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  Garibooli had hoped that Euroke might have returned to the camp with the promised fish. He would have caught one by now, maybe two.

  She found the water in the tin amongst the skins and gulped down refreshing mouthfuls. She thought she should walk to the river to fetch some more, gather some food if she could find some, just as her grandmother and aunts had shown her, and find Euroke. But the heat, her running, her climbing, and her late night listening to Kooradgie had meshed together to make her feel deeply tired. She curled up under the lean-to and enjoyed the deliciously heavy sleep. She was so deep in her slumber that she did not hear the birds squawk as they scattered in the distance. She did not wake as the car drove across the paddock, stopping just outside the cluster of trees that lined the camp.

  It was the slamming of the car doors that stirred her. The sleep had clouded her head and her limbs felt thick. She heard the voices that she did not recognise and, realising they were strangers, sensed danger.

  Euroke had been fishing. He liked the curve of the river where, it was said, an evil water spirit would attack if someone ventured there after dark.

  He was carrying his catch on a stick on the way back to the camp. He intended to get his sister to help him prepare the fish for cooking, knowing she would be impressed by his success and flitter around him excitedly. He already felt the warm glow of pride in his stomach.

  Euroke had always been aware of his sister’s watchful eye. Her presence pulled from him a protecting and caring spirit. Booli would sit quietly and watch him as he worked or played, fascinated by his movements, her big brown eyes focused intently on him. He would suck in the pride he felt at being the centre of the older girl’s universe, basking in her gentle adoration.

  He passed three younger boys from his camp playing at making a nganda*, nodding at them confidently as he passed, giving them the approval they had sought from him. A short way on, he heard the shrieks of the gila as they scattered into the sky. Usually there had to be some disturbance to send the birds into such a fit. A car. Gubbas. Gunjies. Euroke felt that something was wrong. Something bad. It was always bad when the men in black, in their black cars, came to the camp. Something in his heart told him that he needed to find Booli.

  * nganda = canoe

  gila = galah

  gunjies = police

  Garibooli emerged from the lean-to and saw two men in black uniforms walking towards her.

  “There’s one of them,” the taller man shouted as Garibooli stared back at him, a small animal suddenly spying a predator. As the men started to move quickly towards her, she instinctively turned to run. Her mother and father had repeatedly told her: if you see a black car, run the other way; if you see men in black uniforms, the gunjies, run away as fast as you can—hide in the riverbed, climb up high in a tree, be silent until they leave.

  Being surprised by their arrival, she had not left herself enough time. In her startled and sleepy state she could not get a head start on them. As she ran to dodge the burning coals of the slumbering fire, thick arms, as strong as a tree branch, pulled at her waist, scooping her thin, tiny frame up. She kicked her legs into the air as she was carried towards the car. She screamed, pressing all the air out of her lungs with fear. When her voice stopped, she gasped hard and fast. She screamed again.

  The other gungie — the shorter, rounder, redder man — had opened the door to the back of the car. There was a struggle between the young girl and the man who was trying to put her into the black vehicle. Garibooli heard her name being called distantly. She recognised the cadences and felt almost relief. “Euroke! Euroke! Euroke!” she yelled.

  As he approached the camp, Euroke heard the screams. He ran to where the noise came from, his fish and stick long since abandoned. He saw Booli being pushed into the back of a black car by two men dressed in uniforms. He saw the slight figure of his sister turning and kicking wildly at the men.

  He ran towards her, yelling her name. “Booli. Booli.”

  The second uniformed man grabbed her thrashing legs and helped to bundle the small, struggling girl into the car, like a bag of dirty clothing. The door slammed shut behind her. Her skin burned on the sun-heated leather of the seat. She scrambled to the back window. She could see Euroke, could see his mouth open and his arms stretched out to her.

  “Euroke! Euroke!” she continued to yell.

  “Shut up, girl!” barked the gungie dressed in black, whose hands left red welts on her legs and arms.

