there was the fourpenny Compound. But for some reason or other that institution was not popular. Most Aborigines who had been born in freedom preferred to do their starving in the bush. And all the while the Nation was boasting to the world of its Freedom and Manliness and Honesty. Australia Felix!

Flying Fox was washed by a vigorous tide, which was capable of rising during spring period to a height of some twenty-five feet. Hence the mouth of the salt-water creek was usually surging like a mill-race, but wasting its power—or so it had been—on transporting such things as jellyfish, leaves, and crocodiles. This waste had been the cause of great irritation to Mark, who, though careless of most forms of ineconomy, could not bear to see the wasting of natural force. Therefore, after years of irritation, at the cost of much study and money on his own part and great labour on the part of the men of Yurracumbunga, he had dammed the mouth of the creek and cut a culvert through the isthmus, causing the water to flow through a quaint-looking machine that sucked out kinetic energy and churned it into electric power. The machine was ingeniously constructed, consisting of an old centrifugal pump of brass, a flywheel of concrete, a dynamo of antiquated type, and an elaborate system of gears comprised mainly of bicycle parts, which was capable of reversing action at the turn of the tide without interfering with the running of the dynamo. Although of rather Heath-Robinsonian design, the machine was quite effective, and when the tide was running, kept the settlement ablaze with electric light. Unfortunately, owing to the perversity of Nature, the tide was usually not running when the light was most required.

There were many electrically-operated gadgets about the place. Jock studied them with interest, wishing to learn how they were made so that he might not have to buy them. And he listened with interest to Mark’s confiding that the building of the machine had given him more pleasure than any job he had ever undertaken in his life, and that therefore it pained him to have to do that which he would not do but for his urgent neediness, namely, part with it for money. Jock thought this an extraordinarily cunning method of bargaining, and therefore responded warily, praising the damming and sluicing and other parts of the contrivance that he would not have to buy, and saying with reference to them that Mark would have made a clever engineer, but cruelly criticising the machine itself, although secretly delighted with its efficacy, in order that Mark might not be led into forming an exaggerated idea of its value.

Simple Mark was hurt by the criticisms, thinking them genuine, and was influenced by them and other subtle methods of Jock’s to make a mighty reduction in his price. He began by asking for £150, which was, he said, £50 less than the machine had cost, and was about the same amount as Jock would have paid had his bargaining not succeeded. He ended, exhausted by hours of merciless wrangling on Jock’s part, by agreeing to take £48 10s. For some hours after the settling of the deal Mark wandered at a distance up the beach, struggling, as he confided to Chook, to keep his hands from choking the life out of a Lousy, Bloody, Popeyed Pommy.

Jock’s stay at Flying Fox was brief. As soon as the machine was packed and stowed, he responded to Mark’s hints about the likelihood of their meeting with bad weather if the return were delayed for long, and said that he was ready to go. Nawnim was captured and taken yelling aboard the lugger.

Mark’s forecast of the weather proved truer than he had realised. The lugger sailed right into bad weather and was buffeted for days. Five days were spent at sea, nearly every hour of which Jock spent in the cabin, sick. Mark was pleased, and wasted many an hour in letting the ship drift broadside to the sea. Through Jock’s confinement, little Nawnim had no need to cower in the chains as he had during the first hour or two; and because of Jock’s lack of appetite Nawnim got most of his helping of food.

At last the end of the voyage came in sight. The Spirit of the Land passed into Zodiac Harbour and went slowly towards the town, revealing to Nawnim one by one the wonders of Civilisation. First wonder was an automobile, a high-wheeled waggon of the type called Motor Buggy, the forerunner of the modern motor-truck. As the ship was making her way under sail alone, Nawnim heard the strange thing roaring in the bush long before he saw it, and saw the cloud of red dust it was raising. Mark noticed his interest and forthwith ordered the helmsman to hug the shore. The buggy—it was just a Thing to Nawnim—rushed from the bush, swung into the beach-road, ran parallel with the lugger’s course. Nawnim had never seen a wheeled vehicle before. He was amazed, and still more amazed when his father waved to the Thing and received an answer.

They crept past the Calaboose. Nawnim stared in wonder at the buildings on the hill and at a gang of black felons working on the road and at a gang of white ones fishing from the cliff. They passed the great Meat-works, which was still more amazing because painted black, whereas the Calaboose was white. They coasted beside Mailunga Beach, which was an almost exact miniature of the ocean-beach at Flying Fox; but it was rendered incomparably more interesting by the fact that two men were pedalling bicycles through the grove of coconuts. Nawnim hopped with excitement and clapped his yellow hands.

Then Jock, who had been asleep, became aware of the fact that the ship was running in smooth water, and leapt up and poked his crimson face from the hatchway, saw what there was to see, and said fervently, “Thahnk gawd!”

