farms have been made feasible by the 1100mm of rain forced onto
the desert from the high trans-oceanic winds, all God’s plenty
watering Restitution and the other forty-seven new cities of the
inner plains, the secret places of the roo and emu. It is a whisky
bottle, which splinters the glass and polished wood of her favourite
clock, falls unharm ed and gurgling to the white pile carpet.
The slowly spreading rust stain holds her attention with a horrid
fascination; just once she sobs. Laughter strains her throat eventually, hysterical perhaps, stretches her face and does not stop. How empty her life must be, even here.
Surely none of these men wish to drive great hot machines, run
with sweat, scratch whiskers matted on exhausted faces, leave their
babies unhugged for hours each day. O ut come the babies in
shaded strollers, and Jean sits in the high, shaking cabin to shove
tonnes of earth while Peter and Klim listen to the kids’ demands for
eccentric purchases at the supermarket: no milky products for this
one, nothing fibrous for that, special fish-pond-grown supplements
for the third.
Claudia dances so hard her menses are confused and pinch her.
Carey chops vegetables into a wok.
Len listens to the complaints of the distraught, Berys organises
their troubled lives for them, drawing up lists. She has all the
details on file for their benefit. Each remembers the old way of it, in
the city, under the screw, with the yellow gasping sky and cockroaches sauntering in the kitchen. In Restitution there is no grease on the stove, and it is our tendency to eat in excellent Chinese
restaurants where the children do much of the serving.
When Ki-in-jara arrives at the door, an hour later, Rirette’s ruined
clock is in the tidy, all the tiny shiny cogs and springs panned up; a
The Interior
2 2 9
Venetian statuette stands in its place, a Persian throw-rug covers
the tawny stain.
Ki-in-jara is not unsophisticated. Through her glowing beauty
(opposite of his dark) he sees her misery. Lightly he kisses her,
comes without a word of greeting into her house.
‘You are the mythic heart of Australia,’ she whispers to him.
She touches, without pressure, the welts of his burkan markings,
the totemic whipmarks which score his face.
Somehow, here in Restitution, they make a harmony; every
meeting is a new unfolding, a new wonder, a fullness of joy. W hat
can he guess of her emptiness, he who is so full of the joy of life?
‘I need you,’ she tells him. Yes, he knows that, but how can he
know that her need is so different from his?
For Rirette, drifting here in the concrete, nuclear-lighted and
air-conditioned halls of the Hogan’s six trillion dollar flattened
truncated pyramid, Ki-in-jara is, she understands, the final glimmer of meaning in life.
W ithout him is . . . well, death. She plans to cut her throat and
bleed as quickly as possible into the snow.
Up at the Top End, the man-made mountain swathes through tropical jungle screaming with birds of mad hue. In the dead heart, there’s stone and willy-willies and tiny blue flowers when the rare
rains come, every hundred years, though the Hogan’s going to
change that. The wind there drones like a corroboree of blacks
blowing ancient blues down the misery and power of their hollow
didgeridoos.
We love it here, by and large.
She who is empty listens, in their talking, and his voice speaks for
both of them. He has not come like a savage clad for the desert,
naked, his woomeras and boomerangs clacking at his belt of wallaby skin. She hears only one part in ten of what he says and what she hears infuriates the sick, tormenting thing inside her, but his
voice is beauty and life and strength and a promise (if she can only
find it at last) of meaning.
Why is he with her? It is duty, yes, vocation, yes, but for Ki-in-
jara it is a sad gladness and a love powerful as the deep voices of his
kin droning their strange sophistications in the departing deserts.
230
Dam ien Broderick
Some of the women have children. As yet it is difficult to arrange
pregnancy in the men, but
