The Winning Side Read online

  We got to Absalom in the late afternoon; the tarred road stopped outside the pub; long slanting shadows from a big mango tree blurred the spot where the tar gave way to dirt. The pub was a long, low white building, with a fierce iron roof. A deep verandah ran along the street side and the sign ‘BAR’ hung at the end of it.

  There was a hitching post outside with two horses tied to it. They stamped in the thick, white dust as Rivers swung the Land Rover in beside them.

  ‘Publican lives here’, he said. ‘Pub’s the last few feet of his bloody house.’

  ‘Who drinks here?’

  ‘Stockmen, tin gougers, passers-through.’

  ‘And Damien Franklin?’ It was time to get down to tin tracks, if Franklin was a drunken fantasist where were we?

  Rivers nodded. ‘And him. Two beers a day, the publican tells me.’

  ‘What about at home?’

  ‘No bottles around, that I saw. Stone sober when he talked to me, and that was after six.’

  I nodded, in that country they were good credentials for temperance.

  ‘Custom here is to have a beer when you arrive’, Rivers said.

  ‘All right.’

  The horsemen, one black and one white, were in the bar along with a little, wizened character who was studying a map which had a small beer parked in the middle of it.

  ‘Gidday, young feller.’ The barman pulled two beers without taking an order. Rivers reached for his pocket but I had my money down first. We saluted and drank. ‘Up to see Damien again.’

  Rivers nodded.

  ‘Brings in a bit of trade one way or another’, the barman said. ‘Had a television mob through once. Shit, those blokes could drink. Not only blokes; there was a sheila who could put it away too.’

  I was sipping, clearly not in the same class.

  We finished the ritual beer and went back outside, where the light was failing fast. Rivers drove on to the dirt; we passed a couple of houses which were nearly buried in deep, straggling vines. We turned off the road towards a creek marked by a line of trees. A couple of minutes driving brought us to a gap-toothed picket fence which was being pulled down by wisteria. A few yards back from the fence was a squat building, oddly-angled and with a strangely shaped roof.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Old joss house’, Rivers said. ‘Franklin’s place.’

  Massive bits of wood dominated. Big slices sunk in the dirt formed a path to the huge chunk which was the door. The slab walls were caulked with iron-hard mud. Rivers knocked on the door, and when it swung open I got my first look at Damien Franklin in the flesh—I’d seen his photograph dozens of times. He had a wreath of fluffy silvery hair and a furrowed, experienced face, dark as mine in the gloom. He was tall and spare, wearing a flannel shirt and moleskins.

  ‘Aar, it’s you. Come in son, come in. Who’s your mate?’ His voice was parade-ground harsh, with a sing-song lilt to it as if he had absorbed Oriental inflexions from his house.

  ‘This is Charlie Thomas, Mr Franklin. He writes for the Sydney paper. He’s going to help—make sure the story goes national.’

  ‘Good. What paper? Come in, come in.’

  We went in, and I gave him the name of the paper.

  ‘There’s worse,’ he grunted. ‘Gave me last show a good notice, as I recall.’

  We walked on rough planks and between raw, knobby walls to a room near the back lit by a hurricane lamp. I had an impression of austerity—bare surfaces, spartan fittings. Franklin announced that he had soup cooking and that we’d stay to eat with him.

  Franklin’s Queensland series is a big, sprawling spread of paintings about the Queensland gulf country. Franklin painted them through the 1960s, weathered the complaint that some of them were obscene, and had recently got acclaim for them in the right circles. They were angry paintings, which showed the rape of the land and the people and the beauty of both. I studied Franklin closely; he was near seventy, but could have been fifteen years younger. His hands were scarred and thick and the muscle in his shoulders and arms had been built by work. His speech was blunt with a lot of swearing, all delivered in that curious sing-song.

  When he doled out the soup, I pulled one of the bottles of scotch out. He took it and nodded appreciatively.

  ‘After’, he said and set it down on the floor.

  The soup was more like a stew; we scoffed it and used Franklin’s home-baked bread to sop it up. He poured three hefty scotches as the last of the light went and insects started knocking on the windows.

