Terra Nullius Read online

  On the pile, finally, and just in time to wrap a bandage around his bleeding sanity, was something a little different from the usual applications for privileges, petitions and appeals, complaints and whining. It was a card, small, hand painted, surely by Natives, the colour of the picture standing out brightly, like a gemstone, against the finger-stained and ink-scrawled pile. The picture had no appeal to him, it was poorly executed and not even the greatest artist in the world could turn the ugly forests here into something beautiful.

  Oh how he hated the landscape, so different to the comfortable lush beauty back home. He would never admit it to anyone but the alien landscape in which he found himself both frightened and sickened him. He hated it almost as much as he hated the people . . . No, that was not right, he didn’t hate them, mustn’t hate them. He pitied them, they were merely children, he wanted to help them.

  As much to hide the picture as to read the message, he turned the card over slowly – no need to rush – to reveal the other side. Yes, there was writing on the other side, in a neat hand, far more exciting than the ugly picture. ‘Dear Sir . . .’ it began, the handwriting somehow rendering the ‘Sir’ genuine, creating something special, a statement of real respect, not just a formality.

  Dear Sir

  I am writing to thank you for the essentially thankless task you have undertaken. The Natives, although possessed of the intelligence they needed to survive without us, and even more cunning than that, would be unable to survive the changes facing them. You and your department in forcing and assisting the assimilation of these ‘people’ are giving them the only chance they have to survive and one day be useful to society.

  In Thanks

  Doctor Des Asper

  Devil allowed himself a still, silent moment of self-satisfaction. Finally somebody appreciated his hard work and believed in the great, certainly critical, task he had undertaken. Even the government, who paid his bills, reluctantly paid his salary, funded the work, seemed uncertain of the overall validity of the project. It was popular with the Settlers, at least those who didn’t favour outright extermination of all the Natives, and no politician or bureaucrat had the courage to close his department, to cancel his project.

  A tiny bead of moisture fell from his face onto the card he had forgotten he was holding. How he hated the heat of this place. He was prone, when insufficiently in control of his thoughts and emotions, to ranting about the state of the weather, to the point where whoever was listening would do anything to shut him up. Why his people settled the place was beyond him – there was nothing, from what he had seen, but desert. Once they had settled there, his arrival had become almost inevitable. As much as he hated the weather, they needed him, or someone like him, to manage, protect and elevate the Natives.

  He had needed a promotion, they had needed a man, he had theories and ideas on how to perform the task before him. It was perfect. Or it would have been perfect if his office was not in the oven-hot, foul-smelling, fauna-infested dump where they had posted him.

  In a silence broken only by his rapid, excited breathing, he rose from his chair, slowly, laboriously, with self-enforced calm and patience. Nobody could know how excited he was at such praise. Carefully searching the walls he selected a place and pinned the card, writing out, next to a child’s drawing of a house and garden. There was not really any clear wall, this new addition obscured something less important.

  One day everyone will understand, even appreciate, what he has been doing with his life. When they do, his walls, his entire office, will be a museum, a shrine. Just as carefully, walking backwards so he could keep his eyes on his walls, he returned to his chair.

  Esperance had not slept well, again, the shouting and brawling had not ceased all night. Every time she tried to sleep she was woken by the clamour of voices and more than once the nauseating sound of fists pounding into flesh. Obviously someone, and she would find out who, had made it to a town and brought back some grog, either that or a smuggler, a trader had made it to their camp, had found them somehow.

  The grog smugglers always find them, and somehow the drinkers always find a way to pay for a drink. Everyone was hungry, everyone was always hungry, yet somehow someone, everyone, always found a way to get grog.

  There was little worse than the drunken fight over the last dregs of drink; grog seemed to destroy everyone’s sense of proportion and their self-control, they fought for it, some would die for it. Stopped dead in her thoughts, she prayed it was drink that had brought the fighting and the fights were over the last of it. There are worse poisons than drink, and worse disasters than it running out. If it had run out at least the immediate problem was over.

  Sighing she examined the shabby hovel she called home. She had seen other homes, real houses, from a distance, but she had never lived in one, never experienced four clean walls and a roof that did not leak. She had never even experienced a real floor, a clean floor, a hard floor, a floor not made of dirt. Everything was filthy, which is what happens when you live in dirt and can spare no water to wash anything, but at least nothing was broken. The single sheet of tin roofing held up with scraps of wood was at least still in place, giving the illusion of shelter if not the actuality of it.

  If it ever rained there it would doubtlessly destroy the illusion the roof was waterproof. If it actually rained she would have to patch all the holes, although the repairs never lasted long. When it rained, and at night, her shelter was essential but in the day it was no better, worse actually, than the shade of a tree. Uninsulated, made of tin, you could bake bread inside by midday. Once the daylight hit the roof she would have to get out and find some shade.

  Her meagre belongings were arranged carefully on an upturned wooden crate. She only owned what she could carry with her if they had to run, not that she had any way to get more stuff even if she wanted to. She knew where to find everything: the stub of candle she used on the rare times she needed light at night; a larger knife than the folding knife always in her pocket, scratched on the blade from constant sharpening on rocks; her tin cup; a carved wooden lizard as long as her forearm that was her only toy as a child and the only decoration in her adulthood.

