the sloop berthed, and they began shouting when they saw the ship’s tender being lowered with a skinny black child sitting in its bow. They put their arms around her when Mathinna stepped out of the boat. It was like being the black princess of Hobart all over again. It was like the theatre plays that sometimes came to Hobart and to which Lady Jane had taken her. Only now she was both the actor and the audience.
Mathinna showed neither joy nor happiness till she realised no one would make her wear clogs on the pain of beating if she didn’t. She took off the heavy pine slippers. The skin of her feet was soft and white and flaky. The ends of her toes looked as if they had been wrapped with wet dough. She scrunched them back and forth in the wet sand of the Wybalenna beach. Behind her, waves roared. The air smelt of tea-tree and salt and life. In front of her, fairy wrens darted in the flotsam, brilliant blue in the glistening bull kelp.
She threw the clogs into a tea-tree grove.
The crowd laughed and roared approval. But she was outside of their excitement and squealing and questions. She had not returned with the albino possum that shat musket balls. She had not come back to them with laughter. She dug her toes further into the sand. She was aware of the gritty rub and rasp of life. But she was a blind woman staring. Shoving her feet deeper and deeper, she knew it was true: she could feel nothing.
After a short time, the excitement of the Wybalenna natives evaporated. They found Mathinna strange. She saw the whites as her kin, not them.
‘Mathinna left us,’ said Gooseberry, ‘and she still gone.’
The girl found the few Aborigines she met on her return dirty, ignorant and indolent. She showed no sign of shock when she discovered the rest were dead, all buried in Robinson’s cemetery, and Robinson himself gone to Australia with his tame blacks to bring his protection to the Port Phillip Aborigines.
‘Them strangers to me,’ she told Dr Bryant, the man who now ran the settlement, in front of several of those she so maligned. ‘Just filthy strangers.’
She simply did what she always now did: cast her mind adrift, and very soon it was floating above the cemetery, looking down at the other Aborigines who had taken her there, looking at herself—no longer a beautiful child in beautiful clothes, but now a broken bough of a girl clad in a grubby brown petticoat and ripped blue pullover.
Occasionally the spindly girl said something because she had to, and, floating above, she could understand that she spoke in a manner that was neither white nor black, but in a strange way with strange words that made no sense to anyone. Who was this girl? Why did she talk this way, why this strange wavering voice?
One of the Aborigines, a young man called Walter Talba Bruney, was angry. He was saying he did not understand why this was happening, all this death. He pointed at the graves and yelled into her face, as though it were her fault, as though she might have returned to Wybalenna with some answer. Some message, some explanation, some hope. But she had only a red dress that no longer fitted and that she had taken to wearing as a scarf.
She did not know that Walter Talba Bruney’s passion impressed some, and that he thought it might impress her. She didn’t move. She didn’t care. She understood that none of it meant anything.
‘Kill me too, then,’ she said.
He had no power over such a girl.
Those not dead numbered fewer than a hundred and were in despair, and still they kept dying. Of a morning the women would walk to the top of Flagstaff Hill and sit there all day, looking at an outline sixty miles south, the distant coastline of their homeland. There, their villages of rotting cupola huts awaited a return that would never happen; their forest glades were filling with saplings, their tracks with scrub, and their hunting plains were being fenced and filled with sheep. They would call to their abandoned ancestors who kept trying to sing them home, so that their own souls would not be lost forever, but there was no answer.
Mathinna did not go to Flagstaff Hill. At first she spent much of her time with the Catechist, Robert McMahon. He was so dirty that Dr Bryant told his wife that if the island ever ran out of provisions, McMahon’s shirt could be boiled for the food preserved in its black larded recesses.
‘I don’t plead laxity and I don’t plead stupidity,’ McMahon had said to Dr Bryant, in explanation of why he was there. ‘I only ask forgiveness.’ He kept saying it, as though his original intention of a peaceful, if mediocre, colonial sinecure had given way to complicity in some strange, unseeable crime. It was true that McMahon faced, with Dr Bryant, the grim task of maintaining some sort of order in what the Protector’s son had described as a charnel house he was glad to be leaving.
At first McMahon was curious and caring, learnt something of the natives’ language and translated some of Scripture into it, but that didn’t stop anyone dying and it didn’t stop the government cutting and cutting again the annual outlay for the settlement. There was always less food, less clothing, less of everything. In time, Bryant and McMahon resorted to withholding food and contemplated the possibility of shooting some natives to keep them peaceable, but still they provocatively went on dying.
McMahon was dirtier than any black, with an enormous capacity to misquote Scripture at great length, and he seemed at once to side with the blacks as well as to despise them. For Mathinna, he had the added virtue of being unpopular with the natives, which she felt must mean he was a good man. To impress him, she made notes in a diary in his presence, as she had often seen Lady Jane do.
McMahon demanded to see what Mathinna was writing. She showed him, thinking it might raise his opinion of her above that of the other blacks, with whom she had regrettably been lumped. Though she made a great show of writing much, he discovered she in fact wrote very little. He did not know that she saw writing in equal measure as a reward, a show of good behaviour—like washing with soap—and a form of power. If he had, he would have laughed.
Sometimes she copied out Scripture, sometimes advertisements for cottons, horses, soaps or medicines from old
Halting only between words slimy with the spittle spume his lips wore along with a corncob pipe, he read on.
Robert McMahon threw her diary into the fire.
Three years passed. Then came the summer of fire. Stories of its never-ending nature, of how it was destroying vast tracts of the far distant Australian mainland interior, arrived with a brig that emerged out of a December sunrise with Robinson’s tame blacks, returned from their time with the Protector on the mainland. They had broken free of Robinson and run with the Australian Aborigines, telling them to kill the white man or be killed. They had shot stock-keepers, looted shepherds’ huts, burnt houses, killed two whalers. The white men had caught and hanged Timmy, they had caught and hanged Pevay, but the other six natives—three women and three men— had, through the Protector’s intervention, been saved and returned to Wybalenna.
These women were different from the women who sat on Flagstaff Hill. They taught the other women a new dance, the devil dance. Of a day Mathinna kept on with a new diary, but of an evening she watched the devil dance around the big campfire. For a time she sought to persuade the returned women that their ways were uncouth and uncivilised, but at night she listened in wonder as the old women told their stories of all that they had seen—at the hands of the sealers and whalers, the government men and the missionary men. For they had discovered something remarkable: the world was not run by God but by the Devil.
The world was hennaed by a smoke haze that never ended, that brought the sky low and softened every view of the bleak and fantastic hills into something uncertain. The sun was no longer solid and sure but red and shaking. By day the air was full of the acrid smell of fires hundreds of miles distant, but the nights filled with the sound and shrieks of devil dancing. The evening she finally stood up to join in, Mathinna was speckled with charred leaves and blackened fronds that had been carried by the wind from the Australian mainland, to finally eddy and drift to earth at Wybalenna.
