Master of the Ghost Dreaming. Mudrooroo
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or below as their instruments desired. Each didgeridoo player, Jangamuttuk knew, was letting his instrument speak. Now his clapsticks, anxious for direction stopped; the didgeridoos groaned low and hesitated: this was ceremony, serious business. Jangamuttuk took control of his clapsticks. He entered into a rhythm which switched the playing back onto the individual skills of the musicians. They edged into the time, feeling out the possibilities of the play as the rhythm bounced the shaman towards possession and his people into a new kind of dance.
The dancers clasped each other and began a European reel. They kept to the repetitive steps and let the strange rhythm move their feet. It became their master. Each generation including the tragically few children jigged as Jangamuttuk began to sing in perfect ghost accents:
‘They made of me
A ghost down under,
Made for me
A place to plunder,
A place to plunder,
Way down under.’
He finished the verse and began again, picking out individual words in the traditional style. This was far from a euphonious rendering, but it was difficult to range vowels and consonants into an harmonious whole in the ghost language he was using. He finished on the words:
‘Made me made me mad
Ghost place ghost face
Ghost ghost ghost ghost.’
Feeling his consciousness beginning to slip, feeling the night and the dancers begin to ... He began the second stanza:
‘They made of me
A ghost down under,
Gave me a dram,
It tasted like cram;
Real as my dream,
Way, way under.
Under, plunder, thunder,
Way, may, nay, stay
Down, town, down,
Ghost ghost under,
Slam clam ram mam ...’
Mada writhed uneasily, then jerked awake as the burning pain hit her. It began way down in her abdomen and twisted along her spasming bowels. She lay there, desperately trying to come to grips with yet another manifestation of what she had come to accept as her pain, her anguish, her hatred and loathing at being forced to continue living on in this awful colony, isolated far from the nearest decent-sized town on a dreary island, where the weather lurched from violent extreme to violent extreme. No wonder her health suffered, no wonder – and that great clod of her husband didn’t care one iota, nor did her oaf of a son. He never thought of the sacrifices she had made just in bringing him into the world, and both father and son certainly never considered how isolated she felt in this savage land. But she couldn’t blame her son, as that lump beside her was the cause of all their, of all her problems, of her constant state of ill-health. He didn’t care for her at all. It was his meddling in things beyond him that had caused her pain.
The constant burning pulsing of her bowels didn’t allow her the luxury of contemplating her plight in an uncaring land covered with the secretness of the night. Beyond the drawn, thick curtains the alien stars shone and the pain-laden wind rustled the foreboding trees in the threatening forest. The trees pressed in on the civilised square in which lay the mission house, the chapel, the storerooms and the compound for Christianising the natives, before their corpses went to add to the ever increasing number of graves in the cemetery. Too often all this tugged her into depression, but at the moment none of it bothered her. She was safely hidden away behind thick curtains in a refuge which, as much as possible, resembled the imagined sweetness of her sweet home, with its heavy imported furniture and knickknacks, far across the ocean. She sighed alone in exile and with the pain eating away at her. She needed her medicine. Over the years her memories of London had dimmed. Now it was a fairyland free from suffering. How she hated that pig of a husband snorting beside her. Him and his career and his excuse of waiting time out only for the pittance of a pension which would be her deliverance. Him and his altruism. His stupid ideas about serving humanity and taking the message of Christian caring and goodwill to benighted savages like the ones dying all around her. Why, he loved those sable friends of his more than he loved his own wife. He didn’t care one penny for her and how she suffered. She needed the care of expert doctors that could only be found at home, London! There, she had been in the full bloom of health. Illness had begun when she allowed herself to be taken to this colony – to be lodged in a rough establishment and forced there to raise a son, while the father evaded his responsibilities and roamed across the wilderness on what he called his mission of conciliation.
She had had to be the man to her child while he was off in the wilderness up to God alone knows. Now, after all that time of strength, her body had broken down. It was constantly racked by pain. In fact it felt as though it was the battlefield between constantly warring groups of organs. Her pains were the result of the wounds and setbacks of all she had endured in the ever recurring campaigns. Which side would win, or what the result of winning would have on her, and the consciousness of her body, she had no idea; except that it would add further torment. What could she do, but seek to bring a truce in the warfare, and to pacify all the combatants by using the haphazard supply of medicines which arrived on the supply vessel? One medicine above all she valued as a pacifier, laudanum. But her husband, who had the audacity to believe that he knew what was best for her, only allowed three pint bottles per supply ship. These never lasted, never ever lasted. She was so often racked by pain and a little sip morning, noon and night worked wonders for her. It was her special medicine, but that great oaf of a husband refused her a constant supply, just as he refused her every blessed thing else.
He had never loved her. Had only loved himself and that love affair had grown over the years until there was only him and his needs and wants. It – now she realized – had always been like that. The only reason he had married her was that she was above him, and so he had thought that by marrying her he would automatically rise to her level. That would never be and he would remain a member of the lower orders until the day he added his own grave to the others he prayed over. Why, he was little better than the poor convicts they insisted on sending out to rot in the colony. Poor things. She pitied them, but they were all rogues, male or female, and she was better off without having them around. Servants indeed. A lot of thieving rascals. Why, you had to keep an eye on them, morning, noon and night. Now she had those so-called civilised natives for servants, that Ludjee, who had been around her husband for God knows how many years until she had become civilised in conceit. At least, she did her work better than that convict lass she had had: the one who had become mysteriously pregnant and had had to be sent back to the female factory. Hussies the lot of them. Trash, just like that husband of hers with his aspirations to become a gentleman.
Become a gentleman indeed. How she used to laugh, behind his back for sure, but still laugh for all that. Him and his practising hour after hour in front of the mirror to find and keep his aitches. After years of effort, he had succeeded enough to hoodwink those in authority, but for all that, he had only managed to obtain a post on this miserable island where she languished along with him. Superintendent of the Government Mission For Aborigines, indeed! A grand sounding title for a poorly paid job, but then he wasn’t up to anything else. He was so inept at numbers that she had to keep his books for him. Thank God, her daddy had been a shopkeeper and had made sure that everyone in the family could figure. If it wasn’t for her father, God rest his soul, and herself, that worthless man would have stayed the bricklayer he was meant to be. Sweet Jesus, she had been such an innocent ninny to allow herself to be taken in by his sweet words. That’s all he was: words. And that’s all he had, never anything else, and she had allowed him to persuade her to follow him here and to live among an almost extinct tribe of savages.
And here they were, right on schedule, beginning their unearthly din in the middle of the night while she lay in constant suffering, while that great lump of a husband snored on beside her. God, those savages were melodious compared to his bestial snorting. And how healthy they were. Not a sickness among them. No, that wasn’t right. The poor bastards were as badly off as she was. Dying off