Huwa Maluka

 

In the Top End of the Northern Territory is a small town called Katheryne. It lies by the banks of a deep-cut river, and is surrounded by dusty savannah woodland, interspersed with rocky outcrops and hills here and there. The river rises in the Arnhem Land escarpment away to the east, and cuts deep through a high sandstone plateau to form gorges that are beautiful, spectacular and amazing, and rightly attract a lot of tourists during the dry season.

   Katheryne is a quiet, sleepy town, at least by some standards. The north road leads up to Darwin, 317 kms away, the south road goes on to Tennant Creek, 675 kms south, and the west road, eventually, gets you to Kunnunara, just over the WA border, another 515 kms. It is traditionally cattle country, and the highlight of the year is The Show, the agricultural show where all the ringers, i.e. the stockmen, come in from far and wide to show horses, compete in the camp draught, and try their hand at riding the bare back bronc.

   Usually they end up being dragged upside down across the dusty yard with one foot stuck in a stirrup, while the horse, the bronc, rears and bucks and smashes them into the side rails of the yard, to the sound track of Slim Dusty’s rendition of Waltzing Matilda on a never-ending loop. They’re lucky to get away alive and make it back out to camp out bush with an array of interesting and innovative injuries that will prevent them from doing as much as picking their nose for the next six weeks, although of course minor duties such as riding horse, droving large mobs of cattle all day through the bush, and catching, branding, dehorning and castrating cattle will still have to be taken care of.

   I was one of them.

   We lived and worked out bush, and occasionally would foray into Katheryne, The Big Blue Smoke. It was nice to get away from the dust, cowshit and flies sometimes and get down to the river and get wet. Although the river is chockablock of saltwater crocodiles, there’s a few spots where we used to go swimming. There was a place where there was a bit of a rapid, and we reckoned that crocs didn’t like fast moving water, so we swam there. We got away with it, but it was a good idea to have someone sit on the bank with a loaded rifle ready, just in case. So we’d swim, or fish, or drink, or, most usually, all three.

   Further upstream we knew, with that peculiar kind of knowledge that is only enjoyed by locals, that no saltwater crocs ever ventured, and if you went far enough there would only by freshies, freshwater crocodiles that mostly, by and large, leave people alone. So we had a spot where we would jump out of a tree and swim quite happily with the freshies, who would just lie around on little rocky shelves and ledges, with their mouths wide open to cool down, and look at us from the corner of their prehistoric eyes, and leave us alone. There was one old fella freshie, who had no teeth left in his mouth. He would crawl up onto the bank and lie there with his mouth open, expectantly, and wanted you to feed him. So we’d feed him fish and pat him on the head. We called him Victor.

   It was a bit of a hike from out bush to town, but us people from the Territory think nothing of driving for three hours to get to a party, much less to find a pub. Katheryne had both. Pubs were interesting. They often had a front bar, which consisted of bare floorboards, barren walls, a scarred, scratched and dented wooden bar, and a pool table with no green, and for which the concept of levelness was a mystic and impractical notion from another universe. There you could get drinks in tinnies, with a choice between VB, VB and VB, and could enjoy casual punch-ons and sword fights with pool cues. The windows had no glass, or, if they had had it at some point, it had been long ago removed, usually not in a gentle fashion. It was common for people to drink themselves dog-gone blind stupid, into obliteration, and fall or get kicked out of the door only to collapse in a heap right out the front, and lay there until they woke up the next day or night or whatever, often in a puddle of piss or spew or, for those lucky gifted individuals, both.

   Most often the people doing so would be The Countrymen, the blackfellas, the Aboriginal people of the area. They had strong tastes for obliteration. By unspoken rule the front bars were reserved for the blackfellas, and precious few whitefellas would go in there. Around the back of the pub would be the saloon bar: plate glass doors, air-conditioning, plush carpet on the ground, picture frames and tellies with sports events on the walls, TAB counters, pub meals and fancy drinks in actual glasses. That’s where the whitefellas went. Blackfellas were kept out by a rule that required people to wear shirts with collars, and shoes. It worked. It was apartheid and racial segregation in all but name.

   There were several groups of Countrymen from different areas that lived in and around Katheryne in varying degrees of permanence, from the semi-official Walbiri Camp on the south side of town to the established official community of Bindjari on the west side, and scattered groups from eastern and northern areas that would come and go as they pleased and lived at random places in the bush around town.

   The Walbiri were really a mob from the desert, long way away to the south west, near the Tanami, but they had come and set up camp on the outskirts of Katheryne and were there more or less permanently. I used to go bush and hunt with them sometimes. The Bindjari mob were the ones who rightfully owned the local country, it was their country, they were born and bred there and their culture was tied up into the land there. I worked with a few blokes from there on our station, we were roughly the same age. There was always a stand-off between the whitefella ringers and the blackfella ringers, and a lot of the time the blackfellas didn’t say much, while the whitefellas mostly hated their guts and bitched about them behind their backs. I didn’t buy into that.

