A Kind Peoplefrom Carpentaria

The day, all action packed like it was, was now all said and done. The men of Mozzie Fishman’s dedicated convoy to one major dreaming track stretching right across our stolen continent, were now sitting up there on the side of the spinifex hill – like rock wallabies, looking down at what was left of Gurfurritt mine. Just looking, AND turning the sunset crimson with their thoughts.

What a turnout. Gee! Whiz! We were in really serious stuff now. We were burning the white man’s very important places and wasting all his money. We must have forgotten our heads. We were really stupid people to just plumb forgot like that because the white man was a very important person who was very precious about money. Well! He was the boss. We are not boss. He says he likes to be boss. He says he’s got all the money. Well! We haven’t got the money neither. And now, all it took was a simple flick. A flick, flick, here and there with a dirt cheap, cigarette lighter, and we could have left the rich white people who owned Gurfurritt mine, destitute and dispossessed of all they owned.

Straight out we should have been asking ourselves – Why are you not hanging your head in shame to the Whiteman? We were suppose to say, Oh! No! You can’t do things like that to the, umm, beg your pardon, please and thankyou, to the arrr, em, WHITEMAN.

Somehow though, everyone got carried along the humpteen tide of events, like we must have swallowed one too many sour pills that morning for breakfast. Now, we were looking at the world like it was something fresh and inviting to jump into and do what you jolly well liked. That was how our dormant emotions sitting down inside our poor old hearts got stirred up by the Fishman when we listened to him talking in that fetching, guru type voice of his, saying we gotta change the world order. Change the world order? Mozzie Fishman! He is sure enough a crazy man. Oh! We said that. But he goes on and on in his satirical slinging voice about what happened ever since that mine came scraping around our land and our Native Title! ‘Well!’ he says. Us? He wanted us to tell him what that turned out to be. We were a bit cross with Mozzie standing up there, Lord Almighty like on top of that rust bucket of a Falcon station wagon of his. All its crucifixes hand wiped over that white coloured car through the stains of red mud.

‘You know who we all hear about all the time now?’ he asked us. ‘International mining company. Look how we got to suit international mining people. Rich people. How we going to do that?’ Now, even we, any old uneducated buggers are talking globally. We got to help United Kingdom money. Netherlands lead air problems. Asia shipping. United States of America industry, and we don’t even know German people. ‘I says,’ he says like he is singing, ‘We mobs gots to start acting locally. Show who’s got the Dreaming. The Laaaw.’ He liked to emphasise ‘The Laaaaw,’ whenever he was heating up around the ears on the subject of globalization.

We whispered among ourselves – Ignore him. Clap your hands over your ears to put an end to his blasphemy. Don’t listen to him. Everybody knew he always had plenty going on in his big head. We would always say to him – Ah! Yea. Pretend we were listening. Or else, we’d say, Oh! Well! Then. Or – Whatever. Or else – What can we do? Still, he was not finished with us. What happened to those three little petrol sniffing boys must have really split his head open. Poor three of them – Tristrum Fishman. Junior Fishman Luke. Aaron Ho Kum. All finished up under mysterious circumstances together, right in the Police Station, under the White man law.

He goes on ignoring our pleas and we say that we were not rebellious people. Nevermind, in the end he demanded things of us. His voice was soft as silk, he knew who he was playing with. All satiny voice, he said it was time now to end our cowtailing after the white people. It was finale time – Hands up. Who we got to follow? The Whiteman, or the Fishman? This was the ultimatum. Well! He made us that wild. Of course, we got no choice – we got to go with culture every time. We should have known he was leading up to all of this destruction. But we? We were like following dogs, and we were happy to do it, not even giving any of it a bit of extra thought, because we were acting solely and simply on pure rage.

The sound waves coming off the explosion in the aeroplane hangers at the biggest mine of its type in the world, Gurfurritt, were just about as tremendous a sound you could ever expect to hear on this earth. Like guyfork night. Booom! Booom! Over and over. But one hundred times more louder than that. Ripped the lot. We were thinking, those of us laying on the ground up in the hills smelling ash – what if our ears exploded? What would deafness sound like? We should have thought of that first.

Sometime during our precious time on earth we could have asked a deaf person what it was like to not hear the sounds anymore, before we go around deliberately destroying our own good hearing on wildness. Oh! But there was no going back because no one was going to reverse where the rotten hand of fate was heading. So, even though we were shaking in our old work boots, thinking we got busted eardrums, we watched the fire rage like a monster cut loose from another world. It might even have come from hell. Even the devil himself would have least expected us weak people to have opened the gates of hell. But we watched full of fascination of the fire’s life, roaring like a fiery serpent, looking over to us with wild eyes, pausing, looking around, as if deciding what to do next. Then, we could hear it snarl in an ugly voice you would never want to hear again, All right, watch while I spread right through those hangers like they were nothing, hungry! hungry! Get out of my way. It did that roaring along, exploding through walls and rooftops which looked like toadstools bursting open, then once those flames shot outside, going a million miles an hour up into the sky, sparks just landed wherever, like a rain shower, out in the grass somewhere around the back.

