Noland

Prologue

THE LAND WHERE I AM FROM has no name. No name of no-man’s-land. Noland. Is my name. I walk across the land without much guidance but that of the white pigs who dispossessed me of my native rights. I am full of anger and hatred against those who control me. Plan-hatch me. I am left with anger and hatred, and with words that can’t quite match. Decency, civility, I laugh. I laugh and drink until I cry and forget. Oblivion is my new Dream Time. Drugs, alcohol and violence my triumvirat. I am Aboriginal and you all know me. Good on you, I don’t know myself. I am told, turn to Elders, but they are old and senile. I am told, turn to Whites, but they can never be trusted. Turn to your own, then, but there is nothing I own. Where is that land which you’re Dreaming about, Elder, and can’t quite remember yourself? Where is that land which you said you’d give away, Politicians, and never can’t quite? Noland is my name. Nabirru, in the Aboriginal language which I never learned because it was never transmitted to me. Let’s keep it to Noland, then. My story is yours anyway.

      The land where I am from had a name, which I don’t remember. It had a soul too, but I lost mine in the way, somewhere between Cook’s arrival and them Crooks’ disposal. I am the Stolen Generation all over again. So I steal. But my basket is holed, and the more I steal, the emptier I am. Jail is my home. At least do I have the feeling to be a self-contained unit there. Clichéd. Stereotyped. I am an Aboriginal and you all know me. Fear me. Sometimes pet me. I am the Beauty and the Beast all at once. Where can I go from there? There’s not much space for me in here, I feel always already self-contained. Oppressed, depressed, repressed, compressed, how can I express? How funny to feel like this in this mighty continent-island. My feelings, my land. Perhaps if I project, prospect, rather than deject. But I have no outlet.

     Look back to your roots. Who are my ancestors? Naked savages with rounded butts and heavy lips and noses. Altogether a useless heritage, long ago spoiled. I want a big car, and I want to be a big fish. Wanna play on the white man’s grounds, yet I hate the white man. Yet I long for his possessions. I am both possessed and dispossessed, both obsessed and obscene in my leering and loathing of His power and glory. Us and Them. Them and Us. Maybe there exists a third way.

From one coloniser to another

‘Une troisième voix,’ lectures the Frenchman, always keen on puns. A third voice. ‘You see,’ he continues, ‘voice and way are homonyms in French.’

     I am voiceless. ‘Homo..huh?’

     ‘Language is power,’ he concludes emphatically.

     This man hardly speaks English yet feels far more homely than I’ll ever be. He has found a way to consume the world.

     ‘Bloody colonisers,’ I mumble behind my beer.

     When the Frenchman came into the bar, prancing and parading, I immediately saw he was one of them and balked at his touch. Because he’d never seen an Arboriginal before, he paid me a drink. Indeed, language is power, and with his sword-word this stranger has turned me into some kind of plant.

     This bar is my second home, although Aboriginals used to be banned access here back then. Now we are tolerated. Let’s say they put up with us. I can’t even put up with my own kindred, and right now I can’t put up with that Frenchman and his false manners.

     ‘Sooooo. Is that true what we say… You know….’

     No I don’t. And I don’t wanna know.

     ‘Hey, pay him another beer, he’ll tell ya what he knaws, Frenchie.’

     The Frenchman flinches at the name-calling, but disdainfully dismisses the bunch of beardy drunkards at the back of the pub. He’s untouchable, but I’m not.

     ‘I don’t know nothing, sir.’ And I don’t want your fucking beer. I am a man of my own, as far as booze's concerned.

Once upon a time

This is where it all ends and begins.

     Once upon a time, this land belonged to us and we belonged to the land. Once upon a time, there was no Them, only Us. Once in a lifetime, I hope I could say the same as far as my aboriginality is concerned. Arboriginality. Abnormality. Originality. I carry it everywhere I go, like a plague. I have to leave, to live the life that they stole from me. I have to leave, to leave, leave, leave, but where to go-go-go?

     The Frenchman runs after me as I leave the bar. I am the Beauty-and-the-Beast all over again.

     ‘How much?’ I hear myself saying.

     ‘Your price is my price.’ This prick is a gentleman but doesn’t know the rules. Is obviously not from here. I’m not from here either and decide to play my own rules.

