The Promised Land. Mudrooroo
Mudrooroo was born in Narrogin in Western Australia in 1938. He has travelled extensively throughout Australia and the world and is now living in Brisbane. Mudrooroo has been active in Aboriginal cultural affairs, was a Member of the Aboriginal Arts Unit committee of the Australia Council, and a co-founder with Jack Davis of the Aboriginal Writers, Oral Literature and Dramatists Association. He piloted Aboriginal literature courses at Murdoch University, the University of Queensland, the University of the Northern Territory and Bond University. Mudrooroo is a prolific writer of poetry and prose and is best known for his novel, Wildcat Falling, and his critical work, Writing from the Fringe. Old Fellow Poems and Wildcat Falling are both available with his audio presentation. He has completed a new novel Balga Boy Jackson to be released in 2017.
Also by Mudrooroo and available in ETT Imprint
Wildcat Falling (ebook)
Doin' Wildcat Dalwarra
The Indigenous Literature of Australia
The Garden of Gethsemane
An Indecent Obsession (ebook)
The Master of the Ghost Dreaming
The Undying
Underground
The Promised Land
This edition published by ETT Imprint, Exile Bay 2017
First published by Angus & Robertson 2000
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publishers:
ETT IMPRINT
PO Box R1906
Royal Exchange NSW 1225
Australia
Copyright © Mudrooroo 2000, 2017
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-925706-01-7 (ebook)
Cover by Pierre Tremblay/Masterfile
In memory of Heiner Muller (1929-1996)
To keep writing as long as possible, without hope or despair.
‘Allegorical,’ she said, her voice raw, sounding as if she smoked and drank heavily, awaiting exit from the womb.
‘Truth bedecked in Halloween drag.’
Jack Womack
CHAPTER ONE
Lady Lucille, or as she was affectionately known to her intimates, Lucy, since becoming a woman had been subjected to noctambulism. It was a pathological condition she bore sometimes well but often badly, as did her family and friends, who were afraid that this predilection (for they refused to look upon it as a sickness) might lead to the loss of her reputation and thus her marital prospects. A young girl roaming the streets in a somnolent state clad in flimsy night attire, they could see only as a gross indecency which must be checked and banished. ‘It’s a trial not to be accepted,’ her mother complained to her father. After due conference, they called upon her best girl chum, Mina, who was level headed and might alleviate the condition by her presence. Mina came to share Lucy’s chamber and bed, clasping the girl to her bosom as they slept. Alas, such precautions, though pleasurable, proved inadequate and in the early hours of a morning, Mina awoke to find her arms empty.
At the time, they had been staying in a picturesque fishing town in North Riding dominated by the ruins of an ancient abbey, below which was a cemetery with graves that were on the verge of slipping into the ocean. The combination of hilltop ruins, the ancient cemetery and the cliff edge had held them with its Gothic splendour. Such a romantic, though eerie, spot had stirred in the girls longings which they had discussed as they sat on their favourite mossy stone bench gazing over the port with its fishing vessels snugly safe from the windswept sea. They had talked of their future prospects and even of ghostly visitations as they eyed the eruption of another storm at sea. The indented coast was subject to sudden tempests; flashes of lightning and thunder had struck out above becalmed waters which then surged under a wind of gale strength and sheets of icy rain, from which the girls had had to flee like two startled birds.
Lucy had been languishing in the quiet town and needed to be fussed over. Sometimes she shivered as if from the cold, but complained that the constant flow and clash of the elements produced a magnetism that affected her emotionally. She confided in her friend that sometimes her innermost being was so infused that she had to rise and glide out into the open night air so that she might feel the electricity caressing her all over. ‘Like a lot of little fingers rubbing away at my sensitive places, and right under my dress too,’ she had said with a giggle to Mina, who reported the conversation to her chum’s parents. They had all agreed that she was a weird little lass, who threatened them with continuing maintenance if she could not be settled. What had to be done was to get her a husband who would put a stop to all such flights of fancy; but where to find such a man? They had sighed and passed on their responsibility to Mina, whose arms, alas, relaxed in repose. The night had begun with a sudden rush of wind, though this time, instead of the crying of the heavens, there came a stillness with the electrical display above the moaning sea. Mina had drawn the curtains against the aerial disturbance. She had snuggled up against her friend, comparing breasts for some time, then finally drifted off, tightly holding on to the warm body beside her. The night light which was always kept burning had illuminated both their sleeping innocent faces.
Mina awoke to an ominous stillness. She tried to snuggle up to the remembered warmth and felt only the cold sheet. She rubbed her eyes and leaped out of bed, quickly pulling on a thick robe. Now her alarmed gaze fell on Lucy’s dressing gown and day clothes. ‘Poor dear thing,’ she murmured. She snatched up her chum’s gown, rushed downstairs, slipped the latch on the door and darted out into the darkness of the early morning. Heavy clouds were racing across the sky like thick strands of hair, but at ground level the air was motionless and weighed down as if by some fluidic pressure. Thankfully, the moon began glimmering through the thick strands to light her way. She dashed towards the cemetery and as she reached it saw on their favourite bench a sprawled female body draped in white.
‘Lucy,’ she whispered, then her eyes widened and, with an involuntary cry, she darted forward. A dark figure appeared to be embracing her chum.
But when she reached the bench, Lucy was alone. A trick of the light, Mina thought, as she gently shook the girl into some semblance of consciousness, wrapped the robe about her shivering form and led her back to the safety of their bed where she held Lucy’s slight body and gently used her fingers to ease the trembling. With a slight moan, the girl pushed her hand aside and turned away and into sleep.
Fully alert, cheerful and even playful like a fluffy kitten in the full light of the morning, Lucy smilingly declared that she had no recollection of her nocturnal stroll, though she did admit to having had some dream in which a pair of red gleaming eyes had drawn her into a sweet phantasy, the details of which she blushingly declined to reveal. She levelled a meaningful glance at Mina who did not press her further, but who, with a stern sense of duty, informed her chum’s parents of their daughter’s latest escapade. They had not been able to keep hidden Lucy’s sleepwalking and mood swings, and hence there was a dearth of eligible suitors. But their family doctor had advised them that, with all the duties and obligations of matrimony, women had little time to indulge in such nonsense: ‘It is but the fluid intensity of a young woman’s imagination, perhaps stirred by an unhealthy indulgence in the reading of narrative fiction, which will be unable to claim her when there is a husband to be attended to, especially in those conjugal rites which, although there is doubt on this matter, a young woman such as your daughter needs if she is to free herself of the neuralgic symptoms she is manifesting.’
Thus advised, they removed to Bath for Lucy to take the healing waters while they kept