Moonlight Downs Read Free

property was taken over by a hard-nosed bastard by the name of Brick Sivvier. The Warlpuju, whose language makes no distinction between p and b, called him Prick, which wasn’t that far off the mark.
    Within a month of his arrival Sivvier had turfed everybody, black and white, off the place and brought in his own people, from Queensland. For me, this meant being shipped off to boarding school in Adelaide. For my father it meant transforming what had been a part-time interest—gold mining—into the full-time occupation that would eventually make his small fortune. For the Warlpuju it meant leaving their homeland for the ten-year exile in boozy, brutal Bluebush.

    Still, I reflected as I relaxed at the wheel of my ute, knees on the dash, fag hanging off my mouth, they can’t be doing too badly if they can enjoy themselves this much.
    Bindi’s clutch had packed it in, as a result of which he couldn’t change out of first gear. Nor could he stop, since he wouldn’t be able to start again so he circled slowly around us like a great clanking buzzard, cracking jokes and occasionally flushing the old boys out of the bushes.
    ‘Aaaiiyy!’ yelled Bindi. ‘This drivin round in circle tangle up my brain…’
    My passengers gave up their various diversions and clambered back aboard. We inscribed a slow circle in the dust and headed for home, swapping insults, oranges, tobacco and, occasionally, passengers, as the kids took whatever opportunity arose to make death-defying leaps between the two cars.
    We were running along the foot of Jimpili Hill, almost back at the camp, when something—a shift in the noise level, a subtle tension in the air—made me look up.
    There was a row of rocks on top of the hill, or what I took to be a row of rocks until one of them moved. The figure rose to its feet and bellowed, ‘ Kantiya! ’—stop there!—in a voice as deep and dark as a valley full of thunder.
    My heart sank as he drew closer and I recognised him: he was a tall, powerful man encased in rags, fur and army surplus, a tuft of owl feathers in his headband, a rifle across his shoulders, a pack of ratty dogs at heel.
    Blakie Japanangka.

A reading from the book of Blakie

    BLAKIE STRODE down the slope, all windmilling arms and blowabout rags, red dust boiling behind and a fleet of flies scudding above. Around his neck was a quartz crystal on a hairstring necklace. His daks were held up with a length of fencing wire, his chest jangled with a bandolier full of filthy knives. A bloody snake’s head wobbled out of a coat pocket. In his left hand he held a huge fighting stick.
    ‘Oh no!’ I groaned to Lincoln. I’d forgotten about Blakie. ‘Hasn’t anyone put him out of our misery yet?’
    Lincoln clicked his tongue, sighed fleetingly. A sign of disapproval perhaps, though whether of Blakie’s arrival or my lack of respect for an elder was unclear.
    Growing up on Moonlight we were forever being threatened and regaled with tales of the demons who lurked in the bush at night, monsters with snakes in their hair and crystals in their eyes, fabulous creatures who’d rip your head off if they caught you dreaming in the wrong direction.
    These stories were presumably no more than standard Warlpuju fear-mongering, but I thought they’d all come to life at once on that distant winter night when Blakie first wandered into camp.
    I remember lying in the swag with Hazel, terrified, as he stomped from fire to fire and sent a withering blast of invective at the bewildered Warlpuju.
    ‘Fuckin sea comin,’ he growled, ‘flood water risin, green sea roar, wash away white man, wash away blackfeller white as a ghost inside…’
    Blakie’s physical presence was bad enough, but infinitely worse were the whispers that followed him.
    Blakie was a sorcerer.
    Sorcerers out here can cure you or kill you, depending on the mood, and Blakie’s mood tended to swing towards the murderous end of the scale.
    He was occasionally called upon to save the