Carpentaria by Alexis Wright Read Free Book Online Page A

when he was a hawker the one thing everyone wanted was keys – ‘There was real money in keys.’ Number two, he explained, ‘They should be forced to make bathtubs, like the old tin ones, so they could take regular baths.’ And number three, ‘They should be sent back to the cattle stations and made to work for nothing, board and keep, that’s good enough for them if they aren’t interested in making money to get ahead like everyone else.’
    Bruiser got a huge round of applause and after a bit of rumbling about the government doing nothing, someone suggested that they needed direct action. Once Bruiser got the meeting stirred up, he went out the back with a few of his cattlemen friends to enjoy the fresh air and partake in some liquid refreshments, to keep them charged up to go back later on, and finish off the meeting. Although how it ended up, they stayed outside making themselves so pickled and pie-eyed, nothing mattered anymore. What was strategy? This left the new town clerk, Libby Valance, a man accused of neither being local nor understanding the region and its values, to chair the throng.
    Yet Valance was educated in local government, and had been given the job in the first place because he was considered to be sensible. He addressed the meeting in his fine voice which reached no higher than midway, by saying that it was his Christian duty to take a more civil line of approach in advising what a town could do with its citizens. No way, voices were beseeching, Why couldn’t we just? Bulldoze the crap out of those camps, flatten the lot? Why not? ‘Well! The last time the Council did it,’ Valance explained, ‘they just started rebuilding, because they had nowhere else to go.’ So! The meeting went on. Make them go, there must be somewhere else they can go, why do they want to come here for anyway? Those of the Pricklebush mob who had taken up the offer to attend the meeting listened, stunned again by how they had been rendered invisible, while Valance continued, ‘It is because they have a right to be here just like anyone else.’ Bruiser, having come back inside, responded with the following salient points on behalf of all indignities: ‘Huh! Think they do. Then they should live like everyone else then. Right! Let’s go tell ’em.’
    A small delegation, made up of representatives from Uptown and the black busybodies who went along to these popular Council meetings, came over one afternoon, to have a word with Norm Phantom. It had never escaped Norm’s notice that somehow Uptown had encumbered him with the title with all of its glory – leader of the Aboriginal people. They said they wanted him to get those people who had moved out of Westside, and were now living in abandoned car bodies and their makeshift camps behind people’s housing, to start living like white people, if they wanted to live in town.
    ‘Couldn’t give a stuff about them,’ Norm grunted, still bent over his taxidermy efforts on a giant prawn.
    The Uptown prospect, Cilla Mooch, an Aboriginal man learning how to shape himself into a white mould with one of those perpetual traineeship work-for-the - dole programs spread over the length and breadth of Australia in the name of economic development, worked in the Council office. He stood next to Valance, and as it had been predetermined by the Council, was the voice in this delegation. Norm Phantom might reason with someone of his own ilk. Moochie spoke in broken English.
    ‘You know?! That what’s what they is saying about you and all. Saying you started all of this town camps stuff springing up here and there for we mob. Saying they got to stop it. Show a bit of respect for the place. Place belonga Desperance Shire Council. Stop the place looking like an infestation of black heads and what have you.’
    ‘You sound like a fuzzy wuzzy, Mooch. Aren’t got anything to do with me and talk English,’ Norm muttered irritably, still engrossed with the delicate operation on his