What I could hear were tears and alcohol and confused desire. I’d read about ‘Comboism’ – the cohabitation of white men and Aboriginal women – in Alfred Searcy’s In Australian Tropics, published in 1909. And in his account it was all perfectly matter-of-fact:

Nearly all the drovers, cattlemen, and station hands had their black boys (gins) . . . .

These women are invaluable to the white cattlemen, for, besides the companionship, they become splendid horsewomen, and good with cattle. They are useful to find water, settle the camp, boil the billy, and track and bring in the horses in the mornings. In fact, it is impossible to enumerate the advantages of having a good gin ‘outback’.

But Greg didn’t sound as though he was in it for help with the horses. Listening to him holding back his sobs I thought of Shakespeare’s Egypt and Nilus’s slime – torpor and crocodiles and the colour of Cleopatra’s skin.

‘I don’t know how it’ll finish up,’ he went on. ‘I don’t know. I love her, you see, mate. But I have to ask myself who it is that I love. She’s a different woman, mate, a different woman the minute she touches a drop . . .’

‘And then apologizes later?’

‘That’s right, mate. That’s right. She promises she’ll never do it again. But how long can I . . . ?’

‘Well, thanks for talking to us, mate. And don’t forget what I said about a little understanding.’

Whatever phlegmy noises were coming from the studio, out there in the darkest reaches of Darwin, life sounded feverish. I smelled blood and bone – the rich, rancid tropical heat of people living at the edges of their sanity.

But the last thought I had before sleep related to Max Bygraves. I wondered how his concert in the new Performing Arts Centre had gone down. And whether he’d had much success getting his audience to join him in a cockney singalong.

2 Shiklone Troicee and After

Two
 
Shiklone Troicee and After

It is a feature of Darwin plumbing that you can never be certain whether you’ve turned on the cold tap or the hot, so little difference in temperature is there between what comes out of either. Many was the time, in the week or so we were there, that we scalded ourselves in a shower of cold water.