She had grown friendly with Walter Talba Bruney, whom she found odder than herself. He was twenty-two, yet to run to fat, still handsome, and regarded by the few Aborigines as one of their big men. Walter Talba Bruney was certain of many things, having been educated by the Protector, of whom he had once been a favourite, and was seemingly at ease with both the whites and his own people. Son of a Ben Lomond chieftain, he had magical powers. He could, for example, write.
His writing was so powerful that it had come to be regarded as a form of sorcery. He had threatened, for a time, to put the names of those old people who would not take to the Protector’s ways in the
The day after she first devil-danced, Mathinna had swum for crayfish and abalone, and Walter Talba Bruney and she had cooked them on a small fire on the beach and, after, had lain in the sand. Then came a dusk of stories, of what she had seen, the madness and strangeness of white people.
Walter Talba Bruney told her how he was not scared of the whitefellas and he had ideas, and his ideas, once those of his white teachers, were now changing. He would get land back. They would live on their own wheat and potatoes, their own muttonbirds and eggs and sheep. They did not need whitefellas ruling them. He would write to the Queen. It was the hour before midnight that Robert McMahon discovered Mathinna on the moonlit beach giving to Walter Talba Bruney what had been taken from her by another.
Enraged, he thrashed them both with a thin tea-tree cane he kept specially for the purpose. He wanted Walter Talba Bruney to think about God and Hell and punishment, and to help, he imprisoned him for seventeen days. To rescue her otherwise lost and damned soul, McMahon made Mathinna his maid.
In his home he spoke in voices. He told Mathinna she was Chosen. He beat her on an almost daily basis. He flogged her at every opportunity for her failings, the one activity that seemed to bring him pleasure. When blood at last ran down her black back, he would begin talking, his speech as measured as his stroke.
‘You understand,’ he said, as he diligently continued to flog her, ‘she was in her nineteenth year and with child. She lived in the practice of every Christian and womanly virtue and died in the full assurance of a better life beyond the grave.’
It was, Mathinna understood, another form of the catechism.
The women who had brought back the devil dance had also brought back fresh supplies of red ochre for ceremony. They refused to work in the gardens unless they were paid, or to clean their houses unless they got better clothes. They urged the men to stand up. They told the women they must fight back.
Jesus was a trick of the Devil, they said. The Devil ran the world. There was no light at the end, no redemption, no justice. God, heaven, whitefella talk—all tricks of the Devil. There was no black dreaming, no white heaven, only that bugger, the Devil, buggering everything.
They had lived it, they had seen it; there was no argument that they could not shoot down with the terrible argument of their wretched lives. Maybe up there in the stars was the hunt that never ended, which the old fellas talked about. But you would have to fight to get there. Go with the Devil, enjoy the Devil—what else is there? You think the Devil lose? When the Devil ever lose? You tell me. You tell me when the Devil not ruin your life? You dance with him, you enjoy the Devil. Because he going to take us all soon, no matter. No matter what.
And then they would laugh: a terrible laugh that joined with the quickening scent of bull kelp, an overwhelming smell of wet sex that arose from the thick leathery horns of serpentine green, hundreds of feet long, which washed up everywhere along the coast. The scent was blowing up from the beach on the westerly wind the night Mathinna silently laid out long, thin blades of dead grass-tree along the windward side of the Catechist’s house, as patiently as if she were stitching petticoats at the orphanage.
She remembered the pages of her diary yellowing, her dreams of trees curling and transforming into ash in the Catechist’s fire, and she knew what she must do. She laid one layer horizontally, so the fire would bed and be harder to extinguish, and over it she thatched vertically, so the flames would catch the wind and rise speedily. Then she went away and devil-danced, and when the campfire had ebbed to little more than coals and all the blackfellas were weary and all the whites asleep, she made a firebrand out of a tea-tree stick and bound bracken.