Nawnim started, edged away.

Then came into view the Compound, the Nation’s Pride, a miniature city of whitewashed hovels crowded on a barren hill above the sea. Then they passed the hospital, then the Cable Station, then the Residency, then a cluster of neat white houses standing amid poinciana trees that blazed like torches under masses of scarlet blooms. Nawnim’s attention was then snatched away from the shore to the jetty, which suddenly appeared from behind a point, standing with red piles high above the fallen water, looking like a crowded flock of long-legged jabiroos. But even that amazing sight did not hold his attention for long. At the end of the jetty lay an utterly astounding Thing. He gaped, too young and too amazed to think. A blackboy near him said in the Yurracumbunga tongue, “That’s a steamer.”

When at length the steamer was hidden behind a headland, Nawnim, who had been staring at it, rapt, became aware of bustling aboard. He dodged among scrambling legs, concentrated on not being pushed too close to those devil-devilish creatures the whitemen, till a pair of black hands whisked him out of the way and dropped him in the middle of a high coil of rope. He heard the anchor fall, then struggled out of the coil to see that the lugger was lying among several other vessels of similar type, which were peopled with squat quaint-visaged human creatures of a breed he had never seen before. While he was staring at these objects he was seized again, lifted high in the air, lowered with sickening rapidity into the dinghy. He found himself so close to his foster-father that he could smell the sickening whiteman smell of him. For once he was glad when the hands of his true father at length took hold of him, because they lifted him out of that terrible red presence and bore him to the wide wide shore. He was about to fly when Mark seized him again and carried him, protesting uproariously, towards what he was convinced was something frightful. He was left in a humpy on Devilfish Bay in the care of a half-caste woman named Fat Anna.

To Nawnim a deserted house was a delightful playground, but an occupied house a place to be avoided like a reputed lair of debil-debils. Therefore his first few hours’ residence in Fat Anna’s house were not at all comfortable; indeed they were hours of incarceration rather than residence, because it was necessary to restrain him owing to his determination to escape. Anna chased him through mud and mangroves and brought him home thrice before it occurred to her that he was what she called a Myall, a wild creature. The chasing upset her, because she was very fat; but she was also very good-natured and did not thrash him as another person might, nor even reproach him, nor do anything more unfriendly than to hug him to her ample breast and pant a few laughing protests while bathing him with the scent of sweets. It was with her sweets that she eventually dispelled his mistrust of her. She made these herself of butter and sugar and essences in her kitchen. It was with these that she had made most of her mass of flesh.

Having tamed him with sweets, she washed him, performing the operation with such delicacy of touch that he, engaged with a sugar-filled pawpaw, scarcely realised what was going on below his chin. Then she dressed his sores and cropped his hair and put him into his first pair of breeches, which she had made from an old blouse of spotted blue print during his period of intractability. Not even one so misanthropical as Nawnim could long resist the motherliness of Anna. Before many days were out he was snuggling up to her in sheer love.

Anna was of a lower caste than Nawnim. Her father was a Japanese. Therefore, according to the Law of the Land, which recognised no diluent for Aboriginal blood but that of a white race, she was a full-blooded blackgin and not entitled to franchise as Nawnim theoretically would be when he came of age. But Anna did not care. She had small dealings with franchised people, and lived in her own style, untroubled by the formalities that bound the rest of the band to which she legally belonged, because the police seemed to realise that, at least as far as she was concerned, the law they served was an ass. She earned her living by washing clothes for the richer members of the Asiatic crews of the pearling-fleet and by giving her favours to those of them she liked. These were the creatures Nawnim had been amazed to see about him on the day of his arrival. When he inquired about them, Anna told him they were Japs an’ Chows.

She took him for walks through the railway-yards, and down round the pearling-stations, and up the jetty, but never through the town. The Yards were quiet just then, that being the ’tween-trains period; and the jetty was not nearly so interesting when viewed from above and without its steamer; and the town was forbidden ground for one who was a Ward of the State as well as a whiteman’s shame. But Nawnim saw countless interesting things that Anna did her best to explain to him. There was, however, nothing that interested him so much as Anna’s large naked feet. He never tired of watching these, whether they were in action or at rest. She often let him play with them while resting, and made them cut capers to amuse him, or rather suffered them to do so, since it was a fact that more often than not they got out of her control at his touch; for when he touched he tickled, which was always more than she could bear; usually his attention was diverted from her feet by her shrieks of laughter and the astounding involutions of her huge brown-yellow frame.

