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  That night, a corrobboree was held. The women sat in a half-circle and chanted, hitting two boomerangs together to keep time; others beat possum rugs. Fires were lit, and one burned especially high. Heading the procession of male dancers was Naradam. The men danced around. The beating grew stronger. The chanting grew louder. The fires were piled higher. The dancers nudged Naradam towards the brightest burning fire. The mother of the dead girls shrieked loud. Naradam turned to look at her but was confronted with a wall of men. They seized him and threw him into the fire where he perished in the flames.

  “So you see,” Elizabeth concluded, “your mother will always know where you are and if something is wrong, Euroke.” She looked down at him, trying to shield him from whatever it was that had turned him into a silent and secretive teenager.

  Elizabeth didn’t realise her mistake until Thomas asked what ’Euroke’ meant.

  “You remind me of someone I know. Someone I love very much. And ’Euroke’ means ’sun’ or ’sunny’.”

  She kissed his head. Thomas was content with the cryptic answer sealed with his mother’s lips. Each sat silently, pulled into their own internal worlds. Elizabeth felt for Euroke: her lost brother; her lost son. No, a mother did not always know. She had told Thomas a lie. He might sit comforted by the falsehood that had just fallen so lightly from her lips but she could not help but feel trapped by the truth of what she knew.

  Thomas reflected on what his mother had said: A mother knows. She always knows. He hoped that this was not true because of the new, secret thoughts that were creeping into his head. Could she see inside him to the feelings and impulses he was suppressing? Could she witness the secret, seductive night-time thoughts that he could not control or understand in the illuminating light of day?

  Later, years later, these feelings of shame would not be what he remembered of the warm interaction with his mother. What he remembered was the story. Not its content, for he had forgotten the names by the next morning, but where it had come from, and how that genesis unlocked the mystery of his dark skin. Thomas would try over and over again to remember the name that his mother had mistakenly called him, but it was elusive. Eventually, it was lost.

  On the night that Elizabeth had spoken the name ’Euroke’ to her son by mistake, whispering the name aloud to her son seemed to awaken a part of her that had been buried under her extra layer of skin. Whispering the name she said so often in her head had made that old life real again. She remembered that part of herself, that girl so free, so spirited. It was like looking at another daughter. The distraction of the memories made her restless.

  One afternoon, after Thomas had left, while walking home from the shops, she passed a field. Watching the wind blow the tall grass seemed to transport her to another place and she felt all the layers of her life, all she had experienced since she had left the place where the rivers meet, fall from her, and she felt as she had when she was ten. She placed her bags on the ground and started to walk through the field. The grass hitting her legs brought back the memory and feel of the tall grass of Dungalear Station.

  Then she began to lift her pace and go quicker and quicker and faster and faster until she was running, running around the field as though the bulk of her did not exist. The excitement, the adrenalin and the burning breathlessness of having exerted such energy was liberating. But tiredness overcame her. As she walked home, she could not quite catch her breath again. As the day turned over, she could not get rid of the pains in her body. She could not seem to get her breathing or her limbs back to normal.

  Elizabeth stood in the dark of a late spring night and hung damp sheets on the line. Although her task could have waited until morning, it was one of those still, peaceful nights in which the stars seemed to expand across the heavens. Elizabeth continued to study the sky. Always it looked familiar to her, just as it had at home.

  She finished pegging the clothes on the line and lifted her face to the stars. In the sky she could see the Mea-Mei and — what was his name? — chasing the sisters. Where were they from? Then, amongst the patterns and myths with names that now escaped her, she saw the outline of her brother’s face: his childish lips, his brown eyes, his large dark-caramel forehead. “Euroke,” she whispered and she remembered her many silent prayers.

  He will come and rescue me. He will come and rescue me.

  Her heart longed for Euroke. It always had. Sometimes loudly and violently, other times softly and gently, muted by the joys of her children. She had yearned for the gaze of his deep brown eyes and for his infectious laugh, longed for this moment when she could see his face so clearly in the stars. As she looked into the sky, his hand reached down and beckoned her to join him, telling her not to be afraid. Her whole heart seemed to explode with longing. She had been Elizabeth for a time; now she was again Garibooli.

  Garibooli. Garibooli. Garibooli. Say it over and over and over again.

  13

  1929

  SONNY BONEY, EUROKE, the lost brother, felt a breeze, soft and gentle, the night that Garibooli died. Walking down the street of the small opal-mining town, he felt a presence drawing close to him, a warm embrace, and he thought of his sister, hovering near but just out of his reach. For him, Garibooli was still alive, just lost, waiting to be found.

  Several months after Garibooli had been taken, Sonny’s family had been relocated to the mission at Angledool, carried off in trucks. The move took place during a drought but was not driven by lack of water. Sonny’s parents were told that if they did not move, their son would be taken too. The family found itself imprisoned by this threat. Aboriginal children had been denied enrolment at the public school near Dungalear and the townspeople had demanded that the Education Department segregate the school, then complained that the Aboriginal children were neglected because they were getting no education. Garibooli’s family soon discovered that conditions at Angledool were much worse than they had been at Dungalear.

