Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the End of the World. Mudrooroo
sotto voce and wondered what they meant. If he had the energy, he might learn the language. The main num jumped dryshod onto the beach, saw the Aborigine and stamped toward him with hand outstretched.
The Aborigine waited for the strange intruder to reach him. The num was short with a soft body plump from many days of good eating without hunting. Short, stubby legs marched that pot-bellied trunk over the sand with dainty, precise steps lacking the finesse of the hunter. Still there was something of the stamp of a sacred dance in the steps and this gave Wooreddy an interest in the visitor. His eyes brightened as his numbness lessened. The ghost’s face, round like the moon, though unscarred, shone pink like the shoulder skin of the early morning sun. Sharp, sea-coloured eyes sought to bridge the gap between them. The ghostly eyes showed such an avid interest in him that he evaded those eyes by staring at the strange skin on the ghost’s head. From under it, his hair showed rust-coloured like a vein of red ochre in grey rock.
The num grabbed, and succeeded in capturing Wooreddy’s hand. It lay limply in the grasp, while the pink-petalled lips began fluttering out sounds which were gibberish to the man. ‘Such a poor, poor creature! Such a wretched being bereft of everything we civilised people hold dear. How right I was not to listen to my wife and friends who sought to dissuade me from this charitable and necessary task. No matter what hazard, it is truly the Lord’s work and I will persevere.’
Behind his back, the convict crew twisted their faces in mockery. Some of them had endured a visit from him in prison and were familiar with the style of his deliverance. They described it, in their colourful way, as a ‘load of shit’. Perhaps it was their felt contempt which had driven George Augustus Robinson to the greener pastures of Aboriginal welfare.
Wooreddy’s mouth hesitated on the way to a smile, then he saw the faces the convicts were pulling and grinned for the first time in months. The ghost still clung to his hand. Now he fluted: ‘Me, me Mr Robinson.’
Wooreddy’s agile mind discarded the pronouns and he repeated: ‘Meeter Ro-bin-un.’
While behind him the convicts mouthed the words and even went into a little dance, Robinson pushed his left index finger against Wooreddy’s greasy chest and, pronouncing each word slowly and distinctly, asked: ‘You, you, your, name, what?’ Loud snickers from the boat crew caused him to whirl around and shout: ‘Don’t stand around. Get that boat up on the beach’ – then he turned back to the Aborigine and repeated the words in the same fluting tone, though now edged with anger.
Wooreddy politely answered: ‘Narrah warrah (yes)’
‘Pleased to make your acquaintance, I’m sure, Narrah Warrah,’ the num burbled enthusiastically, not caring if he was understood by the poor matted-haired apparition which stood before him with its nakedness partially covered by a dirty blanket. He had come to save such creatures and they would understand this intuitively. Already, this Narrah Warrah knew that he was their friend.
‘I am your friend,’ he said slowly, his voice dropping to a silky softness which oozed. ‘Have no fear, Narrah Warrah’ – a snigger from the convicts whipped a snarl into his tone. ‘I have come to protect you from such scum as these ruffians behind me –’ and he jerked a thumb over his shoulder. Wooreddy intuitively grasped what the gesture meant. He suddenly realised that here was an ally. The self-assured, pompous little ghost before him could be used to help him survive until the end of the world.
He accepted Meeter Ro-bin-un as his very own num with the same readiness with which Robinson had accepted the fact that he was destined to save these poor, benighted people. Such a modus vivendi, lacking all the essentials of a properly understood relationship, held infinite possibilities from rich comedy to equally rich tragedy. At first, Wooreddy was overjoyed. He had found a protector and also a subject of study. He tested out the relationship by making a gesture and then walking off into the bush. He was happy to find the ghost following, but his happiness disappeared when the ghost marched past him and took the lead. Robinson was defining their relationship from the beginning.
In the camp Wooreddy’s wife, Lunna, sat naked and uncaring on a piece of blanket. The coughing demon hacked at her lungs. She didn’t even lift her head when the num bent over her, his face filled with solicitude. A short distance away, one of her sons sat chewing on a tough piece of kangaroo meat while the other sat waiting his turn. They glanced up; their eyes filled with the image of the ghost, and with a united single shriek they were away into the scrub as fast as their little legs could carry them. The father called out, ordering them to return, but the sound of their feet diminished into the distance. Now and not for the first time, he wondered how he had fathered such boys. He remembered when he was their age and the sudden deep thoughts that had slowed his feet so that he more often found himself facing danger rather than fleeing from it. They had none of the qualities he cherished. It was the fault of their foreign mother. Wooreddy refused to acknowledge that his own stuffiness and indifference might have had something to do with their behaviour patterns. He hardly ever spoke to them and often ignored his wife as well.
‘Meridee bidai lidinee loomerai,’ he said explaining the sickness of his wife, but not his lack of concern – a concern which was expressed on the face of the ghost. But even that concern vanished when Trugernanna walked into the clearing clutching in each small fist an arm of the boys. Wooreddy had not been the only one observing the num. Trugernanna, hidden in the scrub, had studied him and decided that he was unlike the ones at the whaling station on the other side of the island. There, all that they wanted to do was take her off somewhere. At first she had found it flattering, but now it was just one of those things.
Away from the num the girl often went naked, but now she wore a kangaroo skin wrapped about her full hips. This was a new style which the women had adapted. The old fashion of draping the skin over the shoulders was gone forever. Now demure in her rough skirt she shot a glance at the ghost and caught his look of approval. They liked females to be covered below the waist for most of the time.
George Augustus Robinson, destined by God to make the Aborigines the most interesting and profitable part of his life, leered at the forbidden fruits of the bare-breasted maiden who conjured up romantic visions of beautiful South Sea islands where missionaries laboured for the salvation of delightful souls. On this island and on the larger one of Van Diemen’s Land, he too would be such a missionary. He went into his ‘Me, Mr Robinson’ routine and this time received a better response. The girl had been around the whalers and sawyers long enough to pick up quite a few words of the ghost language. She replied that her name was Trugernanna and set Robinson right in regard to the name of Wooreddy. In return Robinson smiled an expression which held more than that of the good shepherd at long last finding an intelligent sheep.
She spoke to Wooreddy and enlightened him about the num. Finally he had the proof that the ghost was indeed an ally. As Robinson quaintly informed Trugernanna: ‘Me look after you, give you food, clothing – bad white man no longer hurt you.’ And as the girl just as quaintly echoed: ‘Bad num no longer hurt us’ as she took the protector’s hand and gazed up into his face with all the adoration of a child – though the fullness of her breasts belied the pose. Wooreddy found himself ignored. It annoyed him that the woman had captured all the ghost’s attention. After all Meeter Ro-bin-un was his ally too!
V
Wooreddy and Trugernanna helped Lunna and the two children to shift along the coast to where Meeter Ro-bin-un had had erected a ghost shelter. It was right on the channel and at night they could see, gleaming across the water, the lights of the main num settlement. Robinson wished to acquire a working knowledge of the Bruny language and took every opportunity to learn from the people. He did not offer to teach them his language in return. This would come later. But the Aborigines had realised that they needed to know the ghost language and they too took every opportunity to learn new words and sentences. They found that the main difficulty was in the pronunciation, unlike Robinson who floundered in the complicated grammar structuring Bruny. He never did advance beyond a form of creole, though by this time so few people were left who spoke the language that it did not matter.
The Aborigines soon discovered that their ally considered himself