The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish Read Free Page A

changes in the wider world, the Mokambo steamed into Sydney Harbour. She passed through the heads in the dead of night, and
the first Archie knew of being home—if that’s indeed where he was—was the stench
of coal smoke. He sat on deck in the predawn darkness, observing the city lights
through the grimy atmosphere.
    It had been, he recalled, Professor Radcliffe-Brown who’d encouraged him to go to
the Venus Isles. He had the ear of both the museum’s director, Dr Vere Griffon, and
Cecil Polkinghorne, the museum’s anthropologist, to whom Archie had been apprenticed.
And so, just four years after having arrived at the museum as a fifteen-year-old
cadet, Archie was granted study leave to go to the islands.
    The Venus Isles had a bad reputation. But in 1911 the Reverend E. Gordon-Smythe had
brought Christ to the natives, and it was generally believed that headhunting had been curbed, if not entirely eliminated. Most families would have been concerned
to see their son shipping for such a place, but the Meeks were a hard, unsympathetic
people. He couldn’t remember hearing a kind farewell from his parents, or from his
four brothers.
    ‘Study the culture, Archie. Note everything, and bring a rational, detached mind
to your work,’ Radcliffe-Brown advised. It only now dawned on Archie that, instead,
he’d lived the culture. But he had done one important thing. He’d made a collection.
And what a collection it was!

Chapter 2

    As the sun rose over South Head, Archie made arrangements to clear his collection
and personal effects through customs, and he set off in his ridiculously small, patched
suit, on a leisurely meander towards the museum. After five unconstrained years his
feet were so broad that his shoes pinched him wickedly, forcing him to adopt a strange,
limping gait. People stared as he passed. Brown-skinned with hair uncut, he felt—and
looked like—a stranger in his own city.
    Had he forgotten, or perhaps never realised, how bleak it all was? There were no
trees—no plants but weeds to soften the bare asphalt, dilapidated houses and overhead
tangles of poles and wires. Even Hyde Park looked naked, its southern end turned
into a morass by construction works for a new war memorial. He remembered the endless
fundraising and planning for the monument, and was glad to see that building had
commenced.
    In front of the stately Burns Philp building stood a slender figure, balanced on
short sticks and with a dead bird perched on its head. Its face was flawless, as
pale as a corpse, and its fingernails and lips were as red as if dipped in fresh
blood. Unnervingly, its eyes were surrounded with a strange purple glow. It took
Archie a moment to realise that she was only a very fashionable young lady, albeit
heavily made up, wearing high heels and a bird-of-paradise hat. He wanted nothing
more than to grab Sangoma and shout, ‘Look at that, Uncle! You think you look fine
with a pig’s tusk stuck through your nose and a few tattoos on your face. Well, it’s
we Sydney people who really know how to dress up! Just look at that young woman.
Now, she is flash!’
    The more Archie saw, the more he became amazed. In Macquarie Street there’d been
a noticeable shift from hansom cabs to motor vehicles. And the men, in their grey
suits and fedoras, moved like autumn leaves before the storm. He saw a banker with
an expensive briefcase, a doctor with his trademark Gladstone bag, and a ritual leader
in his black cassock.
    At last Archie reached the museum. He paused before its column-flanked entrance.
The place was a temple to nature, modelled along classical lines and constructed
in a golden age when upstart colonies had vied to impress the motherland. Its doors,
tradition had it, were tall enough to admit a brontosaurus, and wide enough for a
blue whale.
    Archie’s eye caught a movement. A sparrow hopped in the roadway, its confidence and
smart black bib making it as much a city slicker as the banker with his briefcase.
The