  She lay watching the first light peeking through the gaps in her walls, making motes of dust glow and dance. There was no chance of returning to sleep now and nothing else to do, certainly no reason to just lie there. She slid out from under the pile of dusty blankets that had kept her alive another night in the desert cold. The cold at night, out there where they lived, always surprises the unprepared after the scorching, dry heat of the day.

  The eye-watering reek of a smouldering campfire wafted past as she clambered out of her shelter, stinging her tired eyes and surprising a weak cough from her lungs. The small fire pit, outside her hut, was cold, the ashes white. She rarely lit it when there was always a fire in the middle of camp. It was that pit in the middle of camp that was untended, smoking, stinking.

  In the pre-dawn light the camp looked like a battle had passed through; bodies lay around the fire wherever and however they had fallen. The first light of day glinted off fallen bottles, dropped casually when empty, at least none seemed to have been broken. In the dirt they lived in, broken glass could bury itself, not to be found until it entered someone’s foot, for shoes were hard to come by out here. Esperance was deeply relieved she would not be spending the day on hands and knees looking for shards of glass before they entered someone’s body.

  There was even less medical aid in camp than there were comfortable places to live.

  Nobody in the camp lived in buildings; Esperance’s hovel was not so much an example of the housing in the camp as it was something for people to aspire to. There were shacks of wood and canvas, always arrested in the act of slumping onto the ground, misshapen, bulging where the addition of sticks had been used in futile attempts to slow the collapse. There were sheets of tin like Esperance lived under, some of them on
ly held up, held in place, by a single prop of bent wood. No walls, nothing to keep out the wind or give the dwellers privacy. There were humpies and lean-tos of bark and sticks, almost waterproofed by the addition of leafy branches. Everywhere under the trees were shacks made of sticks and discarded hessian sacks.

  Here and there, in the half-light, she could see piles of blankets and belongings, some neat, some decidedly chaotic, where people, families, had failed to provide themselves with any sort of shelter at all. Those unfortunates who had no shelter and couldn’t convince someone else to share their home – she had seen families of six under a single sheet of tin – had to resort to sleeping wherever they could. If they were lucky they had a scrap of canvas with which they could waterproof their bedroll; a canvas tarp as a ground cover was a luxury.

  Fights over those scraps of canvas had kept her awake at night, many times. The issues most likely to cause long-term problems were also the issues most likely to cause fights, keeping Esperance awake at night. She was a great barometer of the camp’s problems, what friends she had could tell how the camp was faring by the size and colour of the black rings under her eyes.

  Esperance felt again the recurring guilt; she really should share her camp with someone, some homeless soul, someone with nowhere to sleep. Yet again she rejected the thought; she had tried sharing her scrap of shelter and the fights had nearly torn apart the camp. She liked people, that was not the problem, but she did not like people in her space, changing things, moving things. She realised every time she had someone else stay with her that either they would have to leave or she would, and she was not going to abandon her home. Curing someone else of homelessness by giving homelessness to herself would be a very stupid move.

  It did not take her long to find her grandfather. He lay, asleep or unconscious, on the ground along with most, if not all, the other men and some of the older women. Fortunately, he was near the campfire. Esperance was grateful for the warmth that would have kept him alive and somebody had thrown a blanket over him where he lay. Somebody clearly had a spare blanket, a rare thing out there, or one had been sacrificed.

  This was the strongest sign possible of the deep respect in which Grandfather was held. When she found out who had slept cold last night so Grandfather could be warm she would thank them profusely. She would also ensure their blanket was returned to them, which would not happen if she left it there.

  He was an old and frail man, all wrinkled skin and spindly limbs; what muscle he had was strung around his fragile-looking bones like rope. Nevertheless, Esperance made no attempt to carry him to his shack. She was as sick and malnourished as everybody else she knew; they were a desperate and destitute mob. There had not been enough food since they had been driven into this part of the desert by the relentless advance of the Settlers long before she was born. She had to wake him, help him to his bed; she gripped his shoulder lightly and gave an almost imperceptible shake.

  ‘Grandfather –’ she shook him again ‘– wouldn’t you rather be comfy in your bed, it might rain.’ She shook his shoulder slightly harder, pulling on it as if to lift him by that barely flesh-covered joint. Grandfather merely mumbled – sounds but no intelligible words, a long moan and some heavy breaths. ‘You shouldn’t have drunk so much, you are going to feel like shit later.’

  Releasing a toneless, formless litany of moans and grumbles he rose laboriously to his feet, helped by the loving hand of his granddaughter clamped firmly, respectfully, around his twiggy shoulder. His breath was light but laboured, as if fighting for every shallow inhalation he took.

  Bundling the blanket under her left arm – it would be safer in Grandfather’s shack until she found out whose it was – she held him up with her right. Several times they stumbled, tripping over detritus, human and otherwise, each near fall merely giving him something more to add to his constant, pained monologue, his speech rendered almost completely wordless by age, drink and the residue of sleep. It seemed an age, rather than only a few minutes, before Grandfather’s ragged, misshapen shack loomed out of the rapidly rising mist.

