LIGHTNING MINE

To Roslyn

Table of Contents

Title Page

LIGHTNING MINE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY ONE

TWENTY TWO

TWENTY THREE

TWENTY FOUR

TWENTY FIVE

TWENTY SIX

TWENTY SEVEN

TWENTY EIGHT

TWENTY NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY ONE

THIRTY TWO

THIRTY THREE

THIRTY FOUR

THIRTY FIVE

THIRTY SIX

THIRTY SEVEN

THIRTY EIGHT

THIRTY NINE

AN AFTERWORD

Cover photograph courtesy of freepik.com

I have to thank the following people who helped me during the long process of creating this book: my son, James McLaren, who waited patiently for answers from me when I stared at him blankly; my daughter, Tanya McLaren, for her support and mature understanding of what it is I do; Christine and Alan Jackson for their expert sailing advice and the personal San Francisco reconnoitres; to Geoff Garden at the Darwin Bureau of Meteorology for his expert advice about the natural phenomenon of lightning and about storms of the Namarrkon region; Jennifer Isaacs, Albert Barunga and Sam Woolgoodja for their written and verbal advice about Wandjina and Namarrkon; Tracey Christensen, the most expert of manuscript readers; Belinda Lee a gifted editor with style; and Jill Hickson, my agent, for providing the business balm and acumen necessary for a writer to succeed.

Finally, I wish to acknowledge the Aboriginal people of Australia who are a source of constant inspiration for any writer, especially this Koori. As a kid growing up in the slums of Redfern I hoped one day someone would tell Australian stories from an Aboriginal perspective. As an adult, while living overseas, I realised I could be that storyteller.

This is a novel in which all characters and incidents are taken from my imagination. Any similarity between living characters or those deceased is coincidental.

However, Blackfellow Creek, Gibb River and King Edward River are real places and are actual sites of sacred Wandjina paintings. It is a delicious irony that the three sites do really sit on a straight line at longitude 128° 30' as I have written in my story. I discovered this by pure chance when studying a detailed map of the region.

ONE

Northern Territory, Australia.

Aaron Shoemaker, an American mining surveyor, had lost his survival pack, had no water or food and sat for hours, nearly naked, in the centre of the northern Australian highway. He clutched a satchel filled with small stones and plants that hung from his shoulder, his skin was festered, blackened and burned but he was alive. Speaking incoherent nonsense, he watched flies swarming on his open sores as a semi-trailer slid to a stop on the rust coloured road in front of him. The driver and his offsider quickly lifted him onto the back seat of their air conditioned cabin and sped him away toward Oenpelli, in the direction from which the delirious man had just walked.

Shoemaker mumbled, his tongue swollen, before he fell face down across the cool vinyl seat, unconscious.

'Don di of lee... lee... God!' he said before he fell.

'Jees-us!... what d'ya reckon happened here?' asked the thin, red-haired driver of his mate.

The fat one thought for a while before answering.

'Fucked if I know,' he said. 'I'm radioing the cops.'

He took the CB radio handset from its cradle with the authority of a Qantas pilot and called the township ahead using the emergency band.

It was a hundred and two and the humidity had remained constant for days at ninety per cent. The unsealed road, the main highway across the top end of Australia, was regularly ploughed down to the hard seam of clay, but the red, powdery dirt found its way back onto the surface making traction difficult for vehicular traffic of any sort. The truck carried liquor supplies to stores in the small towns from Darwin to Gove; on the way back they usually carried mining company goods, furniture and Aboriginal artifacts. In the wet season the roads were impassable and so the drivers became marooned for days in whatever town was near - which is one of the reasons they didn't carry perishables. In any event, the drivers knew they would soon be made redundant, everything would be flown in and out: economics demonstrated the profit-to-cost ratios of transporting goods by road were now equal to those of air freight; and air was much quicker.

The heavily weighted trailer swayed from side to side on the dry, slippery surface and the red-haired, freckled man fought hard to counter each movement. The driver certainly  his wages, it was a difficult job keeping the big rig on the dirt roads.

'See if he'll drink,' the driver said.

The fat man pulled a bottle of water from a chilled box on the floor in front of the rear seat and pushed at Shoemaker's shoulder. He didn't react at all. 'He's out for the fuckin' count,' he said, falling back into his seat and facing the front.

The men sat in silence asking questions of themselves, listening to the random rhythms of the rig. Ahead the sky was clear, blue and bright; behind, rolling white clouds were filling with moisture from the tropical waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria, forming distinct shapes: cartoon faces, chickens, nude women. Suddenly, Aaron Shoemaker sat upright and shouted.

'Stop! Pick them up. Pick them up!'

The startled men looked to where Aaron was pointing but could see no one.

'Hey you! Sit down, you're not too fuckin' good in the head mate. Here... have some water,' the fat man insisted.