  Garibooli continued to wail with terror.

  “I said shut up! Jeez!” the dark-dressed man hollered.

  Garibooli tried to control her sobbing, falling to the leather seat to let the heat scorch her skin. The pain was greater inside her than on her burning face, arms and legs. She whimpered on the leather, her eyes and nose losing liquids that formed a puddle. Her mind and body froze with an overwhelming fear.

  The car door closed and the two men moved quickly into the front seat. Euroke’s heart was flooded with fear.

  “Booli. Booli.”

  He ran, but the car started to move away from him. In his desperation, he forgot how much faster it could move than his legs. He saw his sister’s face looking at him through the prison of the glass window. She was crying out to him, her eyes enlarged with terror. He held his arms out to her but the car pulled away faster; she moved further and further from him. He did not stop chasing her until the car was too far ahead for him to catch. His sister’s face was smaller than the pupil of his eye. He was exhausted but didn’t feel his body ache until he sank to the ground, his tears falling into the soil.

  The car bumped over paddocks, on to the dirt roads and further into the little town that was still and sleepy on the hot summer afternoon.

  If she had sat up, Garibooli would have caught a last glimpse of her mother who, along with the other women in the group, had moved from the centre to the side of the road and was walking with her bundle of rotting rations.

  Guadgee walked slowly along the side of the road. The women watched nervously as the police car passed, then looked at each other. The cars were sinister phantoms, symbols of impending doom. Taking away the men to gaol, or — the greatest fear that lurked in the darkest shadows — taking away the children. They had turned, the white people in black uniforms, from horse to cars, turned from killers into thieves still destroying families. Guadgee was already irritated because the flour she’d been given was infested with weevils. She would either have to use it anyway or find food that the bush was less and less willing to yield up to her.

  Guadgee could not shake the restless, taunting feeling the car had left her with, even though the back seat appeared to be empty. The black vehicles always made her feel that way, vulnerable, as though she were naked. She would lower her head and hope that she would be left alone. Perhaps it was the heat, and the rotting rations, she thought, that were making her feel unsettled. Perhaps it was the usual feeling of dread she felt when collecting the monthly rations. She hated the indignity of the hand outs. Even more she hated the humiliation of being faced with the man who rationed them out. He never looked at her. Guadgee could not be sure whether the lack of eye contact was because he did not remember her or because he did. His face, his voice, were etched into her being, like heat cracks on a dry waterbed. She would not bring her Booli near this malevolent presence. He was a mi-mi, a stealer of souls, with leather boots and a riding crop.

  Guadgee fell silent as the other women around her continued to chatter about the rations, Kooradgie’s stories, and the meal from the night before. These lands were not safe for children with dark skin. She lived in constant fear that her children would be hurt, taken from her, or worse. The countryside raced with tales of how the government would send for the children and take them to where the families would never see them again. One woman carried her child in a suitcase when she travelled, she was so afraid of losing him. Others, who had lost one or more, had wailed with grief, willed themselves to die, washed themselves in alcoh
ol. Hopeful that their youthful spriteliness would keep them from harm, Guadgee had told Euroke and Garibooli that they should always be prepared to run and hide. Her children were more precious to her than anything else. They had given her a reason to live again when so many losses and disappointments hardened her. She marvelled at the miracle and mystery of their small hands, delicate fingers and inquiring, thoughtful eyes that seemed to acknowledge her secret.

  The buzzing feeling of foreboding was covered by a thick smothering fog of dread when Guadgee saw her son running towards her. He was running from the direction of the camp. She knew before he blurted out the words what he was going to say. Her world had already slowed its time.

  “Guni*. They took Booli!” He had reached her, his strong hands clinging to her rubbery waist. “I tried to stop them. I tried. But they were in a car. And I couldn’t get there in time. They were going too fast. But I tried, Guni. I tried.”