  ‘You are funny, Esperance,’ Grandfather mumbled, the words unexpectedly intelligible, ‘it’s not going to rain, it never rains here, that is why we are here, why we came here.’ It took Esperance a moment to think why he said that, to recall what he was responding to; his reaction had been slow enough to become disembodied, a non sequitur. As suddenly as the words had appeared they were buried once more under a mound of mumbles.

  At least he had a proper shack, a roof with four walls, which was more than pretty much anybody else in the camp had. Waterproofed with oiled cloth and scraps of metal sheeting it was almost certainly the oldest, and most liveable, structure in the camp. Grandfather had been the first to set up camp on the banks of this dry riverbed, sheltered and hidden by the giant twisted hulks of red gum trees, leading a small group of lost souls.

  For years, for decades, he had built, repaired and rebuilt his shack as others came to rest around him; repairing and rebuilding, helping others build, until old age and malnutrition began to take their toll. Every addition and repair to his shack was visible, the diverse collection of materials not quite blending together. They did not need to camouflage the building – it had little shape and colour to notice and already blended into its environment perfectly.

  The camp stretched out along the riverbank – if you could call the edge of a ribbon of red sand a riverbank – and part of the way into the trees on each side. A few dwellings even sat precariously on the riverbed itself. If and when the rain came those living in the river would be homeless again.

  Children had been born there, in the dirt under those trees, yet nobody really belonged. Everybody there had come from somewhere else, thrust together, unintentionally, by the Settlers who had merely pushed them away from their homes, expanding to cover more country. Others had arrived there running in terror, barely escaping the violence that had killed everybody they knew.

  Over the years the camp had grown to over a hundred refugees, all malnourished, all dirty, destitute and homeless. Among them there was likely not one, not even a child, who did not relish a thought of returning home one day, returning to wherever they had come from. Every child knew they did not belong there, on that dry riverbank, although every child had been born right there in camp.

  There were even some, like Esperance, whose parents had been born there, although she was the oldest of the second generation born in the camp. Although they had been there for years, decades, everybody knew they might have to run one day – that the Settlers could come, the Settlers would come. Their lives were partly those of settled refugees, partly those of fugitives on the run and, like all fugitives, they were paranoid.

  The sun was finally rising over the camp, casting that first warm light that filled the heart with hope while encasing the world in a soft glow, a light that blurs everything. Even the debris, the rubbish she knew to be scattered in almost every space between the humpies and shacks, was softened into insignificance and painted with a comfortable warm gold. The sun was higher already when she stepped back out through the patched hessian curtain that served her grandfather’s shack as a door.

  The marginally higher sun cast out a harsher light, thrusting fingers of shadow westward from every piece of fallen trash, every collapsed body too tired or still too drunk to stand. Stopping only once to pick up a dropped bottle, she made her way carefully through the mess to the riverbed, turned and walked upstream, or where upstream would be if there was water in the river. The last place to hold water every summer as the never plentiful water in the river dried up was a pool at the bend – now dried to nothing more than a slight darkening in the sand, shaded by overhanging trees, invisible to anyone who did not know where to look.

  She could only hope there was water still; it had been a couple of years since it had rained. Nobody could guess how long the last of their water would remain. If it ran out
they would need to go further in the search for water, or move camp completely.

  Someone had been busy before the grog had arrived and there was a small hole in the right place as wide as the length of her forearm and deep enough that it would reach her knees if she stood in it. At the bottom was a film of water over the damp sand, if she stuck her finger into the water it would reach to the first joint. She knelt in the soft, damp sand at the edge. Desperate not to tumble over the edge into the hole, careful also not to disturb the sand in the bottom, to muddy the precious water, she lowered the bottle into the hole. She pushed it into the damp sand until the water flowed in, held it there until the bottle was full.

  Drinking, she winced at the faint sweet taste of rough wine that the unclean bottle imparted on the water; it almost but didn’t quite cover the fainter taste of mud and dirt. Later that day, when more had been there to collect their water it would get dirtier, until it was the colour of the milky tea she had been fortunate enough to taste once, until only the desperate would drink it. For now it was drinkable, even if there was no certainty it was safe.

  The sun was completely risen, though still low on the horizon, its light cutting itself ragged through the bent, scraggly, dust-grey trees. It was early yet, but even these early shafts of light warned of the scorchingly hot day to come. Drinking down her grog-flavoured water she knelt to refill the bottle; she hadn’t found a cork in the dark so a broken stick was utilised, if not to hold the water in, to at least stop it sloshing out while she carried it carefully back to camp.

  Before the sun hit the waterhole it would need to be protected. Finding a broken branch with leaves still attached she covered the hole; it was not enough, the heat and the sun would still get in. A couple of leafy branches, from a tree across the river, were pulled down and broken off carefully to damage the precious trees as little as possible. The water should be protected by the green leaves almost as much as the sand had protected it before. If not, if it got too much hotter, the hole would have to be filled before midday once everybody had a chance to fill their bottles or to at least have a drink. Not everybody had bottles.