How interesting, I thought: a house with no windows except at the front, overlooking a formal garden in which nothing grew higher than a man’s knee. Around it on all sides, a high stone wall. At the back, a hillside cleared of every tree, every bush. And a door that said: You cannot come in.

What I was looking at was not just a gentleman’s villa. It was a fortress.

Suddenly I was claustrophobic in this dark, tree-shaded building, this whole silent little settlement. At this moment I was absolutely certain—as sure as if I’d seen it with my own eyes—that there’d been trouble here on this quiet bend of the river. It might have been trouble with escaped convicts or bushrangers. But in that moment of seeing the place with new eyes, what I saw were spears and guns, and bright blood soaking into the hot dirt. I imagined this fortress being built so that, if any more blood was spilled, Wiseman could be sure it wouldn’t be his.

All gone? I wondered.

13
A Little Learning

Aboriginal people didn’t feature much in my Social Studies classes at school. We cut boomerangs out of brown cardboard and painted them with zigzags. We drew gunyahs in coloured pencil and learned that a woomera was a throwing-stick. You hurled a spear with it. I didn’t understand how you threw a spear with a stick, but I drew a long thin brown thing in my book, and it got a gold star.

The Australian history I learned in 1960 was really the history of the explorers, and the Aboriginal people were mostly an adjunct to them. Matthew Flinders, for example, the first man to circumnavigate Australia: Aboriginal people welcomed him and he’d entertained them by cutting their beards and hair. Most of the explorers seemed to have a ‘native guide’, often called Jacky. Why were the Aboriginal people so helpful? Was it because, as we were taught, they thought that the Europeans were the white ghosts of their own ancestors?

In that case, though, what about those other Aboriginal people, the ones who threw spears at the Europeans and shouted words that meant ‘go away’? The explorer Charles Sturt had met a lot of different groups of Aboriginal people as he travelled along the Murray River. Some of them treated him like family, others tried to kill him. He couldn’t see any rhyme or reason in it.

Going by what we learned at school, the Aboriginal people had some funny ideas. They had this thing called ‘going walkabout’, which was part of being a nomad. They went to one place and ate all the food they could find, and then they went off somewhere else and ate all the food there. They didn’t build proper houses because they were always going walkabout, and they had to go walkabout because they didn’t know about farming. They hunted and gathered, that was all. Two hundred years after Sturt had recorded his puzzlement, our Social Studies textbooks hadn’t made much progress in understanding the first Australians.