Salt

Selected Essays and Stories

Bruce Pascoe

• Publisher: Black Inc.
• ISBN:
  9781743821053
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literarische Sammlungen

A collection of stories and essays by the award-winning author of Dark Emu, showcasing his shimmering genius across a lifetime of work. Bruce Pascoe has been described as a 'living national treasure' and his work as 'revelatory'. This volume of his best and most celebrated stories and essays, collected here for the first time, ranges across his long career, and explores his enduring fascination with Australia's landscape, culture, land management and history.Featuring new and previously unpublished fiction alongside his most revered and thought-provoking nonfiction – including extracts from his modern classic Dark Emu – this collection is perfect for Pascoe fans and new readers alike. It's time all Australians saw the range and depth of this most marvellous of local writers.Bruce Pascoe is an award-winning writer and a Bunurong man. His books include Dark Emu, Book of the Year at the 2016 NSW Premier's Literary Awards. He works to preserve the Wathaurong language through the Wathaurong Aboriginal Co-operative and was 2018 Dreamtime Person of the Year, recognising his significant contribution to Indigenous culture.

HONEYPOT TWO SHOTS TWO POTS AND MISS HERMANSBERG

I knew I was in a story the moment the gum leaf came out, and I began to worry how to tell it.

And I was doubly convinced as soon as I saw Miss Hermansberg lean close to the Old Man and whisper in his ear. Not because she’s lewd, not because the Old Man was inviting intimacy, but because it’s how women at Hermansberg speak. Their voices can be drowned when a dove shuffles its wings.

She might have fit the name Miss Hermansberg once. A fair sort of time ago. Before the belly and the grey roots. But the dimples in the centre of her cheeks would have been causing blokes sleepless nights, and the eyes, well, the eyes still work, and of course the grace. She walks as if she’s balancing an egg white on a beer coaster on her head.

She leans towards the Old Man and breathes an intoxicating story in his ear. The strangest, sorriest story a country can conjure, but I can’t begin it because the Old Man is the strangest, most complicated bunch of bones you would ever meet in a lifetime of London buses. Not that he’s been to London, but I’m trying to indicate his rareness, the impossibility of his talents and peculiarities.

It’s not everyone who plays an alarming repertoire of songs on a gum leaf. He’s very good and made even more incredible by his ability – well, not ability, but predilection I suppose – to play it at the oddest times. Like today, at an art gallery in Port Hedland. Putting ‘art gallery’ and ‘Port Hedland’ within a single word of each other might seem to be testing the faith between reader and writer, but there is a gallery there, and the Old Man stood smack in the centre of the floor, bringing to a complete stop any chance the staff had to finish the installation of an exhibition of Kariyarra art and bringing to a premature close the piano rehearsal of Chopin by a teenage girl of Indian-Malay extraction. She was good, too, and beautiful, and her father waiting to take her home was handsome and urbane, but he had to wait and she had to sit with her hands spread across five octaves because, as a way of exciting the gallery to the possibilities of art, the Old Man had leapt into gum-leaf renditions of ‘Blue Bayou’, ‘Moonlight Becomes You’, ‘Numeralla Pines’, ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ and ‘Streets of Old Fitzroy’. I told you it was alarming.

But everybody stopped just where they were because with a bloody leaf pinched off a dusty, half-starved gum at the front door he hit every note as if with a diamond hammer, swept into a few glissades and tremolos, and inserted the blues into songs that had never expected to hear themselves as anything but sugared cream.

The art gallery is a converted shed with a shitty old particle board ceiling, but the sound was fat and round and smooth. People were transfixed: holding lighting battens, clutching a large bouquet of flowers meant for a vase at the end of the hall, but on the wrong side of the Old Man so that the shortish woman kept shifting them from one side of her chest to the other so the gladioli didn’t remove her nasal polyps. The rather grand dame, caught mid-gesture in the centre of the room, directly in line for every blast of air from the leaf, will probably be grander when she’s dressed for the grand opening. She spells it ‘grande’. The artists are Aboriginal and there’s no way some of them aren’t going to turn up in check flannelette shirts and thongs; their best check shirt and thongs given a douse in the sink, but flannelette and thongs nonetheless.

But it’s Port Hedland and the grand dame is possibly the bank manager’s wife, or maybe the retired head of the girls’ school. I can’t tell, but how could I? What I can tell is that she is going to get dolled up because there are two or three chances in Port Hedland and one of them is the Camel Cup and no one else would include it as a chance. Well, not quite true, four other women do, but the rest go for the lightweight frock and the slip-on flatties.

How do I know that if I can’t tell whose wife she is? Well, put it down to experience in enough country towns to make me certain.

But look, she was halfway through a stagey sweep of the arm to embrace all the art treasures of Port Hedland when the Old Man stole her oxygen so he could force it across the membrane of a reluctant eucalypt. Everybody had stopped mid-stride, mid-gesture, mid-installation. All except me, because I saw it coming and made myself comfortable on a milk crate in front of Untitled II (gouache and red sand).