The fire spread out the back of the hangers in the dry grass, and then it came burning around to the front again, fanned by a gustily south easterly wind. Then, the monster smelt the spilt fuel on the ground. It raced through that, quickly spreading itself over the ground weeds, until it found the fuel bowsers, then it paused, maybe the fire had thoughts of its own and could not believe its luck. The fire just sitting there was as awesome a moment you could experience for the men waiting in the hills, sneaking a glance from over the boulders they were hiding behind, peering through the black smoke, thinking maybe their luck had run out and what next.

It looked as though the fire was going to peter out. Mind you, wind fires are naturally unpredictable, and the fire was just sitting, smouldering, not knowing where to go next because the wind was not blowing strong enough to fan it in the right direction. Then, our men looking from the hills continued staring at the little flame flickering there, fizzing out. What could they do? It looked like defeat was imminent. And, that same old defeated look, two centuries full of it, began creeping back onto their faces. But, it was too late now, they had a taste of winning, so they started projecting their own sheer will power right across that spinifex plain, calling out with no shame, Come on, come on, willing the little flame not to fizz, believing magic can happen even to poor buggers like themselves.

Somehow, someone started yelling, ‘Look, look, it is starting to move,’ and can you believe it was happening? The unbelievable miracle came flying by. A whirly wind, mind you nobody had seen one for days, just a matter of fact sprung up from the hills themselves. It had swirled straight through from behind those men, picking up their wish and plucking the baseball caps which came flying off their heads, and together with all the loose balls of spinifex flying with the dust and baseball caps the whole lot was moving towards the fire. When it passed over the open rubbish tipsters the mine had lined up along the side of the hangers, it picked up all the trash, all the cardboard boxes, newspapers laying about and oily rags, and spirited the whole lot across the flat towards the line of hangers on fire.

Bloody hell, there was nothing else the Fishman’s foot soldiers could say while they watched incredulously as the flames shot up the whirlwind and the fiery vortex headed straight for the bowsers. Talk about lucky.

It happened so fast when the fiery whirlwind shot into the bowsers and momentarily, lit them up like candles. Well! It might even have been the old Pizza Hut box someone had left on top of one of those bowsers that added that little bit of extra fuel, you never know, for the extra spark, or it would have happened anyway, but the wick was truly lit.

The finale was majestical. Dearo, dearie, the explosion was holy in its glory. All of it was gone. The whole mine, pride of the banana state, ended up looking like a big panorama of burnt chop suey. On a grand scale of course because our country is a very big story. Wonderment was the ear on the ground listening to the great murmuring ancestor, and the earth shook the bodies of those ones laying flat on the ground in the hills. Then, it was dark with smoke and dust and everything turned silent for a long time.

“You think they heard it in Port D’Arcy?” some young lad whispered carefully through the settling dust, because he did not want to frighten anyone by making the first sound of this new beginning. It was so uncomprehendingly silent he needed to speak to hear him­self talk because he was thinking of his family and the noise of his memories of them was the only sound he could hear.

The sound of this young voice being the first sound was a relief for the others who had been thinking they were listening to the sound of their own deafness. However relieved and pacified we were to hear speech though, it was not enough. Everyone kept listening, listening for what else remained missing – Ah! It was the noise of the bush breathing, the wind whispering through the trees and flowing through rustling grasses. We needed to hear birds chirping, the eagle hawk crying out something from the thermals high above, but the eery silence lingered on. The birds were nowhere to be seen or heard, not even a singing willy wagtail lightly filtering from rock to rock wherever anyone walked, or a miner bird haggling at your feet. They looked into the dust and smoke darkened skies and saw no twisting green cloud of budgerigars dancing away in thin air. The wind had completely dropped. Silent clouds passing overhead cast gloomy shadows over the peaceful trees, while grasses and spinifex stood stock still as though this world had become something false almost reminiscent of a theatre setting. The men floated somewhere between the surreal stillness and the reality of the ants, lizards, beetles and other insects moving through the rocky ground as though nothing had happened. No one else spoke or answered the boy, because they guessed the explosion must have been heard on the other side of the world, let alone Port D’Arcy.

One will never know what really happened that day. Fishman never stopped smiling about it. He said his recipe was top secret. We regarded him with awe whenever he came into our presence. It was a privilege to know the Fishman. We respected what he had inside of his head. Too right! Nobody could know highly confidential material in case someone like Mozzie had to do it all over again some day. Some ignorant people would always ask though, How did you stop the mine? And, he would look at them for a long time with his steady eye, like he was making up his mind whether you were worth letting in on the secret. Finally, he would say, I have decided to give you the truth, and the truth was the very same words he had always used about what he would do to the mine from the day it got set up on our traditional domain. “I put broken glass bottles on the road to stop the buggers – that’s what I did.” Somehow, this was the truth. Truth just needed to be interpreted by the believers who could find the answers themselves about broken people just like the Fishman had done. At the same time he offered another piece of advice, which was, a smiling man would live for a very long time. And he did.