Tears of the Moon - Di Morrissey [21]
Lily was disappointed for a moment, then remembered the book in which the Brothers had told the story of the mission. She felt sure she’d find some answers in it. A twinge of excitement and anticipation gnawed in the pit of her stomach as she drove away.
It was afternoon when Lily, dusty, tired, hot and thirty-six hours late, strode up to the reception desk and announced brightly, ‘I’m back!’
A strange girl stared at her blankly. ‘You been somewhere?’
‘Where’s the girl who’s normally here, with the short dark curls?’
‘Oh, Bridget. She took a couple of flexi days. Can I help you?’
‘Never mind, thanks anyway,’ muttered Lily, heading for her room.
Lily showered and lay on her bed to siesta and think about the old mission. While she admired the early missionaries’ fortitude and dedication, she found their original aims misguided. What had they achieved? A handful of converts, an education for a few who managed some modest success in the world of the whites. At the most, a sanctuary from the onslaught of white settlement that probably would have totally exterminated them in time. But, Lily suspected, the price had been high. So much culture had been lost, for most of the Christian sanctuaries had not been tolerant of native language and customs, which, in ignorance, were deemed primitive and heathen.
She opened her eyes and felt herself become half-hypnotised by the slowly turning ceiling fan and began reflecting on her own attitudes to the Aborigines. Over many a candlelit dinner with friends in Sydney she had argued intensely in support of government-sponsored moves towards reconciliation with the Aborigines, supported the general concept of land rights, and was quite passionate about the need to lift their health and housing standards. But until she had come to Broome she had never met an Aborigine, let alone discovered or experienced firsthand something even remotely related to their ancient culture.
A politically correct urban trendy, that’s what I am, she thought. Biddy—the old black woman fishing on the sand spit—was the first Aborigine she’d met. Funny, it hadn’t struck Lily at the time that she was the first. It seemed no big deal, they’d simply accepted each other. But in retrospect it had been a significant event. She’d had a yarn with someone with links to probably forty thousand years of culture. God, forty thousand years of fishing. And those stockmen … they came out of the land as if they were organic to it, and disappeared back into it just as naturally. And she realised she’d felt so comfortable with them … and the old woman. Yet they had nothing in common.
Her eyes fluttered shut and the imagined melodic throbbing hum of a distant didgeridoo began to impose itself on her consciousness. She felt herself drifting into another world … the world of the mind … then the phone rang.
It was Deidre reminding her about the art exhibition at the Cable Beach Club and offering her a lift if she needed one. Lily accepted with gratitude and they arranged to meet at the Mangrove Hotel.
Perched on the cliff top, the renovated Mangrove Hotel had a choice view over mangroves, the sweeping rush of tide across Roebuck Bay and the annual staircase to the moon. Cable Beach held the novelty —for an easterner—of watching the sun set into the sea.
Lily sat in the hotel garden sipping a glass of wine with her back to the crush of jovial tourists, locals and a Perth convention group in the bar and on the verandah terrace. When she’d finished her wine she walked to the edge of the garden to peer at the skeleton of a boat in the mangroves, its hollow ribs filling with the tide.
‘Can I offer you another glass of wine?’
Lily turned at the friendly voice to see an attractive man smiling at her.
‘Ken Fitzgerald. I’m the manager. You staying with us? Haven’t seen you around.’
They chatted briefly and it didn’t surprise Lily to discover he was a former grazier. He had an open and affable country manner.
‘Bit of a change coming from the land to the