Sunset at Coonawarra was sublime. The harsh daylight and perpetual dust momentarily forgotten. The falling sun hit the rocky range and the skies danced from crimson to vermillion. A thrum of cicadas replaced the chorus of laughing kookaburras. “How good?” thought Craig, as he sank into his grandfather’s rocker on the property’s veranda, savouring his chilled Tooheys.
Then one sunset at Coonawarrah turned the red skies black.
“Boss, boss, come quickly!” said Big Foot, Craig’s right-hand man.
“What’s the John Dory mate?”
Craig was exhausted from moving 100 cattle from the drought threatened field 50 kilometres away. A long day on his Kawasaki, the stockmen on horses.
“Birrani, he not moving. I think he moved on Boss”.
The concern mapped across Big Foot’s sun etched face made Craig run to the isolation cell.
Blackfellas had always been a reliable workforce. Craig treated them fairly with weekly rations, traditional humpies and seasonal work. His family had worked this land for three generations. They hadn’t sold out to the big mining companies like some of his friends – now bored, coke addicted, millionaires in the city. A proud countryman, after finishing boarding school in Toowoomba, he was back to the station like a boomerang. The red dust of Coonawarra ran through his veins.
All the emerging land rights nonsense didn’t worry him. Aboriginal people may have been here first, but they were not the ‘traditional owners’ of the land now. Without Whitefellas building schools, hospitals, art galleries, museums and vast outback stations this would all be just wasteland. Not to mention the proper justice system with courts, based on laws from the old country. Unlike like the Aboriginal Payback system organised around community councils, whose only law seems to be “where grievance exists, payback is expected”. Like that was going to solve anything…
Birrani was indeed dead. His coal black skin matched the dirt floor of the 6 ft square concrete bunker. It was only meant to be a short punishment. Birrani was on the grog again after his uncle had died of liver cancer on an adjacent property. Sorry Business they called it. The wailing went on for days. Craig was not sorry when he called for Birrani’s return after a week. But the drinking didn’t stop. Stolen rations and a threat to burn down the Boss house meant Craig had to put Birrani in Time Out. Most blackfellas were fine in the cell for 1-2 days, but not this time.
Big Foot had warned him against it.
“Bad time for him Boss, let him go walk it out”.
But even one blind drunk blackfella felt like a threat. Apart from Doreen, his aging housekeeper, he was outnumbered twenty to one.
Craig strained at the bark that tied his naked body to the gum tree. The scent of eucalyptus sickened him. The laughing kookaburras mocked him. A lizard scurried across his toes. In the drowning red light he saw five spears arching through the air towards him.
Sunset at Coonawarra.