He offered the chilled water to Aaron who took it and drank thirstily. Then, as they negotiated a turn in the road, Aaron leaned forward again pointing and shouting. 'There!... there they are. Pick them up!'

A hundred metres ahead, at the side of the road in the shade of a small leafy tree, sat two Aborigines: a man and a woman. Traditional blacks, they were totally naked with their swags beside them.

'Pick them up!'

'No fuckin' way,' the fat man said. 'We don't pick no one up. You're different, you're one of us. Can't see leaving you out there to fuckin' die, could we? No... we don't pick up no fuckin' blacks, that's it.' Then he turned to his work mate for confirmation. 'Right Blue?'

'Fuckin' right!' the driver said pushing on the accelerator. 'Don't worry about them mate, they know how to live out here. They'll be okay.'

'No... stop!' Aaron shrieked and pulled at the steering wheel.

The driver jumped on the brake pedal and the high-pitched shrill of the air brakes screamed across the plain. The steel of the heavy trailer clanged as the truck skidded and jack-knifed, making a vee shape behind the cabin. Dust spewed high in the air and the Aborigines stood in fright as the rig and trailer dug a deep trough into the high ridge of red dirt at the side of the road and began rolling.

Debris flew about the cabin. The ice box spilled its contents; bottles and plastic lunch containers burst open spilling food everywhere. The glove box had jarred open; maps, cigarettes, a flashlight, can opener and other smaller objects hit the men as they were propelled forward onto the windscreen. Aaron's face was pressed against the fat man's back as they flew forward hitting the glass windshield and became airborne, leaving the cabin together. The driver locked his arms straight and pushed against the steering wheel until it snapped away, then he also flew, head first, through the windshield opening.

The truck rolled one more time then stopped. The trailer had twisted at the joint to the driver's cabin, the inverted cabin rocked slowly, balancing precariously as the wheels continued to spin.

Within seconds everything was quiet again on the grassy expanse. Soft breezes swept past the tangled wreck and its disgorged cargo. Viewed from a distance, the red dust rising high in the blue sky was like the smoke from some mystical, sorcerer's fire. Suddenly, an almighty explosion sent a shock wave across the spinifex plain. The truck's fuel tank had ignited.

Night had already fallen by the time the Oenpelli police could send a helicopter in search of the truck and the men who'd called them earlier. When the police landed beside the road next to the burnt-out wreck they found two men - the red-haired driver and the fat man. Their flesh was reduced to a charred mass grotesquely fused to their skeletal remains.

Aaron Shoemaker was nowhere to be seen.

TWO

One week earlier.

Millie had delayed dinner for two hours but Jarra hadn't shown up. It wasn't unusual for him to arrive home late. She began to worry. She didn't think he was running around with other women, she worried about his safety. She had found it necessary on two occasions to phone the local hospital to find out if he had been admitted as a road accident patient.

Millie was a sports woman, a track star in high school, but she never pursued her sporting career despite holding the state junior record for the hundred metres. Until recently she played A-grade tennis and basketball; her basketball team had won the previous year's Coca-Cola State Cup. Her mother sacrificed everything for her six children - Millie was her only daughter - and while she would never say anything to the contrary, she was reliving her life through Millie, always giving her special concessions. She learned that a lot of Europeans did this too.

Millie often reminisced about the hard times when she was a girl, especially when she attended high school in Darwin. Like most Aboriginal families they struggled against poverty. Her father often accepted work in another city and was away for months at a time, while her mother took in washing and ironing from families on the naval base; this eventually led to a permanent separation of her parents, though they never divorced.

Half the time, as a child, Millie would leave home in the morning having not eaten breakfast because there simply was no food in the house. Her mother would be near delirium from the anxiety but vowed to each child on such days that she would meet them at the front gate of the school with something to eat at lunchtime. Millie never knew how her mother did it but she was always there, she never let them down. Usually they ate lunch together while the boys ran back into the school grounds. She would ask Millie to tell her details about her day and beam as she visualised every story her daughter told.

*

When her mother fell in love, disaster came to Millie and her family. It happened after a series of coincidences. They were living at the edge of town in a two room shack; her mother, Rita, had gone to the shops and Millie had joined the neighbourhood kids playing cricket on the dirt road near the old wooden bridge. In the distance a car raised dust as it sped  toward the cricket pitch. The garbage bin, which acted as the wicket, was picked up by one of the boys and carried to the side of the road. As the car got nearer it slowed, then stopped in the middle of the ring of kids. A black man put his head out of the window and called to them.

'Any of you kids know Rita Unaburra?'

All the kids crowded to the driver's side of the car.

'That's my mother,' Millie called from the back of the group. 'What do you want her for?'

'I've got a message for her... from your dad.'

'My dad?'