  ‘Well, Charlie’, Franklin said, ‘what d’you know about massacres of blacks?’

  ‘Not much. Myall Creek and that one in the Territory in the 1920s. The old men in the camp used to talk about them but we reckoned they were just stories.’

  ‘They weren’t. This puts Myall Creek in the bloody shade. I reckon there might be a hundred bloody skeletons out there.’

  ‘Shit’, Rivers said. ‘Whose land is it, Mr Franklin?’

  ‘Owned by some Pommy mob that makes soap or perfume or something. Wasn’t always, though.’

  ‘Any of the original owners still around?’ Rivers had his pad out.

  Franklin took a pull on his whisky. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You’re sure it’s a white job?’ I said. ‘I know we didn’t go in much for battles, but there could be exceptions.’

  ‘Charlie, most of the skulls’ve got bullet holes in them’, Franklin said. ‘The adults, that is.’

  ‘Jesus’, Rivers said. He scribbled. ‘And how did you find the place?’

  ‘You’ll see when I take you out there. Vegetation’s all different in this spot. I’d say it was a clearing, mustering yard or something, that’s been left to grow back. Decent sort of fire through it at one time.’

  I persisted. ‘Could they have been Chinese? There were a hell of a lot of them around. No one knows how many. A party could have been cut out and killed for some reason.’

  ‘I know a bit about bones’, Franklin said. ‘I did couple of years of doctoring study a long time back. I reckon nearly half the skeletons I’ve seen would be of women.’

  That settled it, and he didn’t want to tell us too much more about it. He thought we should come to the place fresh, without his impressions affecting our own. There was no arguing with that. He told us about his treks in the bush though—long prowls that used to range over scores of miles, but were lessening now that he was old. He fed off the landscape; it inspired him in every way from prompting the right colours to providing images. He couldn’t explain it clearly, but he didn’t have to; it was all demonstrated in his pictures. The land itself is a capricious, challenging actor in the drama of his Queensland series. He deliberately set about exposing himself to physical settings, like a diver experimenting with greater depths, to extend his grasp on things. I listened; Rivers made notes and I wondered what he was thinking. It was heady stuff for an aspiring writer.

  He didn’t offer to pour us more whisky and we didn’t ask. He was a disciplined old man, well in charge of himself and good for many years yet. My fears that the massacre could be a geriatric fantasy evaporated and another feeling intruded—a kind of dread of what we were getting into. He built it up in the few references he made to the place as he circled back to it while talking about the country. He gave us our headline: ‘The dying ground’ he called it.

  We slept on bunks in a bare room. Franklin roused us early, advising us to go for a dip in the creek as he had already done. When we came back from the cool, clear water the weird Oriental structure smelled of coffee and toast.

  Ten miles up the dirt road, going north, we turned off and the Land Rover bounced along a track that had been beaten out by animal hooves, pounded by rain and baked and split by the sun and wind.

  There was a line of hills off to the east that showed redder as the sun rose higher. Franklin saw me squinting at them.

  ‘Full of caves’, he said. ‘Paintings, you should see ’em—horses, guns.’

  ‘Wh
at was this tribe called?’ Rivers asked.

  ‘Don’t go much on tribes’, Franklin said.

  ‘What was their territory, then?’

  The old man sighed. ‘You’ve been reading the wrong stuff. Seems to me the people around here didn’t have any precise territories. They had a special interest in a few places.’ He waved his arm out of the window. ‘Cross there in the hills, and way over beyond them and up north where the river rises. Lots of other places too. They moved around to those places and other people crossed tracks with ’em. It wasn’t like a lot of bloody cattle runs with fences.’

  ‘Sacred sites’, Rivers said.

  ‘That’s what they call ’em now. All over the bloody place, they were. We ploughed ’em under, and built roads on ’em.’

  We bounced along in the dust for ten minutes or so and I was thinking what a hell of a long way it was for an old man to walk when Franklin told Rivers to slow down.