     ‘We’ll go in ya car.’

     Fine, everything’s fine as long as I have my gun.

     ‘Start up, dude! Better be quick! And no kidding!’ The man is terrorised. Who is speechless now, huh?

     ‘Who-who are y-you?’

     I don’t need to speak. The gun does that for me, and the man’s wallet lands in my hands. Hands off my land.

     ‘Now, get the shit outta here.’

     The back door shoves open as I’m still driving and red earth flies off in my rear-view mirror. The Frenchman lands on my land, caught red-handed and red-smeared. Pants down, genitals fast-receding. I feel good. Gotta car and money. I take off. I could go anywhere.

The past is a foreign country

This land can teach you a lot, especially when you don’t have anything to loose. The first thing I learn is humility, when under the scorching sun I am dying of thirst. Not the watch-ya-mouth kind of humility I grew up with and that has taught me nothing but humiliation. Then come hallucinations, visions; not the binge-drinking, pub-crawling type either, when under the shade of a eucalyptus I am dropping my guts.

     Half-way through to nowhere, lost in a red ocean, I realised that there was no gas left, and when the car came to a halt it was already too late. There is no turning back in the Outback. All anger evaporated. Past hallucinations. Past visions of another time, when I thought I saw an Aboriginal, that strange animal, glaring at me with fiery eyes from behind a rock. I am dressed like a pimp, NY Yankees cap-headed with baggies and knickers, and a Frenchman’s Land Rover car that won’t run. With more dollars than I’ll ever have or need, on my way to the biggest road-trip in my life. I can’t resist a smile. I am going to die on that land of my ancestors. The past is a foreign country.

Dreamtime

Dreamtime. Time before time. Time outside of time. Time of the creation of all things. Even I, Noland, must have an origin and an end, although bearing no past or future. At present, I lay under a car, half-awake, half-asleep, half-dreaming, in that fraction state of semi-consciousness that brings me temporary escape. And I see a face that could have been my father. I see my mother, young and altogether a different person, time before time did her wrong. I see myself, time outside of time if I had been born white and worthy. Eventually, I see a gun. My gun. Time of the destruction of all things. I plunge into darkness, lying down on quicksand, feeling myself falling within the depths of the earth that once felt so harsh under my feet. Maybe there and only there lies a third way, une troisième voie, beyond the troubles of the surface. I can almost hear the Frenchman talking of payback time in that strange language of his. I hear his anger at having been tricked by a black fella’, echoed by the roaring of engine and the screeching of tyre, and let myself drifted away.

Playtime

When I wake up, I am tied up to a bed, wrapped up in a screaming-white bathrobe and smelling of shampoo. The Frenchman is gauging me, looking slightly amused.

     ‘Had to shower you up. Is that true you guys never wash or what?’ My eyes silently follow as the Frenchman slowly unknots the cord of my bathrobe.

     ‘Now. Are we ready to play straight?’

     ‘Yes.’

     ‘Yes, what?’

     ‘Yes, sir.’

     ‘Now, are we ready for some playtime?’

James-whatever-his-name-was

‘They took our wives and daugthers to fertilise the barren land with. Used our body and bribed us with cheap jewelry. James Cook. Crook. Cock. Whatever his name was. How can you still celebrate while we are forever mourning? And now they have taken my son. I curse you all, damn you, damn you!’

     ‘Watch ya mouth, old woman, you’re speaking to a police officer.’

     ‘Don’t worry, we’ll find your son.’

     ‘I hope you are aware you son is a dangerous multi-recidivist criminal, who stole a car and a gun. That your son is on the run. Do you understand what I’m saying, old lady?’

     Misunderstanding, she thinks, misunderstanding is at the core of it all.

     ‘When James-whatever-his-name-was approached Botany Bay, he proudly stood at the prow of his boat and held a telescope which he used to peer at the shore. What Aboriginals who hid in the bush saw was a man thinking he could play didgeridoo off his eye and had the biggest laugh they’d ever had. Now who’s laughing? I tell you, who is laughing now!’

     ‘You need some sleep, old woman. Such nonsense. Take her away.’

