Carpentaria Read Online Free PDF Page B

was never going to stop. She was yelling through spit, asking who that woman thought she was: The bloody nobody. When Angel Day said the woman looked like a fat white pig eating up the traditional owner’s country, the woman said she was going to fix Mrs High and Bloody Mighty, once and for all. What happened then was the war started again. Imagine that. Precarious modernity squashed by hostilities dormant for four hundred years, and Angel Day started it up again over an old clock and a statue. Probably all wars start off by a bit of taunting like this.
    Everyone began picking up weapons the ancient way, arming themselves with whatever they could lay their hands on. People and children were running around, picking up lumps of wood, iron bars, or else brown beer bottles picked up and broken along the neck. Everywhere, all you could hear was the sound of bottles being smashed. When all the memories of that day had faded away, that sound of glass smashing still haunted everyone.
    You see, all the alliances had to be weighed up then and there and on the spot. People who had been getting on well, living side by side for decades, started to recall tribal battles from the ancient past. It was unbelievable, but Angel Day was standing there oblivious, hugging her statue, and telling people to get off her land. There were little black flies swarming all over her face but she took no notice. Nobody had seemed to notice the fly squadrons soaring into the air as though struck by an electrifying volatility; as they swarmed up, they were drawn like magnets to the hot smell of human skin, and thousands buzzed around people’s faces.
    The old people believed in phenomena as great as this, and said the flies had been drawn up through the centuries to join the battle. They claimed the spirits would never let you forget the past. They drew lines in the dirt, calling people out from the shadows of complacency, Get it straight where you belong . People must have felt the chilly spike prodding them to arm, to prepare them to add another chapter in the old war. Otherwise they might have never known how to go to war in the way of the old people. Living in harmony in fringe camps was a policy designed by the invader’s governments, and implemented, wherever shacks like Angel Day’s swampside residences first began to be called a community. The old people wrote about the history of these wars on rock.
    Now, centuries later the poor things had turned up with nothing fancy, not one of them weighed down with the spoils of war to live in the Pricklebush, yet carrying a heavy weight all the same. Angel Day’s heart was big and ignorant in those days, but she believed she filled the shoes of Normal’s grandfather, who had been the keeper of this land. No one entered these parts without first speaking their business to the keeper, and to her mind, she was it. She welcomed those who walked heavy with the inheritance of antiquity stashed in their bones. Pride swelled up inside her when she saw those with a landscape chiselled deep into their faces and the legacy of ancestral creation loaded into their senses. She guarded those whose fractured spirits cried of rape, murder and the pillage of their traditional lands. Over time, they all became fringe dwellers living next to the rich white man’s municipality, all squatting next to Angel Day’s lake, on her so-called land, where she reigned like a queen over her dominion. And the domiciated? Well! They ignored her.
    It is hard to determine how sides were forged, but when the fighting began, the blood of family ties flew out of the veins of people, and ran on the ground just like normal blood, when face and limbs are cut like ribbons with broken glass, or when the body has been gouged with a piece of iron, or struck on the head over and over with a lump of wood. Angel Day did not fight because she was still hugging onto her statue and encouraging the human explosion to take hold. It was like sinking an