The Old Man had time afterwards for a fairly comprehensive summary of Victorian Aboriginal history, and the spell would have remained unbroken except a bird of paradise attempted eye surgery on the shortish woman whose arms were obviously not up to a recital of timeless gum-leaf melodies and a history of a state she wouldn’t recognise in an atlas but for the habit of atlas makers to print the name of states in bold serif type. VICTORIA.

The shortish woman discarded the brief attempt to fish Victoria’s shape and position from her mind because the lurid shaft of the flower caused her to sneeze. The spray of Cecil Brunner rosebuds flopped to the floor and was speckled like a hen’s egg in red dust. Well, it was Port Hedland.

But that was earlier. What’s happening now is that Miss Hermansberg is outlining the history of her own state, which has the shape of a rather stiff and tufted muffin. Miss Hermansberg knows she hasn’t got long because the Old Man is opening and shutting his mouth in an attempt to elaborate on the old days by the Snowy, so she prunes her history, keeping it spare and bald, but a history such as this must take some time. A story of a woman shot in the back by police officers of the realm within gaze of her children, the older girl holding the baby and the boy the billy because it was what he’d been told to grab whenever trouble threatened. Which it did frequently because this was Australia and Australians could find all sorts of reasons why a woman has to be shot in the back in front of her children. Of course, we don’t do that now.

Miss Hermansberg was the baby, and when pressed probably can’t be sure whether she remembers all the details of that day or has been schooled in them by her older sister, who at the time was pregnant to the stationowner’s son even though she was only eleven. But there was a good reason for that, too. Probably because eleven-year-old girls are so promiscuously seductive. Something to do with the packs of swap cards, broken biscuits and tennis balls they carry in the pockets of their school shorts. It pays to carry your own tennis ball because the school can never be guaranteed to have enough money to supply equipment for spontaneous games of handball or brandy. Because this is Australia.

She gets very close to the end of the story and the Old Man reaches for the leaf in his top pocket, but Honeypot claps her hands in delight at the presentation of another pot of Emu Bitter.

‘Come on, come on,’ shouts Honeypot, ‘bring it on.’ She has a striking voice, but the most striking thing about the voice is that for three days she’s been sitting next to Miss Hermansberg and Sunflower and saying nothing and casting her gaze down from an expressionless face. Sunflower – yes, I know I didn’t mention Sunflower, but you try and fit it into the title.

Sunflower is beautiful. Christ, everyone’s beautiful in this story. Sunny is a big girl but her face is still rather gorgeous, and lit by a daunting intelligence. Doesn’t matter how big you get, a handsome face crowned by a coronet of curled hair in a pleasant shade of ginger is still worth a look. But crikey, she is a big girl. The night before, at the impromptu women’s pool tournament, she wrenched her knee and had to sit through today’s meeting with an ice pack pressed to it, rather like a big ham on shaved ice in a butcher’s window.

But Sunflower has been single-handledly – if you don’t count Miss Hermansberg and Honeypot – resisting the new tide of racism released by the government on any unsuspecting black individual forced into the court system of our most northern state, the Flying Muffin.

Sunny is saying nothing because she’s twisting the top off a 150ml bottle of Hardy’s Special Reserve. Drinking makes her serious. More serious. She doesn’t even look up when Honeypot screams, ‘Bring it on, Uncle Jacky Jacky!’

Miss Hermansberg and Honeypot had taken to calling the Old Man Uncle Jacky Jacky because unlike every other conference attendee he refused to wear a nametag. Surely everybody knew his name! Well, everybody but Miss Hermansberg and Honeypot, because they’d only met him once and clutched at the thing that struck them most. He gave them a recital of Jacky Jacky at the baggage carousel in Port Hedland. Well, ‘carousel’ is bullshit because it’s just an old steel trailer with two odd tyres.

Anyway, we men had been in the pub for hours, conducting a refreshing survey of important issues, when the triumvirate of court assistants turned up and spied the Old Man sitting beneath an advertisement for Jack Daniel’s bourbon: ‘Jack sat here.’ They think it’s funny, and I suppose it is in its own way, but we blink up at them like owls because we think we’ve just sorted a structure for the enculturation, or re-enculturation, of every willing boy in Victoria. Wouldn’t you blink like an owl?

But Honeypot is on a mission. ‘Four hours I’ve got. Bring it on. Get me the grog, Uncle Jacky Jacky. Four hours and I’m back in the bush.’

And the bush she means is the alcohol-free community where the government allows residents to buy fuel if they can prove they have washed their faces twice a day. Australia’s a tidy town.

She’s almost capering with excitement, and I can’t take my eyes off the sight because this is the shy girl who you could have been forgiven for thinking was a mute.

And she’s black, as black as you ever see people. There’s a lustre, a dark lustre, that reminds me of the back of a mussel shell that has been scoured to such a degree that the nacre begins to gleam in a sheen of opalescence. You look for the colours but can’t quite pick them because they’re not quite there. The skin is black, so black it shines, and you think you see a little shimmer of ebony pearl. Christ, she’s beautiful.

She’s wearing an old windcheater with arms so long the cuffs roll over her hands and she has to keep flicking them back. The grace of this movement is astonishing. When she picks up the pool cue and addresses the white ball, men’s jaws drop. Well, they are miners from the Western Desert, even though they’re philosophically opposed to black people. Well, it is Australia. ...