The Crocodile Hotel Read online

  What the critics said about Julie Janson’s work:

  “Imagery runs rampant, with delightful cadences … an artistic orgy, bombarding all our senses at once, overall the experience is a delightful and original success”.

  James Waites on Season To Taste, Sydney Morning Herald

  “There are profoundly relevant and for some, contentious considerations here. Flashes of a long and intriguing history: a rich context”.

  Frank Gauntlet on Lotus War, Sunday Telegraph

  “Julie Janson’s dialogue combines the right proportion of sacred and profane, the hallmark of good erotica: it hits the theatrical G spot”.

  Colin Rose on Season to Taste, Sydney Morning Herald

  “Tough and emotional… at the stirring end, the ghosts of the killed move in and symbolically reclaim the land”.

  John McCallum on Black Mary, The Australian

  “This is true Australian work. What is Australian art? What is it about? No matter how much we might dismiss it, Aboriginal people and convicts, English settlers who are invaders, whatever you want to call them – forged links. And we never get away from that”.

  Rhoda Roberts on Black Mary

  “Like much of Janson’s work, The Eyes of Marege – which was shortlisted for the Patrick White Award and will premiere in Adelaide before transferring to Sydney – ventures across cultures. Her previous works have included Lotus War and Tears of the Poppy, about Asian politics, while Gunjies and her best-known play Black Mary have dealt with indigenous issues”.

  Joyce Morgan, Sydney Morning Herald

  Julie Janson was born in Boronia Park, Sydney.

  She is of Aboriginal descent from the Darug nation.

  A graduate of the University of NSW, Sydney College of the Arts and the University of Sydney.

  She is an established playwright with several nominations for awards including an AWGIE, the Griffin Award and the Patrick White Award.

  Julie was the recipient of the 2013 Australia Council B R Whiting Studio Residency, Rome.

  www.cyclopspress.com.au

  A Cyclops Press Book

  Published by Cyclops Press, Australia Pty Ltd

  www.cyclopspress.com.au

  This edition published in 2015

  Copyright © Julie Janson 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory provisions of the Australia Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Cyclops Press.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Creator: Janson, Julie, author

  Title: The Crocodile Hotel / Julie Janson

  ISBN: 9780980561951 (paperback)

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  The author acknowledges the use of the following texts:

  Quotes: Trumby song written by Slim Dusty (David Gordon Kirkpatrick) and Joe Daly, lyrics @EMI Publishing; Click Go The Shears folk song written by C. C. Eynesbury; Drinkers in the Northern Territory song written and recorded by Ted Egan; Rock Around the Clock song written by Max C. Freedman and James E. Myers.

  Design & typesetting by tonygordonprintcouncil.com

  Front cover design by Michelle Ball

  Front cover photo by Louise Whelan

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  For the Darug people

  PART ONE

  NORTH WIND SEASON, FISHING, HUNTING, PIED GOOSE EGGS READY – 1976

  This rainy season is lush and green, Jane arrives in Lanniwah country in the midst of plenty. Yams are ready for digging up and roasting. Crocodiles are nesting. The north wind blows, rain is heavy and the lightning spirits are everywhere.

  PART TWO

  NORTH EAST WIND BLOWING, END OF WET SEASON, PELICANS NESTING – 1976

  This is the beginning of the dry season. It is the time for fruiting trees and a cold strong wind. Jane settles into life with the Lanniwah. She learns how to collect fruit and hunt tortoises. Crocodile hatchlings are carried in their mothers’ mouths.

  PART THREE

  HONEY COLLECTING SEASON, FLYING FOXES FAT – 1976

  Stringy bark flowers are sweet smelling, and Lanniwah children are eating sugar bag wild honey. Fresh water swamps are drying out and Jane watches the burning off of grasses.

  PART FOUR

  NORTH WEST WIND, DRY SEASON, YAMS HAVE GREEN LEAVES – 1977

  A year passes and Jane feels at home in Lanniwah country, she is enjoying the cool nights. It is mango season and everyone gorges on the fruit. The Whistling Hawk dives for insects and crocodiles are searching for food.