  Within a year, they returned to the place where the rivers meet; Sonny and his father walked the sixty miles back. Only a few months after their return trip, Guni had died of grief and alcohol, the end of her decline that began with the theft of her daughter. Sonny’s father and Kooradgie, the great storyteller, followed in the flu epidemic of 1919. Many of the old people were lost during that time. Sonny could still remember the smell of the burning dogwood and sandalwood used to smoke out and cleanse Kooradgie’s hut and to burn all of the old man’s worldly possessions. This ceremony to honour Kooradgie’s passing marked the last observance of this funeral rite and the last performance of the tribal dances. His family had been devastated by the loss of so many of their elders and children, and Sonny had lost both of his parents. Everyone who had known him as ’Euroke’ had passed away, moved or disappeared. The need in him to find his sister intensified.

  The end of the Great War worsened the inequalities in the small town. A campaign by the white residents had continued to keep Aboriginal people from the town and tied to isolated reserves and camps of tin-sheet tents on the outskirts. At the same time, pressure was also placed on authorities to give more reserve land over to white hands and shift the Aboriginal inhabitants. The contradiction of these two approaches, something that seemed to pass the authorities by, was not lost on Sonny.

  Sonny closely watched as the soldiers returned home and he harboured hopes of respect for his people and land returned to those Aboriginal men who had loyally fought for Australia on foreign soil. But the returning black soldiers were shunned by the Australian society they had protected and were excluded from the returned servicemen’s clubs. Even the Soldier Settler scheme, which gave farm land to men who had served their country, turned out to be only for white soldiers, and it became clear that the Anzac legend was not going to include the contributions made by Aboriginal soldiers.

  Three or four hundred Aborigines had served during the war, though the exact number would never be known as the statistics were not properly recorded. This participation by Abori
ginal men came despite laws passed in 1909 which prohibited people who were not ’substantially of European descent’ from joining the armed forces. This law was designed specifically to prevent Aborigines, Asians and other non-whites from military service, but this bar was relaxed during the war due to shortages in the number of volunteers, allowing some Aboriginal men to fight, serve and die for their country, which in peacetime would not have wanted them. Aboriginal deaths and acts of heroism on the fields of battle were forgotten by all but the black families who bore them.

  Sonny was apprenticed to a sheep station near Tilpa the year after the flu epidemic. Barely a teenager, he began his work in the pastoral industry with four years of building water tanks and windmills and work as a tar-boy in shearing sheds. Along with the scorched-earth scars this work gave him, he was to be paid two shillings a week, with the money to be placed in the care of the manager. He would never see this income. His apprenticeship taught him that he could never complain of unfair treatment, never get mad no matter how provoked, and never strike a white man. He also learnt to take the bad treatment and to live with humility and humiliation. Yet he also knew that he had been lucky. He would later meet men who carried visible scars from the punishments meted out to them during their periods of apprenticeship.

  Sonny never trusted white people. His father, familiar with killing times like those that had taken place at Temperance Creek, had advised him of their absolute power over blackfellas. “A blackfella is only acceptable to other black-fellas,” he would say before adding, “Stick with your own mob.” White people could be polite and kind to him if they wanted, or cruel and mean if they felt that way. The choice was always up to them as to how they would treat him and there was little he could do about it; either way, Sonny was held hostage to the whims of white men. He adapted his life to avoid them, especially the gangs of white boys that ’patrolled’ the town’s streets. A black man was lucky if these young men stuck only to name-calling.

  All his life, Sonny reflected, whitefellas were saying he should be like them, but he knew, just as his father had told him, that they would never accept him. There were a thousand reminders every day to reinforce his outsider status: the young white louts in towns like Walgett and Brewarrina lying in wait in parks and on deserted roads to beat black men like him; having to wait until all the whites were served before getting attention in a shop; constantly enduring hurtful remarks about his supposed inferiority. He would never get used to the way white people tried to strip him of his dignity as a thing of humour and sport.

  If life on the ground made him feel broken and barren, especially when all those he loved and who loved him had been taken from him, he was elevated above the world on the back of a horse. Sonny had an intuition for riding — and a skill for riding fast. He felt connected with the beast beneath him as though the flow of the movement, the motion of the gallop, had a life force all its own. Riding at full speed across the terrain, he felt a power over his own destiny that seemed so elusive when he was on the ground.

  His other source of escape and comfort came when listening to Bessie Smith on the wireless. Her deep expressive voice, her intense power, went into him, through him, as though he had inhaled her. She seemed to sit in his throat, singing what he couldn’t say. Every hurt, pained word suppressed inside him she could squeeze free with her laments:

  When it rains five days, and the sky’s turned black as night. I said, When it rains five days, and the sky’s turned black as night.

  He could feel her arms around him, this dark, fleshy woman from Chatanooga, Tennessee. He had not experienced the strange capacity of a song to touch him since the days he was still with Garibooli and their tribal songs had meanings, messages and stories that resonated with their everyday lives. Bessie Smith expressed the agony of watching his mother, crumpled over from alcohol, her clothes dirty and her hair matted, sobbing between wrenching coughs, “My birrawee. My birrawee.”

