The Naked Country Read online

  MORRIS LANGLO WEST was born in St Kilda, Melbourne, in 1916. At the age of fourteen, he entered the Christian Brothers seminary ‘as a kind of refuge’ from a difficult childhood. He attended the University of Melbourne and worked as a teacher. In 1941 he left the Christian Brothers without taking final vows. During World War II West worked as a code breaker, and for a time he was private secretary to former prime minister Billy Hughes.

  After the war, West became a successful writer and producer of radio serials. In 1955 he left Australia to build an international career as a writer and lived with his family in Austria, Italy, England and the USA. West also worked for a time as the Vatican correspondent for the British newspaper, the Daily Mail. He returned to Australia in 1982.

  Morris West wrote 30 books and many plays, and several of his novels were adapted for film. His books were published in 28 languages and sold more than 70 million copies worldwide. Each new book he wrote after he became an established writer sold more than one million copies.

  West received many awards and accolades over his long writing career, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W.H. Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature for The Devil’s Advocate. In 1978 he was elected a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 1985, and was made an Officer of the Order (AO) in 1997.

  Morris West died at his desk in 1999.

  THE MORRIS WEST COLLECTION

  FICTION

  Moon in My Pocket (1945, as Julian Morris)

  Gallows on the Sand (1956)

  Kundu (1957)

  The Big Story (US title: The Crooked Road) (1957)

  The Concubine (US title: McCreary Moves In) (1958)

  The Second Victory

  (US title: Backlash) (1958)

  The Devil’s Advocate (1959)

  The Naked Country (1960)

  Daughter of Silence (1961)

  The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963)

  The Ambassador (1965)

  The Tower of Babel (1968)

  Summer of the Red Wolf (1971)

  The Salamander (1973)

  Harlequin (1974)

  The Navigator (1976)

  Proteus (1979)

  The Clowns of God (1981)

  The World is Made of Glass (1983)

  Cassidy (1986)

  Masterclass (1988)

  Lazarus (1990)

  The Ringmaster (1991)

  The Lovers (1993)

  Vanishing Point (1996)

  Eminence (1998)

  The Last Confession (2000, published posthumously)

  PLAYS

  The Illusionists (1955)

  The Devil’s Advocate (1961)

  Daughter of Silence (1962)

  The Heretic (1969)

  The World is Made of Glass (1982)

  NON-FICTION

  Children of the Sun (US title: Children of the Shadows) (1957)

  Scandal in the Assembly (1970, with Richard Frances)

  A View from the Ridge

  (1996, autobiography)

  Images and Inscriptions

  (1997, selected by Beryl Barraclough)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Terms used in the text do not always reflect current usage.

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin in 2017

  First published in Great Britain in 1960 by William Heinemann Ltd

  Copyright © The Morris West Collection 1960

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

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  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia www.trove.nla.gov.au

  Cover design: Julia Eim

  Cover image: Shutterstock

  ISBN 978 1 76029 758 9 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 1 76063 846 7 (ebook)

  for

  MELANIE JOY

  Welcome to a cock-eyed world

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  HE HAD been riding since dawn, away from the homestead, eastward towards the climbing sun. The river was at his left, a torpid snake, sliding noiselessly through the swamps and the lily-ponds and the floodplains green with the flush of wild rice. On his right was the fringe of paper-bark forest and, ahead, the gaunt heave of the escarpments, which were the beginning of the Stone Country.

  He sat loose in the saddle, long in the stirrup, head bent forward against the glare, his rangy body rolling to the ambling gait of the pony. Dust rose about him in small, grey eddies. Heat beat down on him from a steel-blue sky, parching his lips, searing his eyes, bleaching the moisture out of his brown, leathery skin; but he rode on, tireless and patient, towards the red ridges where the spinifex grew out of the stones, and the wollybutts thrust their roots into cracks and crannies of the sandstone.

  His name was Lance Dillon, and he held title, along with a pastoral mortgage company, to Minardoo, newest and smallest station on the southern fringe of Arnhem Land. He was thirty-seven years of age, which is late enough for a man to come into the cattle business and set himself in competition with the big syndicates and the old families who are the kings of the Australian North-West.

  Twenty miles behind him, the aboriginal stockboys were fanning out, north, south and west, to begin the muster, which is the yearly prelude to the long trek to the railhead. They would brand the new stock, cull out the scrub-bulls, stringy cross-blooded sires who might taint the breeds – then begin herding back towards the homestead. Lance Dillon was the boss-man, staff-general of this wide-flung operation, but today he was riding away from it, intent on a private business of his own.

  To the newcomer, the cattle country promised little but debt and disillusion. The syndicates held most of the land, and the best of it. They had easiest access to port and railhead. They kept priorities over trucking and shipping space. They had first call on experience and man-power, and above all, they had capital – money for pasture improvement, water conservation, transport, slaughter-yards and freezing plants. They could kill their own beef, chill it and fly it straight to the holds of waiting ships, while the small man must drive his steers a hundred and fifty miles and watch his profits decrease with every pound they lost on the trek.