The man pulled the car to the side of the road and got out. He was a tall, thin man with long hair tied back; he wore a pristine white business shirt, jeans and high-heeled, crimson cowboy boots.

'Which place is your place then?' he asked Millie.

'That one,' she pointed. 'But mum's not home. She's gone to the shop.'

The man looked along the road. 'The shop up that way?'

Millie nodded yes.

He sort of murmured out of the side of his mouth. 'I'll go and pick her up... save her the walk.'

Millie said nothing and strolled behind the man as he made his way back to the car. In no time he had wheeled it back onto the road, throwing red dust high in his wake; the car became obscured ahead of it.

The kids reclaimed the dusty pitch and noisily resumed their game.

––––––––

Night had fallen. Millie and her brothers were sitting on hessian sacks on the ground near the front door of their tin shack when their mother stepped from the tall stranger's car. She was laughing!

Stanley Boone moved into the two room shack and made Rita happy.

Millie learned later that Stan had met her father on a cattle station, they had worked together for a few weeks then he won the lottery. He'd won five thousand dollars, not first prize. But it was enough for him to toss the job in and head for the bright lights of Darwin. He bought a used car and clothes and hit the casinos - two days later he was broke. Then he remembered round about where Rita lived.

Months moved past swiftly. Stan never worked - Rita kept him. One year later he had beaten her so badly that she was hospitalised. That's when all the kids went to stay with relatives - Millie went to her grandparents on her father's side.

Millie's nan and pop lived near the river at Ropers Soak. They'd cleverly arranged five sheets of rusty, corrugated tin up into the sloping bank of the dried out river bed and used boxes as a wall on one side, turning them inwards for use as shelving. There hadn't been any water flowing here in Millie's lifetime, but there were underground pools all along the river's course. The men dug for water every so often around here - they knew where to dig.

Millie walked alone at the side of the country road for the five miles to her grandparents; and the closer she got to Ropers Soak the more she was filled with hopelessness and despair. Near  the camp shacks, she asked for directions to her grandparents from the kids who played under the trees; they pointed to a shack fifty yards away. Her bare feet slipped on the steep slope as she climbed up to her new home.

'Hello, anyone in there,' she called, trying to sound cheerful.

Now she saw her nan strolling down in the river hollow and they waved to each other. Inside the lean-to, her pop stirred.

'Wake up pops it's me, Millie.'

Millie's mother died a few days later from an infection she'd picked up in the hospital. Antibiotics were not effective against this new mutant strain of bacteria.

Millie lived and studied on the river bank while going through her final year at school and for almost a year after that. Then she moved to Darwin and got a job. This was about the time that she met Jarra outside a supermarket.

Yarra and Millie had been betrothed when they were about ten, when both families lived in the community, before they became town fringe dwellers.

*

Finally, Millie heard the unmistakable sound of their car coming down the street. She sighed loudly from relief as the station wagon rolled to a stop under their elevated house. Bounding to her feet she scurried to the kitchen, placed a plate of chicken and vegetables in the oven, set the temperature and ran to the front door.

Her timing was perfect: she pulled the door open as Jarra stood startled, reaching for it. 'I know... I'm sorry, I should have called,' Jarra acquiesced and surrendered. Opening his arms wide as he stood on the verandah not venturing inside until he was sure it was safe to do so.

Millie reached out and pulled him to her and hugged him. She would never scold him: she understood. She worked with him every day. They agreed she would have an eight until two work day in an attempt to keep some sort of normality in their domestic life - Millie was five months pregnant with their first child.

Home for thirty seconds, Jarra began steering Millie towards the bedroom but she managed to ward him off. She insisted he eat the meal she had taken the trouble to prepare. Their sex life had not been hindered at all just because Millie was expecting. They had become extremely inventive.

––––––––

Jarra Mariba was twenty-nine years old when he finished law school: he had started university later than most people because he had waited until his tribal initiation was fully completed. Jarra was from the Djaru tribe, he married Millie (Millibini), a Lungga woman, two years previously just weeks after his return to their community. They had known for years that they would be wed, they were betrothed as teenagers by their parents.

Jarra was a tall, well built, black-skinned man who smiled a lot. His exquisite teeth, so white, so dazzling were a disarming weapon.

He studied for his law degree at Sydney University, afterwards - following the Aboriginal trend of recent years - he returned to his homelands to assist his people as they approached the next millennium. Jarra wanted to help remove the legal obstacles Australian governments, state and federal, deliberately placed in the path of aborigines.

When the federal government pastoral leases expired on his tribal lands and the wealthy land owners and multi-nationals wanted to renew, the traditional land owners turned to Jarra to represent them in legal hearings and at numerous government conferences. He was honoured to do so. One particular contract related to the Lord Ludley leasehold property, a cattle ranch. Said to be the largest property held by one person in the world - twenty-one thousand square kilometres in one lot - the Ludley cattle ranch was the size of Wales.