  PART ONE

  NORTH WIND SEASON, FISHING, HUNTING, PIED GOOSE EGGS READY – 1976

  This rainy season is lush and green, Jane arrives in Lanniwah country in the midst of plenty. Yams are ready for digging up and roasting. Crocodiles are nesting. The north wind blows, rain is heavy and the lightning spirits are everywhere.

  CHAPTER 1

  Arrival at Harrison Station

  Jane Reynolds stared out of the Land Rover’s window. The drive from Katherine was a nightmare, it struck deep into her heart, but she was somehow elated, the craving for change always won. Mercifully, her son Aaron stayed sleeping, perspiration on his forehead. This was pitiless heat, searing forty-degree heat suffocating the flat plains and lime green grass spiked with spindly grey-white trees and red boulders thrown like giant’s toys on a moonscape that went on and on. The Department driver, resolutely silent for hours, managed a half turn of his head then a nod to outside. It was the Churinga Roadhouse.

  He climbed out and leant against the car door, ‘How old are you anyway?’

  ‘Twenty seven’

  ‘Old enough, I guess. You can get a feed here if you want.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She nudged Aaron and smoothed his hair.

  Together they pushed the restaurant door into sudden noise and movement. At any moment, Jane expected an absurdist actor to set their hair on fire. Someone farted. Ghoulish rodeo clowns in red hats laughed. Dusty men in blue singlets. They chewed. Some toothless hippies picked at tinned peas and pineapple. Bushmen, jackaroos, roustabouts and stockmen hunched over plates of chips and gravy.

  A bald fat man stood over the bain-marie, sprinkling chicken salt on the yellow food: shrivelled dim sims, chips, pies – all shrinking in the heat. A commercial dishwasher started rumbling. At university she’d worked as a kitchen hand, leered at by the rich boys of Basser College. No blowflies trapped behind glass foodshields back there. Her graduation had been followed by unemployment, a year of staring in cake shop windows, a year of hunger and pregnancy.

  Aaron’s eyes begged, he held up cans of Coca Cola. She paid the fat man and they got a seat by the jukebox. Kenny Rodgers. The Northern Territory Times, grubby from earlier diners, faced her. ‘Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge sack head of state’; she spotted another headline: ‘Child taken by Croc’. Aaron would not shift from her sight. Vigilance the first word out here, in all things.

  She watched the dusty Aboriginal families framed in the greasy windows. Two children blinked with pus-filled eyes in the sunlight. They clutched bright orange Twisties. Their mother stroked their backs in the shade. Single mothers worried about food. She and Aaron had slept next to each other on a small mattress in the share house. No money, no support. Definitely, she must keep hold of this new j
ob.

  The fat man pushed an old Aboriginal man in a shredded flannel shirt and no shoes towards the door.

  ‘No humbug here – you know the rules, Sandy,’ the fat man said. The old Aboriginal man shuffled towards the road. Jane stood up with a sinking feeling, a slight shaking in her voice. Gough Whitlam’s Land Rights speech had barely carried to the Blue Mountains. She urged herself to her feet. She had to speak up.

  ‘Why are you throwing him out?’ she said.

  ‘He’s dirty.’

  ‘So are those stockmen.’

  ‘He doesn’t want to be inside.’

  Jane bent towards the old man. ‘Would you like to sit down in the airconditioning?’ she said.

  The fat man held court.

  ‘Look lady, you’re from down south, aren’t ya? My place, my rules,’ said the fat man.

  ‘It’s racist. Let him stay.’

  There was a boom of laughter.

  ‘Why don’t you piss off? Go on, away you go.’

  Jane felt everyone watching; she took Aaron by the hand and walked to the door. The fat man waddled past her and put down a bag of bottles of Coke, placing it outside the door. The old man, breathing heavily, rested on the step. He pulled the bag to him and looked at Jane, his eyes seemed blurred and sightless. She tried to hold his look. She felt useless. It wasn’t her business, she had to learn to keep quiet and stop trying to interfere. The roadhouse owner, the fat man, had rights. The customers, the paying ones, were always right, weren’t they? She looked back at the faces. Some smirked. Aaron touched the old man’s shoulder.