  It was a gambler’s business and the winnings went to the man who could sit longest on his cards. Lance Dillon knew it as well as the next, yet he had spent his last shilling and mortgaged himself to the neck to buy into the game. He had reasoned long and logically that the only answer for the small man was better bloodlines: stock bred to the climate with its monsoon summer and its parching dry season, resistant to ticks and parasites, growing meat instead o
f sinew, and hardy enough to hold their poundage on the gruelling drive to the railhead yards.

  And this was the reason for his ride to the ridge on the edge of the Stone Country. Behind the first escarpment was a valley, a land-locked basin, watered by a spring that gurgled up perennially from some underground source. There were shade trees and sweet grass, where a new and noble sire could breed his wives in comfort, free from the raids of scrub-bulls and dingoes, untouched by the parasites that bred in the swamp-pastures by the river. Behind the red-brick wall were three thousand pound’s worth of blood bull and fifty first-class cows ready to calve. If his judgment had been right, it was the first smell of success, and he could soon spit in the eye of the financiers who kept him close to strangling point when all he needed was two years without their thumbs on his throat.

  He reined in the pony, dismounted and unhooked the canvas water-bag from his saddle. He took off his hat, half filled it with water and held it under the animal’s muzzle until the last drop was gone. Afterwards, he held the bag to his own lips, threw back his head and took a long, grateful swallow…

  It was then that he saw the smoke, a thin high-rising column, over the saddle of the hill. He cursed quietly, jammed the stopper back into the water-bag, hoisted himself into the saddle and set off at a smart canter.

  The smoke had only one meaning: the myalls were in the valley, and he wanted them out of it as quickly as possible.

  There was nothing singular or sinister in this presence of tribal aborigines on homestead property. All this land was blackfellow country and the myalls – the tribal nomads who lived resolutely apart from the white settlements – had ranged it for centuries. They were the most primitive people in the world, who had never built a house nor made a wheel, nor learned the use of clothing. Their weapons were spears and clubs and boomerangs and implements of stone. They slept on the ground, naked as Adam. They ate kangaroo and buffalo and reptiles and grubs and yams and lily roots and honey plundered from the wild bees. They ranged free as animals within their tribal areas, and the only signs of their passing were the ashes of their camp-fires or a windbreak of branches, or a body wrapped in bark and perched in the fork of a tree. Sometimes, if game were scarce, they might kill a steer or a scrub-bull from the white man’s herds, but this was a convention of existence with no hostility on either side.

  Lance Dillon understood the primitive rights of the nomads and respected them: but the valley was his own domain, and he wanted it private to himself. His word had gone out to the tribal elders and, until this moment, they had respected it. The smoke, rising above the ridges, was a kind of defiance which puzzled him. More, it was a symbol of danger. A camp-fire might grow to a grass fire which would destroy his pasture in a night. The myalls saw no difference between bloodstock and bush buffalo, and this herd was for breeding – not for blackfellow meat.

  The thought was painful to him, and he urged the pony into a lathering gallop which brought him swiftly to the foot of the sandstone escarpment where a narrow gorge marked the entrance to the valley.

  Dillon’s face clouded when he saw that the log barrier had been torn down and the thorn-bush palisade pushed to one side. Thoughtfully, he walked the pony past the logs and brushwood and inward towards the basin, where the gorge opened out into a small, grassy knoll, twenty feet above the valley floor. When he reached it, he reined in and looked across the green amphitheatre, gape-mouthed with shock and fury.

  There was a hunting party of eight or ten myalls, husky, naked bucks, armed with spears and clubs and throwing sticks. Three of them had worked the cows and the calves away from the bull and into a blind corner of the valley. The others were circling the bull, who, well fed and satiated, was watching them with hostile eyes. Before Dillon had time to open his mouth, there were three spears in the great animal, and two men with clubs were battering at his hindquarters to bring him down.

  For one suspended moment, Dillon sat, paralysed by the sight of the senseless slaughter. Then, with a wild howl of anger, he clapped spurs into the pony and went racing down the incline, towards the myalls. As he galloped, he wrenched the stockwhip from his saddle and whirled its long lash, trying to cut them down. They scattered at his approach, and his momentum carried him through and beyond them, while the dying bull bellowed and tried to raise itself on its forelegs. Dillon wheeled sharply and charged again, flailing at them with his whip, but before he had gone twenty yards a spear caught him in the right shoulder, so that he dropped the whip and almost toppled from the saddle. Another flew over his head, a third carried away his hat and the three bucks came running in as reinforcements, so that he knew they would kill him if he stayed.

  Gasping with pain, he wrenched the pony’s head round and galloped him back towards the defile, with the bellows of the dying bull in his ears and the spear-haft dangling from the bloody wound in his left shoulder.

  The myalls followed him, running, right to the mouth of the defile, then they turned back to the slaughter of the great bull for which Dillon had paid three thousand pounds.

