Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the End of the World. Mudrooroo
Already he felt bored at being stuck on the island for over three months. He was a man of action and longed to be up and about. ‘Things are about to happen,’ he assured Wooreddy, as he bent his head to continue scrawling the long words of a long and tedious report.
In their own good time the women finally limped back to the camp. After a day or so they planned to go fishing. Wooreddy had found to his dismay that the attractions of not having a woman were countered by the attractions of having a woman. In short, he needed a new wife. Women could brave the ocean and endure its cold pressure while they prised off abalone or grabbed the crayfish crawling along the very sea bottom. Trugernanna, young and agile, squat and strong, was a powerful swimmer who enjoyed her mastery of the watery element. She could fill this hole in his life. After thinking overlong in his usual fashion, at last he approached her father to see if his offer still stood.
Mangana seemed to have become all grey – his hair, his beard and even his skin was grey. He sat at his fire watching a few roots called ‘potatoes’, which Meeter Ro-bin-un gave out, darkening in the ashes of the fire. Wooreddy once had liked sitting with the old man, but since the ghost had arrived he had spent much less time with him. Mangana seemed senile and it was difficult to speak to him. In reply to sentences he usually grunted or muttered a single word or strung words together in meaningless sentences. Still he had to ask the old man’s permission – he did so and waited and waited. At last the old man shifted his eyes from the fat possum Wooreddy had placed next to him and began to speak without the ceremonial opening which tradition had once demanded.
‘Ahaha, Ria Warrawah, the darkness fleeing. My wives, my children – all but one gone! How dark the day is – and Trugernanna friends with those from Ria Warrawah. The Islands of the Dead! Does she wish to jump up over there where even the water is white and cold? Great Ancestor sits at his campfire in a sunny land and waits. Things are as they were, ever changing. They sicken and die on this island once our homeland. The dead roam whining in the night and it is best to leave them with the ghosts. That is right!’
Mangana fell into an ocean of sorrows and the younger man shared his pain. Then he began to speak again.
‘Trugernanna, an ocean girl, a sea girl, a lover of ghosts. A ghost girl, a pale girl, she will live on longer than all of us. Go and eat her food, go and love her loveless body, go and share whatever she will offer. You and she are both foolish enough to want life. It is for both of you and some of it will be enjoyable. Tomorrow is but a day away from Great Ancestor, he lives in me
The old man rambled on for an hour allowing the younger man to share the past of his life laid out in words and silences, gestures and feelings and things beyond Wooreddy’s ken. When he left he felt himself floating in the old man’s memories, but he had promised to bring him a fat doe kangaroo as payment for permission to court Trugernanna.
VI
‘MOTTO NYRAE PAKLERDI MOTTI NOVILEI RAEGEWRAPPA. PARLERDI MAGGERA WARRANGELLI, RAEGEWRAPPA MAGGERA TOOGENNA UENEE. NYRAE PARLEWAR LOGERNA TAGGERA TEENI LAWWAI WARRANGELLE PARLERDI NYRAE, NYRAE RAEGE LOGERNA TAGGERA TEENNI LAWWAI WARRANGELLI; NOVILLI PARLERWAR LOGERNA TAGGERA TEENI TOOGUNNA RAEGEWROPPA UENEE MAGGERA UENEE...’
‘Fader’ stopped his somewhat premature attempt at a sermon in Bruny and rose in eloquence and competence as he continued on in Ghost. His flow of moral rhetoric was directed at his convict servants carefully segregated from those he called his ‘sable friends’.
One of his ‘sable friends’ had been stealing glances at another ‘sable friend’ throughout the attempt at Bruny. With the abrupt change in language, Wooreddy switched his mind off Trugernanna and onto the words he had heard. Within them must reside some sort of meaning. They seemed to mean that if you were good, that is, kept the laws of the Bruny Islanders, on death or after death you travelled along the sky-trail to where Great Ancestor had his camp; but if you were bad, that is, did not follow the customs, you stayed below in the sea or dark hollows with Ria Warrawah, All in all, if he had interpreted the mishmash of words correctly Meeter Ro-bin-un had just given a very simple account of the Bruny Island religion. ‘Fader’ also had seemed to imply that ghosts too could travel along the skyway, but this was wrong. Ghosts came from the Islands of the Dead {a halfway stop on the way to Great Ancestor) and when they left Bruny Island they would return there. But the good doctor, not content with the apparent meaning, sought a deeper and more esoteric meaning.