  ‘The place we’re going to is over there’, he said, pointing. ‘You want to look around now, get the feel of it.’

  We were in flat country with the red hills rising up ahead; there were ragged trees marking some kind of watercourse off to the east. Little gullies ran down towards it from the track. The grass and scrub were low and dry but half a mile or so ahead was a patch of yellowish green. It seemed to begin abruptly and to have defined edges; from where we were it looked like a field of maize that had gone to seed. As we got closer it looked less regular; it straggled off to the right a bit and there were gaps in it like bald patches. We stopped a hundred yards short, and Franklin squatted down and inclined his head.

  ‘See here’, he said. ‘Look along there and you can see that they’ve swung the stock around to miss that place. For donkey’s years.’

  Rivers circled around, aiming his camera and clicking. I scuffed my boots in the dust and waited; I didn’t want to face it. The warm air with its scents of the bush, the climbing, slanting sun and the feel of the sweat on my body all took me back to the old camp. I’d never pieced the images together in this way before, but now I realised that there’d been a lot of death in that camp—I remembered old, shrivelled men and women disappearing suddenly and kids, coughing and coughing and never playing again. I’d always thought of the camp as a place bursting with life and it was shock to know that it wasn’t, not completely. The dying ground was working on me already.

  We walked up to it and Franklin motioned for us to go in where the scrub was thinnest. The trees and low, salty bushes hid a reddish earth, pitted with ant’s nests and unaccountably bare in patches. There were animal tracks through it and a couple of deep, flash-flood gullies. Franklin pointed down into one of them.

  ‘Jump down there and have a squizz.’

  The gully walls went up sheer and shoulder high, the bottom was narrow and rocky. I tottered a few steps in the new boots and nearly fell; I reached to steady myself against the wall and then snatched my hand away. Fragile, delicate bones were sticking out of the earth. I turned towards Rivers, but he was looking at a skull exposed in the opposite wall. I moved on carefully, keeping my balance: for thirty feet there was a display of skulls, finger bones and ribs on both sides of the gully. My mind raced to make comparisons and analogies—it was like the hand that stuck out of the trench at Gallipoli, the one the soldiers shook; it was like some trendy display in a modern art gallery, designed to shock and please. Cleverly done.

  Brian Rivers stopped half way along; he was transfixed there with his camera held in front of him like a shield. Franklin stood above him with his hands on his hips.

  ‘See the dark layer above the bones? Fire. Water cut right through the middle of the burial.’

  ‘That means more bones would’ve been carried along’, I said.

  ‘Right. Take a look down there where she bends.’

  I walked along the gully to where a boulder had diverted the water. The bones were caught between the rock and the gully wall. I counted six skulls, large and small, and saw the bullet holes. Other bones were lying criss-crossed and jumbled like pick-up-sticks.

  Rivers had got past the first boneyard and was sitting on the gully bottom.

  ‘You’ve got to see it all’, I said.

  ‘I don’t think I can.’ He held up his hand with the thumb and forefinger separated a few inches. ‘There’s a little hand back there. Like this. A baby.’ Tears were running down through the layer of white dust that coated his flat, brown face.

  ‘It happened’, I said harshly. ‘Get some pictures and make them good. We’ll shove this right up them.’

  I climbed out of the gully, and joined Franklin who was squatting in the dust, doing some of his atmosphere-soaking.

  ‘Is this all?’

  ‘No. There’s more of the same in the other gully. Bit less. And something else across the way. How’s the young feller?’

  ‘Bad’, I said. ‘What’s this something else?’

  ‘Show you.’ He got up and I followed him over an ant hill and through a thicket of stringy gums. There was a big old gum, its trunk a couple of yards around, standing near a lumpy bare patch. Fire had eaten away at the base of the tree but it had survived. The bare patch was roughly square with about twelve foot sides. In the middle was a long, deep tear in the earth and Franklin knelt down near it.

  ‘Animals digging’, he said. ‘Take a look at this.’