  Guadgee held her son’s head, holding him tight to her, her rations lying on the ground around her. She could feel his tears dampening her dress, his face hot from grief. The women stood helpless in horror, stunned by the news, overwhelmed by desperate thoughts for the little girl, the little whirlwind they all loved.

  “It’s not your fault. Hush. Hush. It’s not your fault,” Guadgee clutched her son as though he were her last breath.

  An eerie stillness hung over the camp, engulfing it in a mist. The festivities of Kooradgie’s visit seemed to have existed in another dimension. Guadgee wailed inconsolably. Her husband would not be returning until tomorrow but the mothers were too afraid to send any of the younger boys to fetch the men back. Guadgee’s grief was flooding over. She beat her chest as she whispered through her tears, “My birrawee. My birrawee.”

  * guni = mother

  birrawee = child

  She cursed the world and, more bitterly, cursed herself for leaving Garibooli in the camp. In wanting to keep her safe from Tom Kerrigan she had allowed her daughter to be exposed to an even greater danger.

  “I never should have let her stay here on her own,” she snuffled.

  “You did the right thing, Guadgee. Kerrigan’s no good. You did right to keep her at home and protect your little one. After what he did to my Karrwi…” her sister, Nimmaylee, comforted. After a pause, she quietly added, “And what he did to us.”

  Guadgee shook with silent, convulsive sobs. “I am so afraid for her. My birrawee. My birrawee.”

  The sisters held each other in their flooding pain, the same way they had clung together over thirteen years ago on another night in which they had violently been brought to understand what it meant to be a woman wrapped in black skin living amongst the pale, colourless men. Guadgee thought she could see the evil venom flowing though the blue veins in their see-through skin when that evening, all those years ago, the sisters had been down past the graves. It was a place they shouldn’t have been in, especially as they were married and old enough to know better.

  Guadgee had been walking ahead of Nimmaylee when she heard a scream, then the thud of the older girl’s body as it crashed to the ground. Guadgee turned to see a gubba in dirty clothes standing over her sister and then felt an enormous pain as her own body was slammed to the ground. Her back held a searing pain from the force of her fall and was scratched by the fallen branches pressing against her flesh.

  She was young, her breasts just having formed. Guadgee began to scream instinctively but was silenced by a hard slap that burnt her face. She closed her eyes tightly and tried to imagine herself as a kukughagha flying high above the earth —untouchable and free—while the man did to her what her husband did, but angry and rough, forceful and mean. Fearing that he would kill her, she remained frozen until the gubba slipped out of her and off her.

  “Your go, Jacko,” he bellowed, as another figure staggered from the shadows. The shadow sniggered as he unbuttoned his trousers.

  Guadgee never forgot the sound of Tom Kerrigan’s voice. That sound and the events of that late afternoon had stained her and she marked all other events in her life against it. She remembered the sickly smell of alcohol on the breath of the white man, of Tom Kerrigan, and felt his humiliation of her every time she went for rations. He never seemed to recognise the hatred that lit her eyes.

  But in the late hours of that day, near the graves of her ancestors, when Tom Kerrigan violated her, the world seemed flooded with darkness. She had already lost so much: her mother had been killed, shot dead, just as her father had been; her sister’s husband had died in prison hung by a belt that was not his own.* These raw losses and grievings mingled with tales of massacres and mutilations. There were only three lights left — her sister, her daughter, and her son. Each showed her the contentment that could be experienced, even in the most desolate and degraded of environments.

  *In Aboriginal families, the sisters of a person’s mother were also called ’mother’. Guadgee and Nimmaylee were sisters; they both would have been mother to Garibooli. Also, Guadgee’s husband would have taken Nimmaylee as a second wife when her own husband had died as he would have had responsibility for looking after her.

  Now her most precious daughter—so much like herself in look, manner and temperament, but fresher and so much more trusting — had been swept away into the harshness of that other world. One of her lights, her hopes, had been extinguished. The pain of loss and its bitterness gnawed at her, devouring her. It would prove to be terminal.

