Devotion(89)

hunger


Night is falling now. There is an empty feeling to the land below.


Once I found a coastline and walked the shore for weeks. I remember it as a cold time. The ocean raged against rocks and land; I saw the way salt worked upon the world. I passed a place where river met sea, and there were many people living there who read the country like my father read his Bible: in assurance of its graces and knowledge of how they might be found. I sat at a distance and watched them cook in ovens of stone. There were shell middens there, so old they shared the hum of the land. But some of the faces of the people bore evidence of affliction, and the more time I spent there, the more I saw ugly shepherds of smallpox and violence force an unnatural migration upon these people, away from the country they belonged to.

I spent the nights curled in dunes amidst the grasses. Every morning-come I was covered in sand.

I found a whaling station that smelled of death and disruption, white men missing teeth, their faces greased mean with hunger for seal pelt, and even though the coastline there was a deep love song of granite submitting to time and weather, I felt uneasy. I continued on and later, when the wind blew up from the south, it was a mouth filled with horror and it said dark and urgent things I could not understand, though it raked fear through me. That afternoon, walking along the coast, I saw an Aboriginal woman half in the water and half out of it.

She fled the island, the sea said as it flowed through her hair. She wanted to return home. We carried her the distance she could not swim.

I knew nothing of those things when I first came to the valley. I had no understanding of the world.

Night is falling now. I am not gone yet. Here, wind, listen. There is more. There is always more.



On a clear day towards the end of winter, the same day Flügel finally arrived in Heiligendorf, a large group of Peramangk arrived in the valley.

At first, the congregation considered them with a quiet sort of interest. But when, over the next few days, bark huts appeared at the periphery of the allotments, now cleared and dug and sown with wheat, curiosity turned into a kind of mute apprehension. It was clear that they had left the higher campsites, wrongly assumed to be permanent settlements, and intended to remain in the valley around the dwellings of the village.

Milling amongst the congregation after Flügel’s first service the next morning, I heard Rudolph Simmel tell Matthias and Hans that he had ventured close to one of the campfires the previous evening, wanting to have a closer look and make some sketches in his notebook. The ‘Schwarze’, as he called them, had promptly covered up their coals. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘they did not want much to do with me.’

Flügel spent the afternoon visiting the various allotments, listening to the concerns of the various families and nodding approvingly at the piglets and fowls delivered by MacFarlane’s men. Mostly he tried to allay the concerns about the debt, hanging over the congregation like a dark cloud, and I soon grew sick enough of wheat talk to leave the pastor alone and return to Thea’s side.

As I approached the Eichenwalds’ campsite, I noticed a group of Aboriginal women passing in the opposite direction. Anna Maria was watching them walk by, and as I reached their campfire, she stood up and, indicating that Thea should come with her, followed them at a distance. The women, while turning occasionally to look the Wend up and down, did nothing to make her stop but continued about their business, turning off the track and venturing further out into the bush behind the Eichenwalds’ allotment. Eventually they paused by a decaying tree and kneeled. Anna Maria peered over them, openly curious, and after glancing at each other, room was made for her to observe their work.

I watched them too. The woman at their centre looked at Thea and, gesturing, indicated a small bulge in the tree and a tiny hole beneath it. Cutting away the wood, she made a hook from a stick and prised something thick and white from the cavity inside.

Anna Maria raised her eyebrows. The woman smiled and tipped the large, slow-writhing grub into the Wend’s hand. She indicated that Anna Maria should eat it.

Anna Maria looked uncertain.

‘Is it a caterpillar?’ Thea whispered.

‘Eat,’ the woman said in English, encouraging her by bringing her fingers to her lips.

Anna Maria did so, chewing and swallowing quickly.

‘What does it taste like?’ Thea asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘Nutty.’

They watched as more grubs were pulled out.

‘Warum isst du sie nicht?’ asked Anna Maria, bringing her fingers to her mouth. She turned to Thea. ‘Why aren’t they eating them?’

The woman who had handed her the grub nodded towards a campfire smoking in a clearing beyond the tree.

‘I think she prefers to cook them.’ Thea turned. ‘Cook?’ she asked. ‘Das Feuer?’

‘Yes. Fire.’ The woman nodded again, then pointed at Anna Maria, imitating her bewildered expression. The group burst into easy laughter.


Magdalena and Pastor Flügel were waiting outside the Eichenwalds’ shelter when they returned from the bush. Thea spotted the pastor first, his dark sleeves flapping in the wind that had sprung up, one hand on his hat to keep it in place, and touched her mother’s elbow.

Anna Maria looked up from the grubs she held in her hands. ‘Thea,’ she murmured, eyes fixed on Magdalena, ‘where is the book?’