Progress

My name is Djarrtjuntjun and I am the last of the people. That makes me the most intelligent person on earth by my reckoning, and indeed there is no-one to dispute it.

I do not count the voices of the spirits of the dead, those ghosts who returned to torment us, bringing strange ways and disease. They have expelled the rest of us into the land of the dead and are wandering in the place of living things. Where can the wisdom be in that?

I challenged one of the spirits and asked him why he acted so. In the end he spoke only stupidities about my white father. 

All the people know that the father of Djarrtjunjun is Eucalyptus, deep rooted in the spirit land, where he waits to shade me with his leaves.

The returned spirit wore a black skin, even in the heat of the day. Seeing that he was controlled by a familiar that lived in a log that he placed on his head, I knocked the spirit-keeper off with my club to let him speak freely.

The log was hollow, like the home of snake, but this familiar was adept at hiding and I saw nothing inside.

The story that the returned spirit related was very strange. He took me to a high place to look down up on the land of the people. He asked me to dream it as a rutted field surrounded by stinging metal in which strange plants would grow. In this dream the land was tended by beings who toiled to bring the spirit of the river onto the land.

I answered that this could not be a true dream, for all things were part of the people. If the land were cut by stinging metal the people would feel its pain and suffer and die.

I asked him why the spirits did these things and threatened him with my club. He tried to bind me with a word suggested by his familiar and I became frightened and fled.

Later in their anger the returned spirits imprisoned the river in white stone and struck a great wound in the land, making the blood run metal red until the fish died.

The people were driven from the land by cruel lashes and some were struck down by invisible spears thrown with a voice like thunder. Most simply starved or died from a wasting disease that turned the skin and nose into red blisters, on which the flies feasted greedily.

I would grieve for the land and for the river and the fish but I have no grief left since the fire left the eyes of my beautiful Alinta. 

Perhaps it is best that she is no longer here to see the end of this dream.

Now I have returned to the high place and I see the tangled remains of the stinging metal drawing patterns on the red earth in which no thing lives.

For many days I dreamed as hard as I could but I am only one, and even the most intelligent man on earth cannot return things to how they were.

As I lie exhausted, I understand that I have been followed by the snake’s whispered word and it has bound me after all. 

A great weariness lies upon my spirit until now I dream only of joining Alinta round the fire in the shade of father Eucalyptus.