The middle-aged woman stood at the familiar glass door of the town library. Even from outside, standing on the sunny concrete step, she knew the smell of the room precisely. It reeked of books, papers, aged carpet. Generations of crosslegged children, burning up with stories. Briefly, she shut her eyes. Would she make it in today? Could she? She grasped the vertical silver handle, unaware that she was holding her breath.
‘I see the weather’s on the improve,’ the librarian trilled automatically. But, she thought uneasily as the woman stepped in, but oh those purple bags under the eyes, that awful hair. Derelicts were a dime a dozen in her line of work, but what did you say to a respectable 48-year-old woman who looked like she should be in a hospital bed?
‘Morning. Hard at it, I see,’ the woman answered dully. It was a joke. Yes, that marionette smile definitely made it a tiny joke. The librarian brightened.
‘Mmm, it’s quiet all right. I think everyone must be at the funeral from that terrible, um—’
The woman turned quickly away, stalling the humiliation of tears. She strode once, twice, and was—there you go, luv—easily past the reading table with its lacerating headlines. The librarian stood, hideously embarrassed, unsure what to do with the empty space suddenly opened in front of her.
The shelf the woman stopped at was an old friend. Local History. The sign, itself an artefact, was held on by Blu-Tack that she herself had pressed against the steel shelf two summers ago. The summer before the accident. No-one else knew of this anonymous contribution. Not even the librarian had any idea what the woman was secretly holding up.
She expertly scanned the spines: A Social History of Dairy Farming in the Burringbah District, The Brunswick —A Coastal Community. Not these, not today. This one, then: ‘Cedargetting 1845-1885 in Northern New South Wales’. A PhD thesis submitted to the University of Sydney.
Once the local blacks had been subdued, the cedar cutters harvested the ‘red gold’ in enormous quantity. The virgin land they plundered was hard, hilly country, but repaid their efforts with cross-saw and axe. Opened up, the foothills and river flats were soon ripe for dairying, and small farms soon flourished.
Subdued. She knew what that meant. It meant Lumpy Johnny, working unpaid for Bob’s grandfather for forty years. But virgin land? Opened up? She had a sudden unpleasant vision of Lumpy Johnny’s sister, of her mysterious yellow children. The woman shook her head. She wanted to replace these vagabond thoughts with orderly Friesians and Jerseys, with pictures of soothing streams of foamy milk in nickel buckets. Lumpy Johnny was long dead, and his grandchildren worked in the pub and the video store when they worked at all.
She hastily put the history back and took up a slim, hand-typed booklet. It at least had the look and the feel of something real. Someone living had corrected that misspelled ‘Marwillumbah’. Someone’s hand had written ‘not to scale’ in red ink on the map inside the front cover. These small details gave her hope that a connection might be made, hope that the impossible gap between human hearts might somehow be bridged. She read:
Until 1922, the Ferry Reserve was allocated by Law for the use of Aboriginals. The tribe, who previously had wandered the forests and beaches at will, were enclosed and at the mercy of authorities.
Enclosed and at the mercy. The words ripped the woman from the library; they tore the sun from the sky. She felt again the doorframe crushing her shoulder as the Commodore skidded sideways. A banshee scream of truck brakes, the drumming rain. She lowered the hand-typed pamphlet, her heart thumping in her chest like a young wallaby seeing its first gun.
The librarian was standing rather close to a man whose young daughter tugged him towards the kiddies books.
‘Oh, criminal the way they’ve left it like it is, absolutely criminal.’
‘Daa-ad…’
‘Of course there was that big head-on last Christmas. Three killed then, wasn’t it?’
‘Dad, come on …
‘Just go over, I’ll be there in a minute. Go on.’
The woman became aware of glances, and an urgent whispering. She closed her eyes again. She saw flashing lights. Blue uniforms directing the traffic to slow, to stop, to detour around them. ‘You’ll have to take the Wooyung road, sir.’ She became aware that she was leaning heavily against the bookstack. She blindly groped sideways for a new book, a different story to her own. Anything would do. Pathways of the Bundjalung.
Few today realise that, driving between the settlements of coast and plain, more often than not they are tracing the ancient walking trails that aborigines used for generations. Early European explorers naturally followed existing trails, and so did the bullock carts which followed. Many of our modern roads followed in due course.
She inhabited darkness. There had been a wetness on her hands that wasn’t water. Red clothes. Hospital, and then uniforms in her lounge room. Everything was tea and notebooks.
‘Are you sure you’re all right, Hilda?’ The librarian bustled over and touched her arm, just the way the policewoman had.
‘Fine, fine. Tired, that’s all, a bit . . . tired.’ Her blue eyes were sorrier than rain.
‘You don’t look …’ Quite human, thought the librarian anxiously.
‘No, I don’t suppose I do. Not sleeping.’ The woman made a superhuman effort and mustered a kind of smile.
‘It’s been eight months now—’ the librarian said with hopeless sympathy, as though information was what was required.
‘Look, I’ll just go.’
The door closed behind her, and the librarian turned straight to the man for absolution. ‘Poor thing, she didn’t always look so … well, so bad. Her husband, he was one of those three at Christmas, the driver. You know, a wet night and that Burringbar road just turns to glass …’
The librarian clucked. The man jerked his head sideways to show that he too understood the savagery of the killer range.
Outside the sun still shone. The woman stopped and bought a hand of bananas. She ate two, and later in the week would throw the rest away when the fruitflies in the kitchen became altogether too much, a black cloud of widowhood rising to meet her. The little girl in the corner read on, and dreamed of the day she would become a vet, or failing that, a jockey.
The librarian and the man embarked the following Tuesday on a brief, passionate affair, which turned over the summer weeks and months into a solid literary friendship. And always and forever beneath the smooth, black, terrible roads lay the eternal, the patient, the unsubdued Bundjalung, their bones coffined as they should have been, in red clay, and their spirits waiting only for the rains to release them.