The seventh Lord of Ludley employed seventy-three local tribesmen until industrial laws required he pay them the same wages as his white workers. In addition he had to give them compatible working conditions and lodgings to his white workers. Previously, he had paid his Aboriginal workers a quarter of the European mens' wage and the blacks lived in a camp a hundred metres from the main house. Subsequently, he fired all the blacks except for eight; four of those were women who worked in his home, and in the bunk house, as 'domestics'.

The Australian media lapped up the imagery: the oppressed traditional owners of the land against the imperialistic aristocracy of Great Britain. It placed the Australian public one step away from the fray, it was excellent theatre, great sport, and they eagerly spectated while the courts refereed.

Jarra was in constant demand for media interviews. Despite popular sentiment, the grey-suited Aborigine troubled the government and Australia's white establishment, even though Jarra's discourse was with the British Lord. Suddenly, here was an articulate black who knew British and Australian law and debated their finer nuances; it was particularly worrying that he did this with journalists from the national media on the steps of their highest courts. This blackfella could reach millions of Australians any time he felt like calling a media conference which he had done twice already.

To many Australians, Jarra Mariba was a dangerous man.

Jarra's traditional mentor, Mutta Ranupingu, preferred to live away from his community, visiting only occasionally when he became lonely. He was married to Akuna who was forty-five, ten years younger than himself. Despite their middle age, Akuna and Mutta were tribal elders nearing the end of their lives. It made them angry when they had learned that life expectancy of Aboriginals was twenty-five years less than that of white Australians and they wondered if white Australian leaders started dying off at fifty if this might be taken seriously. Their five children, all boys, were married with many children of their own and they all lived in the community; so their visits were large family affairs.

That day they had made camp and built a shelter before eating. These were their ancestral lands: the three previous days they walked on a neighbouring tribe's land. They enjoyed meandering along the serpent-like course of the river and it took them away from their own territory.

There were stories about the deeply eroded river; of a snake in ancient times that was injured by an unwitting kookaburra, dropped from way above the hill tops; in its attempt to escape the area it carved this blemish in the earth. All animals were gigantic in that ancient time. Although this was not one of their clan's stories they both liked and respected it all the same - they were filled with the unique spirit of this area because of that.

There were water holes all around this region therefore the hunting was good. It was a pleasing place to spend time. The morning was silent, tranquil, warm and windless. Far off, against an azure sky, a moving greyish speck appeared. Mutta and Akuna sat on the rise above Blackfellow Creek and watched the speck approach. As it came closer they could see it was a wingless aircraft. The helicopter circled the valley in a wide arc, spiralling as it lost altitude. Then it landed, causing a red cloud to rise beside the creek below them.

They watched the tall, blonde white man step from the cockpit and Mutta nudged Akuna and signalled that they should go down to meet him. Mutta put his hands to his cheeks and called along the valley.

'Cooee!'

Aaron was startled. He looked up at the rocks, scanning them for any sign of movement, then he saw the man and woman slowly approaching. They were both naked. He decided to play coy and continued unstrapping the motorbike from the lower superstructure of the aircraft. After a while he called back.

'Hello up there!'

The aging Aboriginal couple looked graceful, balletic almost, as they scaled the rugged slope bringing them down to the river. Mutta stopped, his wife safely behind him, he looked Aaron up and down in a manner Europeans might consider rude, before he advanced.

'You by yourself?' Mutta asked as he got close, Akuna remained two paces behind.

'Yep... by myself,' Aaron said, smiling, cautiously diverting his eyes to the ground.

'You fly that machine all by yourself, eh?' Mutta asked as he looked at the helicopter.

'Yep.' Aaron slapped his sides nervously. 'It's not too hard to do.'

Mutta had seen helicopters before but never as close as this. He gingerly touched the windshield, ran the flat of his palm over it as he walked to be in front of it, then he put two palms flat on it and pushed to feel the weight in the beast. 'What are you up to, coming here?' Mutta asked as he did this.

'I'm interested in the stones and bushes around here,' Aaron said being careful not to give any cause for concern. 'I hope I didn't bother you with my loud engines. Are you camping near here?'

'This is our place.'

'I thought it might be your land.'

'Yes, this is our land. We camp everywhere, all over here,' he spoke with pride in his voice and waved his arms, gesturing widely. 'We are Djaru people. All this is ours.'

Aaron could see that Mutta was simply stating a fact, he wasn't angry at all. This land simply was his. Aaron knew the man had no legal title to it, but there was no doubting the fact.

'Yes I know,' he said slowly.

Akuna watched with interest from a distance; she was shy. Her nakedness disarmed Aaron but he was compelled to continue to look at her. He liked looking at her. He liked the way her form, the black female