Time Walker

By Gil Hardwick

A taboo story of hauntingly brutal awakening for a part native boy with a scheming avaricious white mother determined to hold onto the land she inherited, mistaken in the belief that she can do so by marrying a local Aboriginal man.

Without reckoning on her lonely misfit son Will’s wider kinship obligations, she alienates and confuses him until an old man arrives one day to take him on his coming-of-age journey.

Old Will is a magic man, who walks him back through time to meet his ancestors and witness the massacres of his people by encroaching settlers, sealers and marauding pirates around the southwest coast.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gilbert J Hardwick
• Release date: Feb 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9780648598015

Gil Hardwick

As an anthropologist, novelist and writer Gil Hardwick is a gifted author. Over many years working as a field ethnographer in the vast Australian inland he has met real characters and had real-life adventures, bringing his personalities and his plots to vibrant life. Writing from life, he neither shies away from real social issues and at times confronting dilemmas.

Book preview

Copyright © Gil Hardwick 2015

Published by eNovella Australia, Perth, Western Australia

Typesetting, Layout and Cover Design by Site211 Media

This digital edition processed by http://ebookswest.com.au/

Copyright © Gil Hardwick 2015

The right of Gilbert John Hardwick to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced in any form by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Author: Hardwick, Gil.

Title: Time Walker / Gil Hardwick.

ISBN: 978-0-6485980-1-5 (ebook)

Target Audience: For young adults.

Subjects: Young adult fiction.

Dewey Number: A823.4

This story is inspired by Ralph Nelson's 1970 film Soldier Blue, the 1981 SBS television series, Women of the Sun, Ridley Scott's 2010 Robin Hood, Rolf de Heer's 2002 film The Tracker and Catriona McKenzie's 2012 Satellite Boy, combined with sustained ethnographic field research in the Lower Southwest of Western Australia.

Personal and place names are taken from Jack Bussell's Dornderup Wongie and Len Collard's Noongar Place Names project, with words from Rose Whitehurst's Noongar Dictionary, 2nd Edition, 1997.

While background events are drawn from the historic record, persons and characters depicted herein remain entirely fictitious.

Chapter One

Old Bill had a rugged worn landscape of a face, an ancient weathered face creased and furrowed by stories and tradition, yet he smiled up bright-eyed with a four year old's twinkle of mischief.

Will stood watching him for a long moment sitting there sunning himself against the wall, until the old fellow turned his face toward him, and caught his gaze.

He held it, then shook his head saying, I'm not giving you any money.

Bill sat back, raising his eyebrows. He cocked his head sideways.

Look like I need it, do I? Holdin' a sign up or somethin'?

No. But you look like a beggar. Mum doesn't like beggars. She said don't give them any money, they'll waste it.

Smart mother yer got, son. I wouldn't give them any money either.

Will nodded at that. He stood watching the old man's battered face, intrigued.

So what are you about, sitting there like that?

Ah, curiosity killed the cat. What's yer name first, boy, then maybe I'll tell yer. Maybe not.

Knowledge went and brought it back. My name's Will. What's yours, anyway?

Bill. Call me Bill.

Same name as me, except Mum calls me Will.

Not exactly. I was christened Guillaume. That's French.

Will gazed fixedly at him for a long, somewhat convoluted moment.

You're just being picky. It's still William. We're speaking English, not French. If we were speaking French I'd be Guillaume too, wouldn't I. Still the same name.

Do you want to be my friend or not? he went on, Or do you just want to argue.

Do both if we want. I don't mind a good argument, lad. Depends on how clever you are. You have Guillaume written on your birth certificate, do yer, or yer christenin'?

Well, no. It's written down as William. It's in English, or at least Australian. I can't help that, what some clerk wants to write. Doesn't change anything, but.

Someone was calling him, and they both turned their heads.

That'll be Mum, Will said eventually. Better go, eh.

Chapter Two

There was a gold coin in his pocket that he didn't expect to be there, as he undressed for his evening bath.

The dried frog he knew about, he'd picked it up next to the last remaining patch of gluey brown mud he skipped across on the way home from school, down that long track beside the