BACK TO THE DESERT
“…They send us away to desert…”
“Go back to the desert,” ordered the holy man to the diseased nomad. “Go back to your people. There is nothing for you here.”
The wasted Aboriginal warrior, his belly bloated with hunger, nervously raked gnarled fingers through his tangled hair and stirred the arid dust with his toe.
He stood like a tragic statue: the long, black length of his famished body poised motionless under the angry sky; the humming bush flies massed about the corners of his eyes and two crawling insects explored the mild dampness of his nostrils.
The lean nakedness of this derelict man disgusted the pious missionary.
The Aborigine’s stomach protruded grotesquely, out of all proportion to the sinewy limbs, sunken chest and withered cheeks.
Luminous mystic eyes smouldered beneath the recess of the warrior’s aggressive forehead – like magnificent opals, expressing all the silent bewilderments his tongue could never phrase.
And still the Aborigine lingered, standing permanent as a mountain, his swarthy skin only mildly relieved by the dust of his exhaustive journey.
A splendid figure, yet wilted, weary and wan: a living assault to the missionary’s conscience.
“Don’t you hear me, Jack?” the missionary shouted from his shaded verandah. “Get away from here and find your people. They will look after you.”
But the nomad hesitated, glancing furtively at the cool water tank beside the house.
Longingly, his eyes caressed the gleaming iron and the brass tap at the base.
A drop of water dribbled from the nozzle, glinted a while in the light, then fell to the earth.
The parched soil swallowed it greedily.
“Me t’ink that old fella thirsty,” said the Christian’s gin, a slender girl with sensual eyes and a baby in her belly. “That one fella sick ‘n tired. Him need drink.”
The clergyman turned to his paramour.
Sympathy burned in her face, and the unabashed empathy of the girl disurbed him.
Her piccaninny was already becoming apparent beneath the shabby dress, a daily embarrassment.
‘I will have to send her back to the desert soon,’ the missionary mused. ‘She can’t be staying around here much longer.’
Then he said: “Gnarla, go tell that old man to leave the mission immediately. “Go on, send him away.”
“But he sick fella,” complained the woman plaintively. “Him need water.”
“No water,” he snapped, irritated by her insolence. “We’ve hardly got enough for ourselves. Now do what I tell you, girl, or I’ll send you away with him.”
Her aggression died.
Cringing from the missionary’s anger, she pushed through the fly-wire door and approached her kinsman.
The old man crackled a greeting in their own Pitjantjatjara tongue, and the girl replied: “The white boss say you must go, old one.”
“But my blood is like the drying stream,” he told her. “It runs slow and thin. My people have wandered far away. They say I am too old to hunt, that I must lie in the shade and wait for the spirits.”
“Me properly sorry,” she said, showing him the agony in her eyes. “But me can’t help. That Jessus fella has taken me for him wife now. His baby inside me. I must listen to his law now.”
The old man nodded, saying: “Does this God-man forbid me to drink from his tank?”
“Yes,” said the girl, sadly. That water, he say, is private. It nearly empty, he say. But I know he lie, it nearly full up. Me no more understand white man’s way.”
“More better in old time,” the warrior reminisced. “Then country full of animals, birds, bush tucker. Water belong us all that time. We mob been happy then. Them white people took everythings. They send us away to desert. They said we no good with our ceremony. But this new people bring hunger, big mob sadness, sickness.”
“You speak true way,” the girl said. “The God-fellas are strange. Old ways was best, I reckon.”
So the kindly old man bid his country woman goodbye and took his wretchedness into the whispering wilderness, back to the soulful desert, where cruel sands shimmered in the blinding haze, stretching wide and golden till they merged with the skies.
His shuffling feet, blistered and painful, left an inconsistent but indeliblr track, sometimes dragging uselessly, often hobbling, etching on the dust of his inferno a vivid map for all later to read.
The shameless orb drew the juices from his pores and the flies clustered in a living blanket across his brow, sucking gratefully at his meagre sweat.
His weakening mind dreamed of a tree with soft roots and damp with moisture.
This illusion sustained his weakening strength till he stumbled upon a group of rocks, at the foot of which water once laid.
He squatted on the red earth and probed the split ground with a stick, levering up hard lumps and examining the holes underneath.
He found nothing.
Disspirited and sighing, he fell on to his back and closed his eyes against the harsg glare, bringing up an arm to drape across his throbbing forehead.
‘Me die now,’ he thought passively.
And so he lay, unmoving, as the vicious sun dawdled in an arc over the blue sky, as though bent on some terrible vengeance, at last to die in the west.
With the twilight an anguished cry sounded in the heart of Australia, and there was no one to hear, no one to heed, no one to know or care.
At dusk, a dingo limped up to the corpse, its nose twitching warily as it came; then, with an exultant yelp, the wild dog joyously ravaged the warm flesh, tearing and tugging and laughing at his unexpected fortune.
“Kark! Kark!” cried an indignant crow. “Kaaaaark!”