Big Mama

His father. Nolan could only conceive his father as absence. His mama: a Big Mama who had had to cover up the space Noland's father had left in their lives. Stifling Big Mama, you are a widow with no window. Until today, until Noland's disappearance, you withdrew into a shadow while desperately trying to blindfold everyone, your family, your community and yourself with your fears, even the police officer who is now sending you away for having spoilt the little authority he holds on a world he does not understand and refuses to understand. Big Mama, hear your son's cry if you can, muffled by the hands of yet another invader. Conquer your fears and claim Noland back by taking the law into your own hands. 

Big Mama raises up, still groggy from the drugs they administered to her. She manages to break open the window of the free clinic where they locked her up. She knows Noland's father would have approved. 

Sprawled on the office desk of the clinic, yet another snoring cop, and yet another gun, staunchly waiting at its master's feet. She seizes the gun and quietly walks out. All her life, Big Mama has remained so quiet, and now is time for her voice to be heard. It is Big Mama time. 

Lies that are hard to swallow

When she enters the pub where her son was last spotted, a few regulars are sitting on stools at the counter, backs turned to her, fixing the tap, gulping beer to drown out an abysmal thirst that seems to have no end. The bartender’s face closes off, making it clear that she is not welcomed.

     Big Mama must now face walls of silence. There is nothing more to tell but what the bartender has already told the police.

     ‘Noland threatened one of ‘em tourists with a gun -a Frenchman- stole his car and money and drove off with the man, and we never saw ‘em again.’

     ‘We don’t want any trouble around here, woman,’ moans one of the drinkers from behind the shelter of his massive shoulders.

     How much do they know? How much does she know? How many times did she opt herself for the cold comfort of a beer, or a bath or a bed, seeking shadowy respite from the blatant Australian sunlight?.

     She is about to leave, when she sees the squat shape of somebody seated alone in a dark corner at the back of the bar, collapsed onto a table, face buried in his arms. Empty pints of beer lie scattered around him, some knocked over, forming a precarious rampart like an army of disorganised soldiers, and a fast-growing paddle of murky liquid dripping over onto the floor. The shape is motionless, seemingly dead, if not for the burning cigarette fuming from its hands. Then it lifts slowly, almost imperceptibly, one or two inches above arm-length, to reveal feverish eyes that flicker in the direction of Big Mama.

     ‘Your sonovabitch of a son’s a whore. Probably sucking that Frenchie’s cock right now. Reckon he likes it too.’

     ‘Shut up!’ The bartender is shouting, causing the drinkers at the counter to awake momentarily from their blank contemplation. They quickly stick their nose down in their beverage again. Don’t look, don’t ask. Big Mama does not know if she wants to hear, too.

     ‘I tell ya! Check it out. Billy’s cabin, at the end of town.’ Now the shape is trying to rise a few inches more but is found halfway through choking with hiccup, and those lies that are hard to swallow.

Billy’s Shack

Long ago a man called Billy owned this shack. Now it is everyone’s shack. The shack lies on the fringes of time, where the red of the earth meets the rust of corrugated iron. Time before time. Time outside of time. Time of the creation of all things. The Frenchman is thinking he does not like this land. It looks so ridiculously untouched, man’s imprint on it so much unstable, more likely to be erased in one blow by dust storms or cyclones. Yet this precisely is what he finds attractive in it. Its purity. Its innocence. The impenetrability of it all. Like that boy. In him shall be revealed the true essence of this land. He feels like one of those early explorers who charted and named Australia as he paces with his hands through the boy’s dark-skinned body. There is no time to waste. So much to do and build. His hands now feel like bakers’s hands, kneading dough, rolling dough, from which the shape of a New World will emerge.

     The reasons that made him come to Australia remain unclear. He guesses that he just needed holidays, a breakaway to the humdrum of his existence, to some exotic location of some kind. After a few days only spent in Perth, he had felt bored; the place had not met his expectations. He had then called his travel agent, who arranged for him a guided tour up north. He was thrilled by the sheer beauty of the wilderness, yet quickly bored again, understanding that he must now look beyond the unsavory taste of package tours. In Geraldton he hired a Land Rover, travelling alone, on his way to the great escape, and felt revived for the first time in years. Reborn. That’s what this land is all about, he muses, an escape from our coming to age, and in some way, a return to the mother’s womb, where conscience and duplicity have not arisen yet. At last, he had felt one with himself. Miles and miles of nothingness stretching ahead and all around, until he had reached that town where he and the boy met. As soon as he saw him he felt the compulsive need, which nothing could repress, not even the beer he thought would assuage his thirst, to impregnate the boy with his touch. When he told him that he should feel honoured being the first Aboriginal he’d ever talked to, and that the boy instantly cringed under the touch of his words, he saw what was so special about these people. A primal instinct, animalistic in character and yet that was closer from humanity as anything could possibly be. He had read all about Aboriginals, but to see one in living colour was quite a different thing altogether. There was a look of desperation in the boy’s eyes, and an apparent toughness of body that betrayed an inherent vulnerability at its core. Like this land. Perhaps he could offer him a drink, and then, who knows what would follow.