  ‘Want me to carry your bag?’ He smiled and saluted at the little blonde boy. Jane assisted the old man to stand, aligning her forearm under his like a tiller to guide him back to his family beneath the tree. The family women averted their eyes. They saw a whitey do-gooder. Aaron put the drinks bag down gently.

  ‘Yeeai, good boy.’ The old man touched Aaron’s hand and held it for a long moment.

  ‘You okay now?’ said Aaron. Jane smiled at the quiet scene the two were making.

  In the midst of the doom. Her son, the knower. The children under the tree ripped into the Cokes and swigged. Their eyes were blooms of infection. Did she have some ointment that could help? Who was she to think she could help anybody? She was barely able to help herself. Was this somehow her fault too? The guilt and misery etched on people’s faces seemed to go on and on. No one escaped the sense of powerlessness.

  Neither blacks nor whites could shake free of how to be around each other. The Department driver was wiping off the windscreen.

  To Jane, every broken man on the ground was an incarnation of her mentally ill brother. He would pick up cigarette butts from the streets around Balmain and roll them into smokes with newspaper. He never begged, but suffered the indignity of being thrown from pubs for not having enough money for a beer. His blue eyes and heavy forehead spoke of his Aboriginal grannies. Each tramp was her brother in need. There but for the grace of God go I.

  Jane bought a box of oranges from the fat man, carried them to the car. They had a long way to go, hundreds of kilometres. The driver put out his cigarette and called to Jane to get back in. The air was a furnace, no air conditioning. It smelt like a decaying cow. She stared out the window: the blue horizon cut the world in two, and it was vast and uplifting. She felt so alive. This was her new life, transmigrated to Mars. Ghost gums, small reptiles flattened on the road and bloated bodies of dead kangaroos. Aaron began to count the dead while a bustard walked slowly along the road oblivious to an approaching eight-carriage road train.

  The car turned off the bitumen onto a bulldust track with holes so big that you could lose a car in them. Rainer River, south of Arnhem Land, was scorched country. They drove through hundreds of kilometres of cattle stations with no fences. Stark grey-green beauty.

  On Harrison Station, there were soaring wedge-tailed eagles, egrets, blue cranes and galahs. A mirage shimmered, broken-down bulldozers rusted on yellow dirt, water tanks teetered on wooden towers. A meat house, fowl house, dog house and humpies for three hundred people. The Lanniwah houses were made of paper-bark and tin; some were canvas, with pots and billycans hanging in the trees. Mangy dogs lay in heaps on bare earth and the soil glinted with camp pie tins and broken bottles. Pandanus dillybags hung like fruit on bare wooden poles and precious suitcases jutted from beneath iron bedframes. Lanniwah children played on the hills while their parents sat by small fires.

  One bent-over old woman with a stick walked by surrounded by blue-andred dogs. Jane watched her stop and stare at the government Land Rover; she had a magnetic presence. A sense of incredible excitement grew. Jane could see that the demountable school was about four hundred metres from the teacher’s place, and the camp was further off near a hill of stone. The big house for the Boss and his family was very close to Jane’s new home. It was possible to look into their bedrooms, as they had no curtains; it was uncomfortably close. Still it might be better than television. The pretty lilycovered billabong rippled a short walk from where Jane stood.

  Jane lifted her son from the back seat as he woke up. They crawled out of the car; the heat hit them like a shovel. A forty-three-degree haze floated towards her; bleached bones bordered the road. Jane staggered and wondered how anyone could live out here.

  Aaron seemed oblivious, and she watched him as he ran around the yard skipping and hooting, exploring their new home at Harrison Station: a large demountable home, a caravan parked on flat orange earth, white painted stones and dozens of shrunken geraniums. Jane took it all in. There was hardly a tree, and the wire mesh fences were falling down – they wouldn’t keep out Brahman bulls or dingoes.