When Robert McMahon ran from the burning conflagration, alive and unscorched and wearing only a filthy shirt, to catch Mathinna throwing a pile of bracken on the burning house, he did not ask if she was guilty and she did not pretend she wasn’t. He made her kneel, bound her hands and flogged her with his tea-tree stick.
The few men left with magic cursed him. It did no good. He thrashed Mathinna all the more. He was as imperishable as ants, and no matter how much you stamped on him he always came back. He survived flames. He survived curses, incantations, the pointed bones of the dead. He did not survive being thrown overboard a mile out from Big Dog Island by his native boatman, but still the Aborigines kept dying. Robinson’s cemetery filled with ever more Aboriginal corpses.
Some whites worried about the possible extinction of the race, others fervently prayed for it; but all concurred as to the melancholy and listlessness that now prevailed amongst the formerly warlike and active people. Mathinna would awake screaming. The old people asked her to tell them what her nightmares were. There was nothing to tell.
‘No good dreams any more,’ she said, her one solace from her time in Hobart Town vanished. She did not like to say her father never came to see her, because she did not wish to shame him and understood there must be a reason and that she must be it. She did not say she could no longer remember her father’s face.
Finally, when there were only forty-seven Van Diemonian natives left, when it was apparent that they no longer posed any threat, when it was clear it was costing too much money to keep the last remnants of their race in the misery to which they had grown accustomed, the new Governor decreed they could finally be returned and live in worse misery in their home country. They were interred at Oyster Cove, south of Hobart Town, in some crumbling slab huts once used as convict barracks. There they subsisted on rum and a government ration of two pounds of meat a day.
The six surviving native children, Mathinna among them, were sent to St John’s Orphanage. They arrived there in the evening. She held her face in her hands, as if she were unsure that both it and she were still there, and looked skywards. Through the cracks between her fingers a silver light fell.
‘Towterer,’ she whispered.
There is a crack in all things, she thought. She was fifteen years old and she had survived by clinging to the smallest things.
After six months at the orphanage, Mathinna was sent to work for a seamstress, Mrs Dellacorte, in a street off Salamanca. The black princess was, for a short time, an attraction in her own right, a celebrity Mrs Dellacorte recognised for its commercial worth from the beginning. The seamstress, a faded beauty who favoured red wigs, and whose looks had retreated behind a veil of white lead powder to form a ghost mask, made her money not from dress repair of a day, but a sly grog shop of a night. It was here that Mathinna was expected to work, fetching jugs of rum and lemon, of gin and sugar for American whalers and Maori sealers, for redcoats off for a night and the occasional old lag who had somehow scrounged enough for another drink.
‘You can take whatever you want,’ said the seamstress. ‘Just don’t take me down.’
Mathinna understood that meant she, too, could indulge in the hot pleasure of rum and tea spiced with cinnamon, for which she quickly acquired a strong appetite.
Mrs Dellacorte and her black pug dog, Beatrice, ruled the taproom with an icy ruthlessness. Whoever irritated the mistress or her dog were no longer spoken of or with, and a second offence saw you thrown out. Beatrice, when not in the lap of Mrs Dellacorte or wandering around tabletops licking food off plates with a hideous tongue of reptilian length and dexterity, sat on a filthy lambskin at the entrance of a long dark hall, wheezing worse than a dying consumptive.
In a darkened parlour was Mrs Dellacorte’s prize possession, set on a rammed dirt floor: a billiard table with one broken leg resting on a butcher’s old chopping block. Hung above the fireplace, a portrait of Mrs Dellacorte as a young woman of some beauty looked across at the table, as if in a final plea—for the hope of something better? forgiveness? love? For Mrs Dellacorte lived in a loveless universe, the horror of which she kept at bay with what lay strewn over the billiard table’s worn felt: mementos and keepsakes of her late lover, a womanising spendthrift who claimed to be of Hapsburgian lineage.
There were scabbards without swords, compasses without needles, even an astrolabe with a bent alidade, along with several newspapers written in a strange, unreadable script, which Mrs Dellacorte said was Hungarian.