  For the first wild minutes of his flight, Dillon was incapable of coherent thought. Anger, pain, and a blind animal urge to self-preservation, drove him headlong through the gorge and out towards the shelter of the paper-bark trees. He was a mile away from the valley before he slackened rein and let the jaded pony’s head droop, while he slumped wearily in the saddle and tried to take command of himself.

  The wound in his shoulder forced itself first on his attention. It was deep and painful, and bleeding profusely. The barbed spear had torn through the shoulder muscles and the drag of the hanging haft was an intolerable agony. He could not hope to ride twenty miles like this under a noon sun. Yet to rid himself of the spear would call for a surgery more brutal than the wound itself. It could not be pulled out, the barbs would lacerate muscle and sinew. The haft must be broken off and the head forced clean through his body until it could be drawn out in front. The mere contemplation of the operation made him dizzy and sick. He closed his eyes and been his head almost to the saddle pommel, until the faintness passed.

  His thoughts leapt back to the valley and anger seemed to pump new strength into his body. The slaughter of the bull made a monstrous mockery of all his hopes and plans. He was finished, cleaned out, ready for the bailiffs…because a bunch of meat-hungry myalls wanted to show their maleness by cutting down the master of the herd.

  Then a new thought struck him. They weren’t meat hungry at all. The grass flats were full of game, kangaroo and wallaby and stray steers. There were geese on the billabongs and fish in the river reaches. No need for the largest tribal unit to go hungry.

  There was more, much more to the killing of the king beast and the attack on his own person. There was deliberate trespass – against the elders and against himself. He remembered that all the bucks had been young ones, sleek-skinned, fast on their feet, aggressive. The old ones understood the conventions of co-existence with the whites. They knew the power of the North-West police: solitary, relentless men who would follow a man for months to exact the penalty of rebellion. Tribal killings were one thing, but violence against the white man was quite another, and the old men wanted no part in it.

  The young ones thought differently. They resented the authority of the elders. They resented still more the presence of the strangers on their tribal preserves. The sap ran strongly under their dark skins and they must prove to themselves and to their women that they were men who would one day rule in the councils of the tribe. They were not fools. When the first blood heat had subsided they would see how far they had fallen under the displeasure of the old ones, and how the vengeance of the white man would fall on the whole tribe. So they would become cunning and try to conceal their trespass.

  Then, Dillon knew, they would try to kill him and hide his body, so that no one would know for certain how he had died.

  Fear took hold of him again, a cramp in the belly, a cold constriction round his heart. Instinctively, he looked back t
owards the ridge, to see, silhouetted against the skyline, a solitary figure, trailing a bundle of throwing-spears in one hand, and with the other shading his eyes as he scanned the spreading plain below. Dillon urged the pony deeper into the shadows of the paper-barks and halted again to consider the situation.

  Soon they would begin to follow him, tracking him like a bush animal by hoof-pad and chipped stone and broken twig and the ants clustered over his blood-drops. They would circle between him and the homestead, cutting off his retreat, and if he tried to out-distance them they would find him the sooner, because a fresh bushman could last longer than a jaded horse and a rider wounded and rocking in the saddle.

  The river was his one hope. It would break his tracks and water his pony and cleanse his wound. Its tropical shore-growth would shelter him while he rested and, with luck and a care for his strength, he might work his way down-stream back to the homestead. It was a slim chance; but the strength was draining out of him with the slow seep of blood under his shirt. Now, or never, he must make the move, heading southward in a wide arc so that the trees would shelter him as long as possible. The course would take him five miles farther up-stream, but he dared not risk a break across open country to the nearer reaches.

  He took a long drink from the water-bottle, tightened the reins in his left hand and, with the spear still jolting pitilessly in his back, set off through the grey trees towards the distant water.

  Mundaru, the Anaburu man, squatted on a flat limestone ledge and watched the white man ride away. He could not see him, but his progress was plainly marked by the shift of a shadow among the tree-boles, the rise of a flock of parrots, the panic leap of a grey wallaby out of the timber-line. The progress was slow, and would get slower yet, but the direction of it was clear. He was heading towards the river.

  Mundaru noted these things calmly, without rancour or jubilation, as he would have noted the movements of a kangaroo or a bush turkey. He calculated how long it would take his quarry to reach the water, and how long more it would take him to work his way down-stream to the point where Mundaru planned to intercept and kill him. There was no malice in the equation. It was part of the mathematics of survival, like the slaying of the newborn in time of drought, like the killing of a woman who dared to look upon the dream-time symbols that only a man must see. Dillon had been a little right and more than half wrong in his judgment of Mundaru and his associates. Their entry into the valley had not been a trespass but a ritual return to an old and sacred place where the spirit people lived. An order to stay away from it was meaningless. It was a place to which they belonged – a question not of possession, but of identity. The ridges which Dillon saw simply as a pen for his stud were a honeycomb of caves whose walls were covered with totem drawings, the great snake, the kangaroo, the turtle, the crocodile and the giant buffalo, Anaburu, which was Mundaru’s own totem, the source of his existence, the symbol of his personal and tribal relationship.