  ‘See you later, enjoy yourself. I’ll be back after the Wet, maybe five months, with some school supplies,’ said the driver.

  ‘Hold on, please – don’t leave.’

  ‘Look lady, it’s a flaming long way back to civilisation and I’m tonguin’ for a cold beer.’

  ‘Wait, what if I need something?’ she yelled.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Something.’

  ‘You won’t be able to call – no phone out here in hell. You had the interview with Mr White at head office. You wanted it. You got it. Good luck, sweetheart.’

  He threw their suitcase onto the ground, grunted, spat and headed back to Katherine, a five-hour drive through deep bulldust. Jane watched him go. The hot air choked her and she couldn’t catch her breath. She smiled at Aaron. Yep, everything was just great. Her caravan gleamed with round ugly edges. There was nowhere to hide; she was naked.

  The landscape was gutted by the annual floods that washed away the topsoil leaving billabongs with stranded twenty-foot long crocodiles. Jane stood battered by dry wind. Blue-grey clouds pulsed with blinding bursts of sunlight. It was an alien landscape with the silver caravans placed like tin cans covered in dust, waiting to be towed away if the numbers at the school dropped. The Department said the people might move on at any moment, looking for seasonal food and ceremony.

  God almighty – what had she done? She found it hard to breathe; the isolation was going to kill her. Jane calmed herself by bending down and breathing slowly and repeating, ‘I can do this. I can do this’. She squatted on the ground. She doubled over, hands on her knees, time stopped; something was caught in her throat, an eternity of fear. She looked at her hands, the trembling fingers. She saw a round white pebble and stooped to take it in her palm. The stone felt solid: it was a message, and she was feeling space and time in a bright light. She put the stone in her pocket; it would protect her.

  Aunty Emily, her Darug aunt, had advised her to take this job: take a chance at a new life, get away from poverty and sadness. To get away from the memories of her father Samuel dying. Jane picked up her suitcase. This would be a great new beginning; she would be a wonderful teacher and her son would thrive on the outdoor adventures. It was going to be all right. She could do this amazing thing.

  Jane thought about
her place, her Aboriginal blood. It circled in her mind, all the way to the Northern Territory. She knew she was of Aboriginal descent; she had grown up with her father being called ‘Abo’. She heard his voice from a distant 1959, when he sat in the backyard of his brick Housing Commission home. “It isn’t smart to call yourself an Aboriginal. Your kids might get taken. You won’t get a government job,” she heard him laugh. He didn’t want that kind of job, but his kids might. Many families had lost children with interference from the Aborigines Welfare Board. Samuel’s brothers and sisters were quiet on the subject: they learnt table manners and kept the secret. She watched him carve her a yam digging stick entwined with a snake design, as his skin went black in the sun. Her aunts said her father’s dark skin was the result of jaundice as a child, but Jane thought that unlikely.

  Jane had been called ‘a little white blackfeller’ when she ran fast in school sports. She had long legs and dark eyes, and a thatch of blonde hair, while her brothers and sister had ‘lubra lips’. Jane had known this family secret but it had seemed a distant thing.

  She took a wedding ring out of her bag and slid it onto her finger. She unfolded the Education Department appointment letter, ‘You have been appointed for one year to Harrison Station School. This position is conditional upon you being a married woman as the accommodation is suitable only for a couple.’ She scanned the horizon. No, there did not seem to be any prospect of a husband. The gossips might think that perhaps Jane’s husband had run off or never existed.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Boss

  In the distance, six Lanniwah children appeared like drawings in an old picture book: dreamlike and skinny against burning white sunlight. Through squinting eyes, she watched a man on horseback gallop towards them. He whirled a stock whip and cracked it on the ground in front of the children who scattered and hid behind trees. Jane tried to make sense of this scene, to apply her perception of reality to the cowering black children. It was a frightening rush into her deep affinity with her Koori ancestors. Is this what they had experienced? No, he must be playing. He was their friend, surely.