Benang Extracts - novel by Kim Scott

Sandy One was washed up, rolled in the beach sand.

It is a powerful place he was washed into and upon. It is so powerful that when I first went back there the birds spoke to me. Looking east we saw, through the sea haze, a headland far across the bay.

It was very cold when the dolphins brought Sandy One to the fire on the beach, where one man stood, singing and tapping sticks. There were others hiding there, waiting to spear the salmon the dolphins herded in. But this time there were no salmon, because the dolphins had brought a sick whale with them. It had a spear in it, and a rope at the end of which was tangled a sandy-haired man. He seemed like he was asleep, and the rope was wrapped around his arm.

That blond man was washed up here in this place now called Dolphin Cove, and he knew nothing. He didn't know what was going on. He lay down and was rolled in the white sand, and he crawled to the creek. His skin was all loose and wrinkled and pale, as if it did not fit him, as if he had shrivelled within it.

Like myself, caught up in a long and most unbecoming process, he had returned.

Fanny must have known it, been told.

Whether they were the dead returned, or not, they brought death with them. And the world changing all the time. After all it was she--variously named in the documents as Pinyan, Benang, Wonyin, Winnery--who became, simply, Fanny Mason.

Her people. Then came the whalers and sealers. Bits of the islands detaching themselves, and bearing these mostly white skinned ones ashore. Those skins the colour of ... skins like the sky, sometimes; like clouds, with the sun on them.

In the sun, those sails like bleached skin, billowing, blowing to us in the sea breeze.

As a little girl, for a long time she was among those kept out of sight. But there were fewer and fewer available to give such shelter.

Let us disregard those shot, brain-bashed, stolen. Forget those poisoned, those chained and force-fed with salt until they led the way to water.

Forget whalers, sealers, explorers, assorted adventurers.

Fanny Benang Mason saw her people fall; saw them trembling, nervous, darting glances all about them. Some became swollen, felt themselves burning up. Their skin--too hot to touch--erupted in various forms of sores. People itched, and scratched the skin away, and writhed on the ground with their arses raw from so much shitting, until eventually even that ceased and there was only an ooze of mucus and blood.

And always, again and again, even in Grandad's sources, but never underlined. They shot a lot.

Children, becoming white, gathering at the woodheap, learned to work for indifferent and earnest fathers.

Yes, the birth of even an unsuccessfully first-white-man-born-in-the-family-line has required a lot of death, a lot of space, a lot of emptiness. All of which I have had in abundance.

And also--it must be said--some sort of luck. I mean in that I am still here, however too-well disguised.

Uncle Jack said to me, `To start with, what you are is a Nyoongar.'