Back of Sunset by Jon Cleary

Author:Jon Cleary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

III

Steve and Kate went out to the tribes that night, to see the corroboree before they went to the ball. This was not a sacred corroboree, and there were other whites there to watch it; a ceremonial “manhood” corroboree would have been performed far away from the eyes of strangers. This was no more than the whites were having in the town, a ball to finish up the race meeting.

The men of the tribes had spent hours over their make-up. The town and the wilderness had supplied their costumes: birds’ feathers, strings of shells, woven strips of kangaroo fur, an old striped football jersey, even one of the racing silks of this afternoon. The men’s faces and bodies were streaked with ochre and other coloured clays: they looked out at the audience through a brightly-coloured grid, like prisoners who carried with them the stripes of their window-bars. The music came from the didgeridoo, the great primitive oboe hollowed out of wood or bamboo, the piping gil-gil sticks, the clicking of boomerangs, the beating of yam sticks in the dust, the drumming of cupped hands on thighs and above all the singing of the tribesmen and their women.

Steve and Kate sat in the truck parked beneath an old boab. The moon came over the rim of the mountain behind the town, and the clearing in the scrub was lit by its glow. The deep notes of the didgeridoo began, and the voices came in softly, almost imperceptibly growing in volume. Beyond the circle where the dancers would enter, old men, gins and piccaninnies, their eyes and teeth white in the glow of the fires, kept time to the singing. Dancing was the aborigine’s one real art, and Steve felt the excitement rising inside him as the moment of entry for the dancers approached. He had never been interested in dancing, ballet, folk or just ballroom; but this was different, the last surviving expression of a dying people. The aborigine was doomed, but he would go out into the darkness of the Never-Never, back of sunset, singing and dancing as he was tonight.

The singing was at a crescendo now: the night air throbbed with its meaningless words. Suddenly it stopped dead: the echoes flew away into the scrub. The silence seemed to quiver: Steve looked at his watch, half-expecting it to have stopped. Then the music began again, softer this time, and a solitary voice took up the singing.

“That’s the maker,” Kate whispered. “The composer of the corroberee.”

The voice was thin and high-pitched, eerie as a cry from the dead: it went through the blood, touched the heart with a cold finger. Then out from the trees, from the shadows of the paperbarks, the lemon gums and the boabs, came the swaying writhing figures of the dancers. AH of them wore head-dresses of some sort: bright sprays of white cockatoo feathers, eagle-hawk wings, cages of sticks covered with hair, fur and bark: the lead man wore something that Steve at last recognised was a caricature of a horse’s head.

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