     The Frenchman’s imagination is now at its pinnacle, laying plans, pondering on its next move, allowing a few steps back and forward, like painters do when checking over their work. There is a knocking at the door.

     Long ago a man called Billy owned this shack. Now it is everyone’s shack and everyone’s fantasies, and has remained Noland’s prison ever since. Not just today, not just with the Frenchman, but has been so for a long, long time. This, the Frenchman does not know. If only he knew, maybe things would have been different. Or maybe not.

This land is red and will always be

When he hears the knocking at the door, Noland sees the Frenchman rise from his trance and seize the gun lying on the bed next to him. When the latter has his back turned, he tries to undo the knots of the rope that keeps him prisoner to the bed. He always wears a knife hidden in the sleeve of his jacket. But the knife slips from his hands and clangs as it falls down on the floor. His jailer spins on his heels at the noise. Then the door bangs open, and Noland hears one, brief, gunshot. Tied up and lying down, eyes riveted to the ceiling, he cannot see what has happened. He hears a low grunting and the dull sound of a body crashing down. The air is being filled with smoke and with the coppery, metallic smell of blood. Noland is thinking, this land is red and will always be.

Epilogue

The land I stand upon has a name. Has in fact many names. Lucky Country, New World, World Waiting To Be Made. None of which I am able to access. My name is Noland and for me there will be no third way, not even one. To me, Australia, you shall remain Terra Nullius.

     When I was judged and condemned in court for the murder of someone from overseas, from a country where people eat frogs and snails - and whose name sounded so foreign to all of us in the community, whether Whites or Blacks, that it would have almost seemed as if this name had never existed - it made me reflect on my own sense of alienation and erasure, and that of my people, the no-names of the no-man’s-land.

     Subalterns, slaves, sluts, we are the prostitutes, the destitute of this nation. Our place is in the shades of jails, behind the crisscrossing of bars and grids or in front of a stage, under the blinding, flashing spotlights of a stadium, so that either ways people won’t have to see us, only tolerate us. So that people won’t have to face the truth that is contained in our eyes. We, inconvenient truths, must either be staged or silenced, but are rarely experienced. This town felt like it had to denounce and protect us against all forms of abuse over the years, many of them sexual in character, emphatically paving the way for reconciliation and sorry, while in the meantime, these practices were kept well alive and undercover. It is no wonder, thus, that violent abuse often arises from amongst ourselves rather than from the outside these days. Hatred, anger, frustration, are feelings that are to be kept bottled up in this age of polite, decent hypocrisy, so that we have learned to turn into and on ourselves instead the volcanoes that are boiling inside. When these erupt, red lava spurting around until nothing is left, we find ourselves empty and stunned, barely able to remember, not alone comprehend, the havoc that has just happened. Is that me? Did I do that? Big Mama knew what she was doing, though, when she decided to take the law into her hands and broke the spell which had blanketed all of our lives hitherto. There was too much in her that she would, could never forget. For a while, we, both Whites and Blacks, were left cold and vulnerable to one another’s semi-lies and half-truths, until my trial and condemnation clearly restated each one of us in our comfort zones, where we want to believe we know who we are. I am Aboriginal and you all know me. Think you know me. As much as you know this terra incognita which you call Australia.

     A car is waiting for me outside the jail. It is to take me from across the vast emptiness and over to Perth, where I will serve my sentence. One of the guards holding me releases my arm for a brief instant to light a cigarette and I strangle him with my handcuffs. I then usher him inside the car and order him to drive off...

     ...Now looking back in my rear-view mirror, I feel good. Gotta car and a bit of money. I take off. I could go anywhere.