The Corroboree
AT NOON on the day of the corroboree a bunch of half-naked aboriginal children clustered in the shade cast by a solitary box-tree growing well away from the main avenue bordering the creek. Several of the older boys were sitting in the branches, and children on the ground constantly called out an ever-repeated question.
All these children had an uninterrupted view of the plain, and the direction of their searching looks was north-east. At all times they could see ten to a dozen thin columns of grey and red dust staggering slowly across the vast expanse from west to east; for the miniature whirlwinds twisted up dust and debris at times as high as two hundred feet.
And then suddenly one of the boys in the tree gave a shout, and the others became silent. Far out on the plain dust rose and slanted eastward-dust not caused by a whirlwind, a flock of sheep, or a mob of racing horses, but slowly and steadily rising dust from human feet. It arose from one point and remained there steadily, for the marchers were making straight for the outpost tree.
At five Moongalliti, with his bucks marshalled on either side of him and the women and children behind them, waited at the edge of the timber belt to welcome their adjoining tribe. The strangers came forward slowly, obviously tired, yet excited as well. In numbers they equalled Moongalliti’s people, the chief leading, behind him his bucks, carrying spears and warmurrawirries, and behind them the women, loaded as Egyptian donkeys, with their own belongings as well as those of their lords.
Fifty yards from the home tribe the strangers halted, and the strange chief, Mertee, and Moongalliti, walked forward to meet each other, weaponless. What each of them said at the same time was something like:
“Oo-la-oo-la-um-yum-oo-la-oo-la!” spoken very rapidly without pause or cessation. They flung their arms about each other’s naked bodies, hugged and danced on their big-footed, thin, spindly legs, and grunted.
“Oo-la-oo-la-um-yum-oo-la-oo-la!”
The official wording of the welcoming ceremony was double Dutch to Bony, standing with some of the men nearby-they having agreed to postpone their dinner for one hour; and itwas double Dutch to Jeff Stanton and Marion, who, seated in the big car, watched from a greater distance. The meeting of the two head-men was one of extravagant affection, and after about five minutes’ hugging and “oo-la-ing” Moongalliti and Mertee walked towards the former’s people, with Mertee’s tribe hurrying after them, no longer in ordered array, but a couple of mobs.
The two mobs intermingled with happy yells and shrieks of laughter, whilst children eyed stranger children gravely, considering whether to fight or be friends. And then, like a slow-moving “whirlie” of black sand carrying in its swirl the flecks of white and blue and red gaudy feminine raiment, the whole rolled towards the creek, flowed down into its bed, surged up on the farther bank, skirted the water-hole, and ranged itself about a mound of glowing embers before settling into comparative stillness-and silence.
At a short distance from the fire the banquet was set out on sheets of bark, flattened petrol-tins, and disused saucepans and colanders rescued from the station rubbish-heap, arranged in a circle. Jeff Stanton’s flour, mixed with water, had been baked in the likeness of rocky slabs, doubtless of rocklike hardness as well. Quartered kangaroo, sheep’s offal, goannas, yabbies from the water-holes, bush yams, and enormous emu legs, lay in mixed profusion, piping hot, around the rock-bread.
Forming a circle outside the food circle, the bucks sat cross-legged. Behind each buck sat his woman or women, and again behind them the children. The widows and spinsters-there were remarkably few, for a reason that shall be mentioned-crept to the side of their more fortunate sisters who shared with none the love and thrashings of their lords.
No toastmasters or other makers of ceremony being present, no time was lost in useless civilities. The bucks seized those items of the menu which tempted most their individual palates, and for a while those behind them listened with ill-concealed impatience to smacking lips and crunching teeth. And then from the inner circle there appeared to slide yard-long bones with great lumps of meat still adhering to them, whereupon shrill feminine cries raised in argument and the yells of clamouring children on the outermost human circle competed with the yelps and barks of a hundred dogs of all sizes and mixed pedigrees which hemmed in the diners with a cloud of stifling dust.
It will now be understood that the spinsters and widows experienced a lean time, since what they got had to be snatched from the hands of wives who had babies and children to feed from what they left.
At the chiefs’ table was shown a little more decorum. They ate from one dish a mixture of Bony’s bread, two legs of mutton, a great quantity of white, slug-like tree-grubs calledbardees, two small piles of honey ants swollen to the size of peas with the native bee honey showing through their transparent bodies, yams, and one enormous goanna some six feet in length. Behind them sat their respective wives and families.
One by one the bucks stretched themselves and sighed. One by one they lit most evil-smelling pipes or roughly made cigarettes, and at a gutturally spoken command the remains of the banquet-and the remains were by no means small in quantity if lacking in quality-were passed to the women, who broke up into groups and fed. One by one the women stretched and sighed, and lit old pipes and cigarettes-charged chiefly with cow-dung-and, a little while after, one by one the children sighed and stretched and rolled over on their backs. All hands slept torpidly, whilst the countless dogs scratched among them for scraps and bones.