  Trou-ble, trou-ble, I’ve had it all my days,

  It seems that trou-ble’s going to fol-low me to my grave.

  The teachings of camp life in his youth gave him the confidence that comes with the knowledge that to survive all he needed was his own two hands. When he could find employment he lived in the fringe camps or on the missions. When he couldn’t, he sustained himself on the ever-changing land, supplementing the shortfalls in his rations. He would kill possums, especially useful for their meat and their fur that could be made into pliable twine, good for fishing. Their skin was waterproof and made good water bags.

  He had tried to keep to as many of the old ways as he could in the midst of the customs and beliefs of the white men, even as the weave of the clan’s social and cultural life began to loosen. These rituals he kept hidden and secret, for times when there was no one who could see him but his ancestors. To an outsider, they would seem like superstition. He would not look at a bird flying towards the sunset. He would always look straight ahead when travelling. He would still use a spear to stab the footprints of an animal whilst tracking it to weaken it and would resist the temptation to do the same to a human footprint, no matter what the owner had done to him.

  Sonny watched as the landscape he knew by heart changed. His own life was transformed by government regulation and coercion. The Aborigines Protection Board continued to give reserve land away, now to fund the policy that had seen his sister snatched from him. The Board had also leased lands to white farmers for its own revenue, even though Aboriginal men like himself were keen to try their hands at running their own farms instead of working as exploited labour on the properties of white men.

  In times when work was scarce, Sonny would return to life on the reserve, a life he loathed — the tyranny of the manager’s stock whip, the dirt floors of the shacks and the control over every aspect of his life. He was required to get permission to work, to leave the reserve and move to another. He was told what to eat through the rations assigned to him. This constant monitoring and decision-making on his behalf made him feel the way he had felt when he saw the black car, his sister looking out at him from the back window, moving further and further away from him as he ran faster and faster trying to reach her. There were the inedible, insufficient rations: two pounds of sugar, eight pounds of flour, a quarter of a pound of tea, and a little salt. There were the blankets, one for each family in winter, grey with a red stripe and ’N.S.W Aborigines’ in large red letters, to be held up to a camera for a snapshot of white generosity and the forced gratitude of blacks. Sonny continued to catch fish and game to supplement his diet. He would give most of what he caught to the sick children and the old people.

  The scene he relived so many times with reflection and regret — “if only I hadn’t gone to the river”, “if only I had run faster, called her name louder” — had become like so many other stories told by parents and siblings across the years. The terrible conditions on the reserves, caused by government neglect and official corruption, allowed officials to assert that Aboriginal parents were not able to take care of their children and provided an excuse to justify the removal of more of the community’s sons and daughters into State ’care’. Distraught parents were powerless to stop these actions. Sonny remembered vividly the scene of a father, George Driver, standing in front of a train in a fruitless attempt to prevent his daughter being taken from him, a daughter he would never see again, a daughter who died five years later while still a State ward.

  In 1927 Sonny heard of a petition circulated by a group of Aboriginal people. The men he worked with spoke about this political push and they spoke of a man, Fred Maynard, who was getting people — black and white — to support it. It asked for the dissolution of the Aborigines Protection Board. Sonny could only dream of what that could mean — his freedom, Garibooli’s return. He felt awe at the nerve of this Fred Maynard and searched the newspapers for a glimpse of this man who did not seem to be aware of the protocols that governed his own life — that Aborigines had to hold their tongues, accept the
ir lot, and not make white men angry. What would his father, always warning Sonny not to provoke white people, have thought of Fred Maynard? Men like Fred Maynard showed him that it was time to stop relying on the dream of being rescued by well-intentioned white people; it was time to start relying on Aboriginal people. Sonny would have liked to have met this man and often thought of being given the opportunity of shaking his hand and what he would say. What were the words, he pondered, to be said to someone who holds open a promise that life, when one’s feet are on the ground, could feel as full of freedom as it does when riding a horse as fast as it can move across the open land?

  But these actions of hope did not reach their promise; it seemed to Sonny that it would be a long time before Aboriginal people could start living free from interference from the authorities who would break up their families, tell them where to live and where to work. In scouring the newspapers he came across a news item on November 8,1928 in the Sydney Morning Herald. Seventeen Aboriginal men were killed at Conniston in response to the death of one white man. The killing times that Kooradgie had spoken about were still happening in other parts of the country. And to a man like Sonny, working on the stations in Coonanble and Brewarrina, the freedom Fred Maynard demanded seemed to be crushed by ever intensified government control over his people’s actions and official surveillance of every part of their lives.

  Even with this increased control over where they could work and travel, there was more violence and hostility in the towns towards his people, a resentment of their dark skin and searching eyes. White people continued to push black people off their land and to confine them to places beyond the residential areas. Curfews were imposed in the towns to keep Aborigines off the streets after dark. Conditions on the reserves were so bad and government neglect so rampant that poor health continued to be a way of life for Aboriginal people and was used as an excuse for keeping them from entering the towns, creating an intricate segregation in the rural areas.