   One day me and one of the fellas from the Bindjari mob were on horseback, working cattle, and we were pushing a mob through the bush along a little creek. We were talking about this and that, and I was learning some of their language. I was getting them to teach me how to say ‘that old man is a cunt’, because our head stockman was a real fucking arsehole. He would roar and howl abuse at everyone all day every day, no matter what you did or how you did it. He would then proceed to fuck up whatever he was trying to do, because he was an incompetent lazy fuckwit, and then turn around and blame someone else, hurling the vilest abuse you could ever wish to hear. It is the Territory way.

   You might like to argue that it might have been so because we were out bush in the wild, a long way from town and supposed civilisation, and you could be forgiven for thinking that. But at various points in my long and pointless rambling peregrinations in and out of jobs none of which were worth doing I worked in factories in Darwin, smack bang right in the guts of the most shiniest squeaky clean town we have in the whole of the Territory, proud home to the Government and other leeches, parasites and lying self-serving money-grabbing thieves, and it was exactly the same. Maybe it was just where we were at in life, down low and out. It’s possible that the pollies and accountants that spent all their days swindling us mob and everyone else were polite and nice to each other while they were filling their pockets at our expense.

   Anyway, my mate Jason from the Bindjari mob, the owners of the country, he was teaching me how to say those things in their language. I was interested and intrigued to hear him say ‘huwa maluka’, meaning ‘that old man’. It’s the same word that was made famous in a book from long ago, called ‘We Of The Never Never’, talking about life running cattle out bush in that area. The word Maluka was used as a nickname for the station owner, one of the heroes of the book, which was written by a white woman, his wife. I wondered if the joke had been on her all these long years, and if she knew that the name which she had thought had been lovingly given to the old fella by their supposedly loyal and devoted Aboriginal workers had a side-meaning that meant ‘that old cunt’.

   Seeing how a movie was made after the book, and how it became quite famous around the world, it can be seen as a nice bit of subtle revenge on behalf of the blackfellas that were dispossesed, pushed off their country, used as slave labour for a hundred years on the stations that took over their country, and then sacked and kicked out when the laws changed, blackfellas became recognised as human beings and had to be payed the same as whitefellas. All the black ringers got the sack and were replaced with whitefellas when the new laws came in, because, the white station owners reasoned, if they were going to have to pay people to work for them then they might as well get ‘proper’ white people. Such is the history of our country.

   Jason and me were born around that time. His mum had been working at the station where we were both working at that time, and Jason, same age as me, had been born on the station. We stood up in our stirrups, yelled at the cattle to get a move on, waved our arms around and yelled abuse at the beasts. We should have had stockwhips, but they were too expensive. We were lucky to be able to have a shirt on our backs. The mob moved and shifted, lowing and grunting, and, kicking up clouds of dust in their wake, reluctantly trundled on into the creek to make the crossing. The dust hung in the air on the near bank. Where cattle pass nothing will grow. The fragile old red sandy soils of the country get trodden into oblivion and turn to dust. The pretty-face wallaby, the goanna, the emu, the bustard and the brolga can live on this country for ever and keep it alive. The cattle grind it to dust, the pig rips it up and the buffalo wallows in it until there’s just a great big hole.

   So we pushed that mob through the creek and back out around the other side. Through the haze of dust we saw, and heard, the head stockman going off at someone, abusing the shit out of one of the others out in front at the top of his voice.

   ‘Huwa maluka,’ I said to Jason and grinned.

   ‘Huwa maluka,’ Jason said and grinned back. Yeah. That old cunt.

   Then he looked away, somewhere over my shoulder. That’s what they do, it’s their way. It’s rude to look at someone when you talk to them.

   We followed the last of the cattle through the creek and rode up on the far bank. Then, as we passed a clump of straggly snappy gums, Jason pointed  to a tree.

   ‘I was born there,’ he said.

   I looked. There was a tree with a bit of grass underneath it, about five metres from the water. No crocs in this creek. Not usually, anyway.

   ‘What, just there?’ I said.

   ‘Yeah. Under that tree. This is my country.’

   ‘How did that work?’ I asked.

   ‘Just me and my mum, under that tree. Old style,’ Jason replied, ‘and then we got kicked off the station cos they had to pay us.’

   ‘Right,’ I replied. It’s a mind boggling notion. Welcome to the 20^th century.

   ‘So,’ I said, ‘that bloke he kicked you off, him that fella, he was a huwa maluka him that one.’

   ‘Yeah,’ said Jason and grinned again, white teeth in a black face, with a fair few teeth missing. Jason liked to fight, especially with whitefellas.

   ‘Yeah,’ he said again. ‘Huwa maluka bigwan him, ey.’

   Yeah. What a cunt. They got kicked off their country when they had to be paid for their services, and were replaced by whitefellas.

   Eventually I left the Territory. After years and years of being a bum in and out of the long grass I was fed up with being nothing and knowing nothing, and I went down south to go to university, to learn about things, learn how the world works, try to better myself and get a life.

   When I went back I went to Bindjari, looking for Jason.

   I was told he was in jail in Darwin, for punching a white copper. He had been drinking by the river when the copper had come and given him a hard time, for no real reason. This is the way it works. The copper hit him, and Jason hit back, harder. The copper was out free, walking and strutting around, and getting paid for it. Jason was in jail, doing time for being a blackfella.

   Looks like the bloke in charge is still a huwa maluka.