‘Fader’ could be relating a part of his own past as a human being. Then he had been ‘bad’ and thus after death failed in his attempt to reach Great Ancestor. Now his present life was a warning to all humans not to go astray. Using his excellent memory he recalled Robinson’s words to check if they fitted with his interpretation.
‘One good Great Ancestor; one bad demon. Great Ancestor, good! Great Ancestor stop sky; demon stop below fire (this must mean that he stayed in the dark places of the earth and ocean). Good men dead go road up sky. Good RAEGE (perhaps num or ghosts) dead go road up sky (perhaps this was a rhetorical question?). Bad men dead go road below (across the sea to the Island of the dead, this meant). Demon, fire, stop fire.’ These last words puzzled the good doctor; tentatively they meant that the demon (Ria Warrawah) hated fire and always tried to extinguish it.
‘Fader’s’ voice ceased its rolling and only the sound of the surf continued. Wooreddy left his musings and noticed that the num’s eyes glittered (he still could not think of the ocean without a qualm) like the sun shining off the sea.
Meeter Ro-bin-un was enraptured by the eloquence of his own sermon. He raised his arms and spread them as Wooreddy neared, and exclaimed into the blank faces of the convicts: ‘Come, my child, God has not forgotten you. Poor pitiful child from a pitiful race friendless and alone in a dark and hostile world. Now you too have a father just as I have a father in heaven.’
‘Yeh, fader,’ the childman replied, as the ghost’s rapturous eyes clung to him for some sign of recognition. ‘Yeh, fader,’ he repeated, taking the opportunity to try out his pronunciation.
If the man’s repeated two words were not enough for the ghost, Trugernanna’s seeming rapture equalled his own. She stood beside him, her face uplifted, her brown eyes fixed on his nose while her small body trembled under the sack-like dress she wore. Such obvious adoration elicited from Robinson a deep red flush which had little to do with religious ecstasy.
He found himself feeling the same temptation he belaboured in others – but, unlike the others (he told himself) he would never take advantage of the trusting natures of these child-like creatures. He moved closer to Wooreddy and was relieved that the woman did not follow him. Then in the need to put space between desire and the object of desire, he indicated to the man that he wished to go to the narrow neck uniting the northern and southern parts of the island.
Wooreddy picked up his spear as Robinson raced off at a fast trot into the undergrowth. The man would have liked to question the ghost about the sermon, but the fast waddle he was forced to keep up made his breath rush in and out of his lungs like, like – again a sea simile came to trouble him – seawater in a narrow inlet. At last, and none too soon for the gasping Wooreddy, ‘Fader’ halted his headlong plunge, which had rendered him as desireless as his companion breathless. Wooreddy flopped down beside a bush and to excuse himself told the ghost that kangaroos liked to eat it. Robinson too took the opportunity to catch his breath. Wooreddy, after giving the num the names of a few other plants, took the opportunity to get onto his problem. ‘Lubra logemer piggerder nene,’ he began in the pidgin dialect he had labelled ‘Ro-bin-un’ after its inventor. ‘Fader’s ruddy face assumed an expression of concern as he heard the man mention his dead mate, and Wooreddy, observing that he had aroused the correct feeling, continued on to explain how a human male without a female was lost; he felt like that and had fixed on Trugernanna for a mate.
‘Fader’ smiled, and his mood and expression switched to jocular. ‘You would like to have that one, eh? Can’t say that I blame you. Might be good for her too! Keep her away from those ruffians at the whaling station. She’ll make you a good wife,’ rambled Robinson, and unfortunately brought Trugernanna to mind. His evil inclinations returned, and instantly his short stubby legs churned,