  Half-scratched out of the earth was a skull, and the upper part of a skeleton. The body had been thrown into the grave face down; the bones of the arms lay at an odd angle on top of the spine. Even against the surrounding dirt, a reddish band around the bones above the remaining finger joints was easy to see.

  ‘What’s that?’ I pointed to the red band.

  Franklin picked up a stick and scraped bone. The red material held some spidery strands but was mostly like fine ash.

  ‘Rust’, he said. ‘From wire.’

  ‘It’s hard to say how many’, Franklin said. ‘But my guess is there could be ten or so like this in this patch. Maybe more.’

  I looked up at the tree that had withstood the fire. There was a sturdy, horizontal branch extending out about eight feet and about the same distance up from the ground. Rivers looked up too and nodded.

  ‘That’d be it. A bad, slow way to die.’

  We took a lot of photographs—Franklin’s painter’s eye helped with those. He also helped Rivers on background material and present-day flavour. The result was a brilliant three-part series that the News gave the full treatment. Rivers was launched on his successful free-lance career and his book, The Dying Ground, was a best-seller. The story produced three questions in federal parliament, figured in a land claim and inspired Damien Franklin’s best-known painting—‘Wire’.

  4

  I like Friday night in Forest Lodge. The dog track is lit up and the people are having a good time. Some of them get drunk and a lot of them lose money, but they don’t care. My street and all the streets around get parked-in solid, but we non-car-owners don’t care. People get together at the end of a couple of streets over the track with their flagons and radios, and make a party of it.

  This night Kelly and I walked down to watch a race and we took our son Peter, who was awake. He was a bugger to keep asleep, Peter. I won a few dollars on the race and we went back to have a drink to celebrate. It was a nice night; I was feeling good but I almost dropped the baby when Lennie Collins stepped out of the shadows and touched me on the arm.

  ‘Charlie’, he whispered.

  ‘Christ, Lennie. You want to turn me white?’

  ‘Sorry, Charlie. Gidday, Kelly. Look, I want a word.’

  Kelly put her key in the lock. ‘Charlie’s just won eight dollars, Lennie. Come in and have a drink.’

  We went into the house, which is a narrow, two-storey terrace. Kelly borrowed from her mother, I scraped some up and we bought it cheap. It’s scheduled to have a freeway through the living room, but the bank that gave us the mortgage didn’t seem to care, so it does
n’t worry us.

  Kelly took Peter upstairs, and I got the flagon out of the fridge.

  ‘What’s on your mind, Lennie?’

  He took a big gulp of wine and then remembered, and had a small sip. Lennie had been a goommee, a bad one, but he’d reformed with a lot of help from me and others.

  ‘We’ve got two young blokes down at Bunya Street, draft dodgers.’

  ‘Koories?’

  ‘One is, one isn’t.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘We’re worried about them. They’re political types, you know? Fuck the capitalists, you know?’

  I nodded.

  ‘There’s the money to think of. If the government finds out we’ve got these blokes there, revolutionaries and that. Most of us reckon Bunya Street comes first.’

  I was on a committee in charge of restoring six old derelict houses in Bunya Street, Glebe. A Jewish lawyer, who said his grandfather had made all his money from blacks’ land, had given us the houses. The government gave us a grant, doling it out in little lots like gold dust.

  ‘What does Dick Stuart think?’

  ‘He said to come and get you.’

  ‘What d’you make of the kids, Lennie?’

  ‘The dark bloke’s all right; the gubbah? Can’t understand a bloody word he says—black power, imperialism, all sound like Yank bullshit to me.’

  Kelly came down, and poured herself one of her thimble-sized glasses of wine.

  ‘Did I hear politics?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah. Let’s see, I’m working tomorrow. We could go down to Bunya Street tomorrow night, couldn’t we?’

  Kelly nodded, and Lennie finished his wine.

  ‘Will Dick Stuart be there?’ Kelly said.

  ‘He sent Lennie here.’

  Kelly raised her eyebrows. She mimed throwing and ducking a punch, and I laughed.

  ‘Right, Lennie. Tell Dick tomorrow evening. See you.’