That night none of the gins sought Bony for food and a little “bacco”; even Runta’s love had failed, weighed down by the lead of an enormous meal; and Bony, seated on a petrol-case at the kitchen door, sighed and smoked innumerable cigarettes.
The sigh was not inspired by the absence of Runta, nor by relief at her absence. He sighed because it was one of those times when within him war was waged between the spirit of his father and the spirit of his mother. During these times of spiritual strife his black ancestry invariably almost won. The one influence that decided the battle in favour of the spirit of his father was his love for things beautiful and his loathing for things ugly, an influence passed to him by both his parents. Although his base complex urged him towards native savagery, he could find in it nothing of real beauty, nothing of the beauty he had discovered in the white man’s art, in the white man’s striving towards ideals of cleanliness and purity and achievement.
This night Fate offered a salve for his spiritual wounds. He was reading at a late hour Mendel’s treatise on Heredity in Flowers, when at the door of his room appeared the almost naked form of Moongalliti.
“Goo’ day-ee, Bony!” he said cheerfully.“Gibbitbacco.”
Laying down the book, the half-caste examined histin, and, finding it less than half-full, gave it to the chief and from a box obtained a full tin. He was wondering what lay behind this visit. Then:
“Minefren ’, Mertee,” Moongalliti mumbled, and there beside him stood the visiting chief. For a while all three were silent, when suddenly Moongalliti said: “Mertee, he tell-um me plurry liar. You let um see sign, Bony.”
Bony understood, and, rising to his feet, pulled up his shirt and allowed them to see the initiation cuts on his chest. Mertee, apparently satisfied, grunted; then Bony turned round, and the ensuing silence was at last broken by Moongalliti’s triumph.
“Plurry liar, eh?” he said cheerfully.
Again Mertee grunted. Bony rearranged his shirt and, sitting back on the bed, slowly began to remove the tin-foil from the airtight tobacco-tin. Moongalliti took a huge pinch of tobacco from his tin and began to chew. Mertee obtained the tin with determination, and presently he also was chewing. After a little while Moongalliti said:
“Wot you say, Bony?” He pointed first at himself, then at Mertee, and finally at Bony.“Orlsame. Youcomealonga sign stone? You’mtak ’ place sun get-up. Mak’ Ludbi an’ Warn an’Quinambieorl same us?”
Bony slowly smiled, his blue eyes alight. Why not? Why not for one hourbe as they were? Why not ease his soul-hunger of the craving to dive deep into the mysteries of their cult? Still smiling, he left with them. The moon was almost at its zenith. They walked along the creek-bank beneath the leafy box-trees, as their gods always walked in the fairy world of silver and shining dewdrops. At the camp three youths joinedthem, and the party went on along the creek for half a mile, then turned out on the plain for a further half-mile, reaching then the hummock of ironstone.
Bony and the chiefs scrambled to the summit-the three young men stayed below. On the summit the three began to remove a thick layer of weather-corroded stones and rock rubbish, and after nearly twenty minutes’ labour uncovered a level floor of rock squares approximately four yards each way. The rock squares were much broken andchipped, bearing witness to the centuries that had elapsed since they had been laid. Yet on the eastern side was still to be seen, chipped deeply on the squares, a perfect circle, large enough to enclose a standing man’s feet. The preliminary labour completed, old Moongalliti pointed to the circle; and Bony, thrilled to the core, bathed in the glorious moonlight, threw aside his white man’s clothes, and naked stood within the circle. He faced to the east and held up his arms in a sign.
The precise ceremony that followed cannot be described. No white man knows, and no black man yet has been a traitor. An observer on the ground below might have seen the three young bucks join the three on the summit. He might have seen those six figures moving about, and assumed, when three figures only could be seen, that three laid themselves on the square of squares. He would have seen naught else, nor heard a single cry, yet in the morning three young bucks wore on their backs a plaster of mud and herbs kept in place by swathes of old rag.
How came that cult, with a resemblance to Freemasonry, to Australia? Who and what kind of a man was he who brought it? Did the cult date from times when theLemurian continent joined Australia to India? It was a mystery too deep for even Bony to penetrate.
He fed his men on time the next morning, debonair, shaved, and cheerful. He cut up sheep’s carcasses with a glittering butcher’s knife as expertly as probably he had cut human flesh with a sharp stone but a few hours before. The battle of influences for the mastery of his soul was ended, and he knew once again, within as well as without, the blessed tranquillity of peace.
And indeed, it was a day of peace. The blacks lay in the shade, gorged and slothful. Even the children were less exuberant, and the dogs yelped only in their nightmares.
It was long after midnight when uproar broke out in the blacks’ camp. It awoke Bony, who, standing at his door, listened and smiled and felt glad that he was Bony after all. He guessed shrewdly that in the blacks’ camp one of the bucks had been flagrantly caught in the act of making love to another buck’s gin, belonging to a tribe not his own.