‘Now,’ he said to me, ‘in the hunt you don’t talk, you use the language of signs. Those wallaby don’t have big ears for nothing and they’re always inquisitive about the language of men. Once, it is said, they were the only ones that had language and we stole it from them. They still remember it, though they can no longer speak, and they listen in an attempt to get it back, so we must use gestures to confuse them. They see us making these signs and try to make out their meaning. They forget themselves as they watch us, then whammo, those wallabies learn something else.’
He showed me the signs. ‘Wallaby’ was denoted by both hands held open to the sides of the head, denoting the big ears of the animal. Slight movements of the hands showed that the animal was suspicious, still hands that he was not. The flat of the hand held over the mouth indicated silence. ‘Stay, be still’ was a gesture at the person and the fall of the arm. ‘Spearing’ was simply the clutching of an imaginary spear and a slight forward motion of the hand.
He gave me other signs such as go that way or this way and so on, then said, ‘These are but the rudiments of sign language. They will be enough for this hunt, but with all that time to fill in on that boat I'll teach you the whole grammar by and by. Body language is as complicated as mouth language. What you speak, I can gesture,’ he said, acting out a mime to illustrate. Then, grinning at my smile, he added, ‘If you could hear that, you would not be amused. Now, let us go and kill our meat, though I think that I would like these better than those.’ And he spoke again in a flutter of gestures, then laughed at my perplexed face.
Jangamuttuk turned and made his way up the hill. As he climbed he began to speak with his body. His signs directed our advance into and up the hillock. I crept through the rocks and boulders, feeling the coolness of the stone under the soles of my feet for the day was cloudy and the rocks still damp from the rains of the squall which had driven us into the shelter of the headland. A gesture told me to stop. Hands to the head indicated a rock wallaby. Motionless ears informed me that he was unaware of our presence. An arm told me to raise my spear and get ready for the cast. I did so very slowly and carefully, anxious to please my father as well as to not make a sound as my eyes searched for the animal. There he was, between those two boulders falling to the left and right to form a cleft in which a few tufts of grass grew. His ears pointed towards me. I flung my spear just as the wallaby bounded to the left – and into the flashing shaft of Jangamuttuk.
‘Watch them ears, boy. They’ll tell you which way he’s going to jump, and that’ll be into your spear as long as you’re aware and quick.’
His advice flowed over me throughout the day and by the time the sun, a glowing patch through the clouds, was halfway down the sky I had speared my first wallaby. Overall our tally was six. We piled them on the flat surface of a boulder, then Jangamuttuk gestured for us to continue up to the summit. There we gazed over the plain which went on and on until it fell over the horizon. It was so vast and flat that it caused in me (and the others) a vertigo of the spirit which made me long for my small and contained island home. I felt as tiny and as powerless as an ant. This land was much too much for me. To quell my dizziness, I turned my eyes to the familiar sea which, under Wadawaka’s tutelage, I was beginning to know. There, anchored beside the headland, was my friend the schooner. My fingers clenched around an imaginary wheel as I felt her surge and move beneath me. Home and security. There was Wadawaka hard at work at the bow, and from the beach rose the smoke of our fire blending into the cloudy sky so that it did not call attention to itself. The women were clustered about the fire and there ...
‘Look!’ Jangamuttuk exclaimed, bringing me back to him and the land. He raised an arm, indicating a thin column of smoke rising on the horizon. It could just be discerned against the cloudy sky. ‘People there, two, no, three walks away at the most. They’ll see our smoke too if their eyes are as good as mine. Perhaps they’ll come for a visit, see who we are. Perhaps I’ll go and visit them on Goanna. Blackfellow’s fire at least,’ he growled at me. ‘Mark out how the smoke rises, thin and straight as one of our women’s legs. If they were nam, ghosts, their smoke would billow up like a cloud or fog hugging the ground. They do it like that because their skins can’t take the full light of the sun, but no ghosts walk or sit close by. Could smell them on the wind if there were.’ And he sniffed in all four directions, testing the air.
But, and I could not escape the thought, what would we have done if he had smelt the nam, those ghosts who had dispossessed us of our land, hunting and killing us until they had reduced our numbers so that we could all fit onto one small schooner? Twenty souls in all, twelve men and eight women and, after the death of my brother, I was the only young one left. Tears came into my eyes as I thought over how pitifully few we were. A few survivors fleeing westwards on a stolen schooner, riding the waves and the songs of Jangamuttuk’s vision which was supposed to bring us to our promised land under the coils of the setting sun. But what would we really find there, if we ever arrived?
Doubts as these began when we arose one morning to find that our didgeridoo player, Wawilak, was missing from our vessel. He had vanished in the night. The women wailed and pounded their heads on the deck at this catastrophe. Wadawaka tacked the schooner back over his course. He even took his abeng, his ram’s horn trumpet, and blew loud blasts over the sea. Jangamuttuk and Ludjee entered their trance state but even then could not find him. They returned to say that he was not to be seen, that behind us a fog clung to the sea and a huge crag of frozen water floated like a ghost fortress there. Worse, far worse, they reported that ahead, in the west, they had seen six large ghost ships coming towards us. My father’s ceremonies had been performed to close the gates between our land and the ghostland, but if there were six large ghost ships ahead, coming towards us, this must mean that they were still open. Sadly, we performed the burial ceremony for Wawilak, covering our bodies with ashes and seeking to send his soul to rest. Jangamuttuk sang his death song, then broke into the ghost song as those musicians who had learnt their instrument from him cast them into the sea. The wooden tubes floated away from us, a visible loss of culture as we sailed away towards the west where the old would be reformed in a new land.
These thoughts of mine circled about a core of emotion which hardened and changed during the voyage and the journey became more real to me than its phantasised end. Perhaps my father too came to realise this, that the end did not matter as much as the verses of the songline which extended out and beyond this plane of being. In other and older songlines the ancestor came down to this earth, travelled across it, had his adventures, then departed back into the sky from whence he had come, leaving only the songs of his adventures behind. Perhaps my father operated like these ancestors on a different plane of seeing, for never did we escape the influence of the ghosts. His ceremonies, though they gave us hope, seemed on reflection to have had the opposite effect to that intended. Instead of closing the entrance to the ghostworld, they seemed to have widened it. Ghosts, released from their world, flooded forth on great wooden ships to drift along the coastlines. They landed and made their homes, as they had on our island. Our island, which had felt the brunt of their invasion. And perhaps, now that they had made it their own, they were following us to make this whole vast land theirs. Eventually this is what happened, but back then did I think such thoughts, or did I merely feel them, as I felt the soft fur of the two wallabies I was carrying through the holes in my ragged ghost shirt? Yes, I think that is how it was. The feelings really began with the death of my brother Augustus, and grew with the disappearance of Wawilak. They flowed forth from the two furry corpses I was carrying on my shoulders, one of which I had slain. I felt their heat departing and the coldness which comes at the loss of the spirit stiffened their bodies. The warm blood from where the spear had ripped through fur into the soft flesh beneath cooled, pooled and congealed. Soon it would freeze solid, but as yet it dripped forth, spreading over my shoulder like the red of the sun spreads over the clouds at sunset. My hand was soon covered with the rich redness of life. I shifted my load and grip so that I could sip at the warm blood as I walked along, tasting in it my future, the salt of the sea and the sweet ashes of the land. It caused me to flow with a desire that I could not give a name to, which replaced the apprehension I had been feeling since we had reached the summit of that rock pile.
I
