Underground. Mudrooroo

schooner and too often do I imagine our mob in spirit up among those stars where the silver ocean glimmers – and there they are on that bonny vessel breasting the milky waves as they sail on, searching always for that promised land, our home away from home and perhaps on some planet where our ancestors sit and forget the dreadful doings on this earth.

      Well, you’ve had enough of dust and heat, I dare say, and need a tale about the far cold southern ocean with its icebergs and strange werebears lurching above the snow, with its squalls and tempests and phantom ships petrified in strange frozen waves that take away the living temperature and render the whole crew, captain down to cabin scruff, stiff and dead. It’s cold, mates, cold as the death you dream as the sweat trickles down your backs and stirs the hairs as if you feel a phantom touch of a frozen hand belonging to someone who once loved you ...

      No thanks, I don’t need that sort of drink to soften up my pipes. They say that grog is a curse to folks like me, but I have found other tastes curse enough. So now, to set the mood, hear these sticks sounding like spoons as I make the rhythm for this bit of verse.

      They made of me

      A ghost down under

      Made for me a place to plunder,

      Yeah, to plunder

      Way down under,

      Pardon me while I chunder.

      Not so bright is it, but then neither is this night with the sky all obscured from the dust of your dryblowing. Perhaps I should give you ‘Roaming in the Gloaming’; but well, I don’t know what a gloaming is. What? Dusk y’say. Well, you learn a new word every day. Now another song to set the mood of our gloomy tale.

      Our vessel was a doughty one

      It ploughed the seas alone

      And we huddled on the deck

      And wished not to be a wreck

      So far away from home, boys,

      So far away from home, me boys.

      Our captain, he was as black

      As the startling thunder clap

      He was as restless as the lightning

      And struck out along with the wrack

      Along with the wrack, me boys

      Alone with the wrack.

      Well, that’s more rousing than that old ghost dirge, though what is the night fit for, but the telling of ghostly yarns and phantom ships and ghoulies which wait for the shipwrecked sailor. Worse, I hear tell, is what lurks for you at the bottom of the sea, where the dead men swing in the currents and fish have lights in their heads to navigate about them. Remember those old, old stories of Ulysses and Jason. They heard the sirens singing and met ancient Neptune who had an underwater kingdom and loved you or hated you, saved you or drowned you, whatever took his fancy at the time. Never met him, though I’ve seen more than mortal men. Strange female things just as mean and bad as those sirens enticing men with their singing, along with their billowing tits and flowing hair, though not their fishy tails, what use are those?

      One of those sort it was that got into our chief mate’s brain and swung him away from us. He was never again one with us in spirit. It was then, about the time he changed, that he took it into his head to give our vessel a name. He called her the Kore, upsetting most of our mob who wanted a different vision. But he had ill-luck covering him and from him it spread so that we began to think that we were all doomed. All this happened after we had come upon a wreck that had been cursed from the day she sailed. And when she flung herself upon the beach, her curse waited for us to pull up alongside, for we looted her, but then finder’s keepers, or so we thought at the time. From then on, something came after us and then our chief mate, our captain, disappeared one night, and my then father and I had to seek him out again with direful consequences. We had to find him! He was the only one who knew how to keep our vessel happy. He rode her hard until she learnt to keep the course, but without him she wallowed slow in the water, fat arsed with weeds and barnacles.

      He might have scraped her, but he let her be, for it seemed he had lost his wits along with his luck. He even carved a female shape from a log. Said it was to be our figurehead. It was then he called our schooner the Kore. A kore, a maiden with her fat white breasts on which you could rest a tankard, with flowing locks of yellow hair and evil red glaring eyes that were baleful enough to shatter any rocks and reefs in our way. But, alas, she was no longer our old craft. That wooden witch image possessed her, making her spiteful and mean. She challenged anything that stood in her way just like one of those haughty steamships made of iron, and like one of them her end came abrupt and sudden; but, but, why circle about that when it has nothing to do with the red maw of fright.

      No, it is not part of this yarn into which I settle, as I lean back and gather what seems a breath. Relax, relax! The night is young and randy enough for us to take our time. She’ll enjoy more than her luck deserves, and with her cooling down will come a dew to lower the dust, so if your mug is empty, fill it. Drink up, mates, there’s a coin, gold gleaming, and time as long as the night enduring. Drink! There’s rum enough to help the ghoulies creep into my tale.

      I’ll make it a regular story and begin with those of our mob who stood out from the rest. First, Mungkati, a big blackfellow. His name meant thickhead and he hated it and was easily led astray to take another name. Fada, you see, who did the naming was always one for the latest name of splendour, such as Victoria; but Mungkati could never be a Victoria so he had been called Hercules, which he liked much better, especially when he was given the story to it by Fada who was the bloke who one day arrived on our southern island with a mission to save us from devils such as himself. He saved us all right. He got us all together on a God-forsaken bit of rock where we quickly began to pine away. We blamed it on evil spirits who had been waiting for this opportunity to get us and so did Fada who battled to stop them from harming us. One of his subterfuges was renaming us so that the demons would be bamboozled. This didn’t help at all, and so he left us on that piece of rock while he went off to write a report on us which he had published as The Great Reconciliation. In it, he was the chief character and we were poor victims with hands upheld for succour. (There was no mention that we had stolen his schooner and went off in her.) But all this is another story and he doesn’t figure that much in this yarn, though he has turned up here to make the goldfields his home.

      Well, I’ll tell you a bit about him. He is what is called a philanthropist and is a most Christian gentleman. You all know him, the Leader of the Legislative Council. Yes, good Sir George and there is even talk that he is to be our next governor. A local man is needed and there are those who say he will get things done for this colony, and as evidence will point to the church he got built here. As I’ve said, a most Christian gentleman, though he has a piratical side. Well, he did when he was master over us and also had a liking for what he called the stories of the old paganism and since he considered some of us still pagans, he gleefully gave those ones heathen names: Jason, Hector, Hercules and others I can’t recall, together with the promise that when the offenders had reconciled themselves to the Christian faith they too would be given proper names. I was a child then and baptized as George and this has remained with me. The others never used what they considered their ‘ghost’ names, for they saw white-skinned ones such as your good selves, as ghosts; but as I’ve said Mungkati became known as Hercules for ever more. So I’m George, named after the then reigning monarch and not after himself, even though Jangamuttuk my supposed father had declared: ‘He’s the king of the castle, and he’s a dirty rascal.’ I knew the English words, but being a kid what they were hinting at passed over me as did the laughter when Fada was coupled with ‘black velvet’.

      Well, all this naming business happened a year before the King carked it and Her Majesty ascended the throne. God save Victoria, though I cannot help but wonder what I would have been called if I had been born from her, so to speak. Victor or Victoria, or just Albert. He did and still does, that Fada, that Sir George, like the sound of royal names, even storybook ones. Why, he even called my mother, Lalla Rookh, some fabulous queen of oriental splendour, he assured her as he took his pleasure.

      Anyway,