Free Carpentaria by Alexis Wright Page A

about? Well! Nothing much. They just talked about anything that popped into their heads. Mention a word. Mention horse, and they would talk about horses all day long. Mention shopping, and all night long they would talk about shopping. Mention fighting, and they would go out after dinner and half murder someone. Westside old people accused those people of being so full of madness, they said it had to be punishment from the spirits for disgracing the country not rightfully theirs, in any case.
    So there it was: fringe camps sandwiching Desperance, and nothing better to do with themselves than to sit about watching white folk of Uptown going about their business. It was hard to imagine something being so ingrained it cannot be scrubbed away like ink stains on the carpet. It was like blood stains. This was exactly what it was like.
    So, the ‘edge’ people, all of the blackfella mob living with quiet breathing in higgily-piggerly, rubbish-dump trash shacks, all popped any old where in the prickly bushes, all along a cobweb of dirt tracks running crooked, left, right and centre outside of town, sat back and watched this spectacle of the snow man taking place on the beach. It was the beginning of the story of the day the spirits of the seas and storms mixed their business, and sent Elias from out of oblivion into Desperance with good reason. This was the story about Elias Smith which was later put alongside the Dreamtime by the keepers of the Law to explain what happened once upon a time with those dry claypans sitting quietly out yonder there for anybody to look at, and wonder about what was happening to the world, and to be happy knowing at least this was paradise on earth, and why would anyone want to live anywhere else.
    It is important to say straight up that it was no good at all for Elias coming in from the sea empty-handed like he was, and no good being anywhere with an empty head with even less than ten cents worth of the richness of his own memory anymore. If you put an empty shell in struggle town, or Uptown like the prickly bush mob called it, expect a ton of bad things to happen. His was a lethal combination, he would have been better off being an ant under a leaf if he had zilch left, not even his memory for a bit of a trade.
    Little towns belonging to the white folks are like this. You could hear the town struggling to survive, to make good of itself, crying out – Save me! Save me! But who listened? This was the old, unanswerable question: how the heck were they going to keep themselves out of the water? And, with no disrespect, it is expedient to say at this point, that such little towns are apt to do one thing right, and this was how a town like Desperance shared a slither of similarity with others. You know, it too sought glory in its own legends. A single, important legendary lore of place developed over a century or two:
    impossibly hard to reach by land or sea,
    it cast a spell on those who came,
    planted them like ground rock,
    and because there is a measure of love in acts of permanency,
    they found it too hard to leave.
    Oh! Fashionable city people, Southern people who like noise would say that somewhere north of the Tropic of Capricorn like Desperance, was just a quiet little town, but if you listened hard enough, you would have heard the silence screaming to be heard. Noise was everywhere, and if there was an original God who had come along with all the white people, who created everything for them, then this place was where he made his music. There could not be a more windy town anywhere in the world of tin flapping, like an orchestra growing louder with age. And they never knew it, or realised, but that music drove those town people half mad. You should watch the wind music for it is the undoer of a man’s toil.
    The winds. Well! The winds blew over the claypans from other places in the world with no respectful acknowledgment for a town having been built good and proper in its path. Over time, the