One day he wandered into the railway-yards, and, becoming tired, sought rest and shelter from the sun beneath a cattle-car that stood in a silent rake. He lay on a cool steel sleeper, unconcerned about the grime he gathered and the reek he breathed, amusing himself with slaughtering with a rusty bolt the meat-ants that ran about him. Then he heard a distant sound and sat up listening. The cause of the sound was approaching rapidly, so rapidly that he leapt up to flee and struck his head against the dung-encrusted undercarriage with such force as to knock him flat. The sound was now a thundering. The very earth quaked. He dug fingers into earth and steel, about to dart into sunshine and safety, when, with a frightful grinding roar and a belching of scalding vapour in his face, a Thing of horribleness unutterable dashed across his path. His shriek was as feeble as the plaint of a grass-stalk in a storm.

He recovered his wits to find himself lying with throat on a rail and hands outstretched clutching gravel and teeth clenched on oily grass. He looked up, dazed. There was nothing terrible before him—nothing, indeed, but the roof of Anna’s humpy smiling at him through the tops of palms. He crawled out warily. Nothing in sight to right or left. When he looked at Anna’s again his heart ached with love for her. He slowly rose, and rising glanced to the right to see—Horror!—the Thing rushing down on him—black hair trailing and white whiskers billowing about its pounding flanks.

He tripped over a rail. The Thing yelled at him. He echoed it with all his might, shot to his feet, raced to the embankment, pitched headlong down, fell in a heap, shot up again, crashed through the scrub, tearing his flesh and scuttling crabs and birds, rushed into the humpy, and shrieking, flung himself into the outstretched arms of Anna.

“Whazzer madder liddel man?” she crooned. “Aw wazzer madder wid de liddle myall now?”

She hugged him close and kissed his distorted face and nursed him and petted him till he could find the voice to speak.

“Oh trice!” he moaned. “Dibil-dibil—dibil-dibil——Oh jeezon trice!”

THE COPPER CREEK TRAIN (#ucc395e85-cad9-52ce-ae79-e64b7cf21d6b)

THE life of an infant is like a passage over a gigantic strip of carpet that rolls out ahead and up behind as one goes on, hiding the future and obliterating the past. While living with Fat Anna little Nawnim was aware of no other state of existence. Flying Fox and its associations had faded from his mind. The world was the region visible from the humpy, its people the crabs and snipe and occasional crocodile that haunted the shores of Devilfish Bay, and Anna herself, and her Japs an’ Chows, and the devil-devil of the railway-yards, and the few brave whitemen who worked there.

He spent with Anna what seemed to him a lifetime, but was in fact ten days. Then one night Jock and Mark and Chook came, appearing to him like monsters materialised out of a forgotten nightmare. That was the day before the mail-train’s fortnightly trip to Copper Creek. Next morning Anna woke him early, washed and fed and dressed him with more than usual care, then carried him up to and through the Yards to a whitewashed iron shed that bore on a board in great black letters the name PORT ZODIAC. He himself carried a newspaper-parcel containing a pawpaw and a huge beef-sandwich and a lump of toffee. He knew he was going somewhere, having been told so repeatedly by Anna, but cared about it not at all, supposing that she was going with him.

A noisy crowd of people of all the primary colours of humanity and of most of the tints obtainable by miscegenation was gathered about the train, moving freely, with neither platforms nor officials to impede it. Somewhat to Nawnim’s consternation, Anna shouldered through the crowds, chatting with people as she went, and pushed about till she found Mark and Chook and Jock Driver. While she was talking to these monsters, each vainly tried his hand at petting Nawnim, who would not take from any hand but Anna’s even the large bag of lollies Mark had brought him. At length Jock gave Anna some money and a pinch on the rump. Then she went off with Nawnim, past the three coaches provided for superior passengers, to the trucks at the front, where the crowd was entirely black. She squeezed him for a while, and kissed and petted him, then passed him to a blackboy. Before he was properly aware of his transfer, he was swung into the air. His heart stopped. A momentary glimpse of the jostling crowd, a last sight of Anna’s face; then he was dropped into an open truck.

A sense of desolation smote him. He would have bawled and hammered on the wall before him had he not suddenly become aware of the presence of three black naked piccaninnies and a large mangy mongrel dog, all of whom stared at him so hard that he forgot his forming purpose in staring back. Then the dog attacked him, writhing with friendliness, knocked him down, licked him, tore open his parcel, gobbled his bread-and-beef. The piccaninnies pounced on the rolling pawpaw. He had the wits to grab the sweets.

He had no time to recall the desolation. Scarcely had he recovered from the welcome when the locomotive came. It came horribly, rumbling and grumbling and clanking and hissing, all the more horribly because it could not be seen. All the piccaninnies stiffened. Their faces became blank. Their eyes widened and assumed expressions of sightlessness that told of full sensory powers flung into the one of tense audition. The locomotive stopped, so close that its hot breath choked the listeners and its frightful noises entered their very hearts.

A terrible voice——“Good-o——ease-up!”

Hsssssssssssss!