  The sound of her pain filled the country. It filled the soil. It filled the trees. It filled the grasses and the empty river beds. It hung in the air for all time.

  Euroke cried silently in the shadows, watching his mother as the women surrounded her. His sister had been taken from him and he had been unable to protect, unable to save her. He was unable to console his mother. He longed for something that would bring his sister back, that would fill in the part of him that was missing and making him hurt. He longed for something that would make him feel like he did that very morning, when the dew was new and the world was as he knew it.

  “I’ll get her back,” Euroke swore to himself. “I’ll bring her home.”

  4

  1918

  GARIBOOLI STOOD AT THE TRAIN STATION in the corner of a small room, looking down at the heavy shoes that had been pinching at her heels. Her crying had ceased, replaced by a numbness that struggled with her anxiety as she thought over what had happened to her in the last day.

  Yesterday, when the policemen had brought her to town, she was placed in the police lockup for the night while someone from the government could be organised to take her into their care. Garibooli was kept in the prison cell reserved for drunks and she had almost vomited from the sharp smell of urine and bile. She was not able to eat the bread and water that had been left for her. Nor was she able to sleep. She felt little soothed by being told that she would be collected in the morning by the welfare woman. This turned out to be Mrs Carlyle who now had charge of her.

  Instead, Garibooli had sat on the cold iron bench that doubled as a bed for those too drunk or despondent to feel its hardness against their spine. She watched the outside light turn to darkness and, as the shadows drew up the wall, she waited the many hours until the lightness crept back again. All the while she sat alert, certain she would hear a handle’s click, that someone would open the door to the cell rooms, that her father and mother would walk in to take her home and put her to sleep among the bundar skins.

  When she finally heard the click of the door, it was not her parents but another man in a black uniform. “Well, Poppett, how are you this morning?” he boomed in a thick voice.

  Garibooli looked up at him with his bushy eyebrows, hairs peeping out from his nostrils and twinkling brown eyes. The kindness in his voice made her eyes swell with tears.

  “Ah, well, I’ll fix yer a nice cup o’ tea. How’s that then, eh?” he continued and she nodded, gratefully.

  When he returned, he unlocked her cell and handed her a tin cup hot f
rom the liquid. He watched her as she sipped the tea tentatively. “There’s a nice Missers Carlyle here to see you, Poppett, who’ll look after yer now. So drink that tea and wipe them eyes. How bout that, eh?” he said with a tender voice and a comforting wink.

  He walked with her to the office where one of the policemen who had struggled with her the day before sat writing as a tall, thin woman in a dark blue dress, white gloves and a straw hat looked over his shoulder. She turned and gestured Garibooli to her, “Come here, child.” Garibooli walked towards the outstretched hand.

  The woman with skin the colour of milk was silent for a moment as she gave Garibooli a penetrating look. Her ice-blue eyes surveyed Garibooli’s coffee-coloured face, high forehead, full lips, and deep sorrowful eyes. Garibooli felt as though her whole body was exposed, as though her skin was somehow dirty. But when she looked back into Mrs Carlyle’s eyes she could see in the watery blue that there was something inside this woman that wanted to help. To Garibooli, it meant she would assist her in getting home.

  “Write: ’Removed at child’s own request’.” The woman looked at Garibooli again. With a sigh she added, as she adjusted her stiff woollen jacket, “She may not have asked for it now but you can be sure that she will be grateful to be brought up in a Christian home. Now if you will excuse me, I have to put this child in some decent clothes and a pair of shoes before I put her on the train. The filth they live in … A pity. A real pity.” The woman took Garibooli outside and ordered her to wash her feet at a water pump beside the station, then handed her new clothes and told her to change.

  “You can burn these,” the woman told the officer who had now finished typing. She handed the pile of Garibooli’s clothes over, her arm outstretched and her face turned to one side as though they were stained with the urine that had burned Garibooli’s nose as she had breathed during the night.