Kurdaitcha Descent

By Laurence Davies

David’s life was in shambles. His service in the Vietnam War had left him with intense psychological trauma, which resulted in the once-successful civil engineer being trapped in his own personal hell. That was until a series of mystical encounters with a mysterious
Australian Aboriginal shaman led his life in a direction he did not expect.

Does David really understand the Aboriginal culture; or is he getting deeper into something beyond his understanding?
Will David’s new role as the shaman’s kurdaitcha, the tribe member who points the bone at victims the shaman wants to die, lead David
into a new understanding of his life, or will it bring his inevitable demise?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inspiring Publishers / ASPG
• Release date: Oct 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781922792372

Book preview

During my adolescent years and for many years after, the Bundaberg School of Arts building housed the local museum. It was a stuffy old place, lacking the thoughtful layout and functionality of modern museums. The range of items on display was eclectic, to say the least, a collection of bits and pieces, with hundreds of photos, pioneers of the region, standing sentinel over the dusty collection. Figures from the past, posing stiffly to attention for the photograph, faces staring out from ancient black and white photographs to the chaotic display below, seemingly watchful of modern youth who might dare trespass on their hallowed history. The display included a few stuffed and moth-eaten animals that may have once done credit to a taxidermist but, like the characters in the photographs, they were from a time of long ago, now just dismal effigies of something long past.

The items on display were housed in ancient, scratched, wooden and glass cases. Nobody visited the museum much because it wasn’t much of a museum but it was a place for a boy and his friends to occasionally spend an hour after school when they didn’t want to go home to chores, homework, and such like, when in fact the primary purpose, was not just to delay going home but to link up with high school girls. The museum was a convenient excuse to be in town to seize scarce opportunities to explore freshly won pubescence.

I had a second reason for being there. I didn’t want to leave the warmth and camaraderie of my friends, with whom I had shared the day at school, to return to the bleak emotional landscape of hearth and home. My parents existed unhappily within a loveless marriage. As the eldest son, I was rapidly becoming the unwilling intermediary between two adults, both of whom were too immature or too stubborn to sort out their differences. Instead of being shielded, I became the shield. There were many afternoons I didn’t want to go home at all but always did, perhaps in fear of the unknown beyond home life. Where else does the victim of a dysfunctional family go in the sixties go but ‘home.’ The street kids these days have more options and an easier escape from home life, be it into both good or bad activities. Either way, they can escape to an alternative hell or heaven beyond the chaos of home life.

Talk about an angry young man. I suppose that’s what I was, the angry adolescent, the victim of a poor home life perhaps but I can see now I was the victim on some preordained trajectory, destined to live a life well beyond the norm. It seems now that there had always been latent anger even before my parents gave me a reason to be angry.

It’s all so vague now but if you have ever lived within the hellish amalgam of intense love for parents that alternated with intense frustration, with two people whom a young boy should only receive love, warmth, trust and guidance, you will know what I mean. Parents are normally in place to soothe and heal such things, not exacerbate them. The trouble is, I don’t see either of them as being at fault. I see them only as less than perfect human beings who did the best they could under very trying circumstances. Aren’t we all less than perfect to varying degrees?

In fairness, I think there are many more victims these days than there were back then but at least now there is an increasing corpus of the dysfunctional, so there is now a de facto peer, perception reinforcement group, for both the positive and the negative consequences. Back then I suffered while most of my peers led sheltered, comfortable and protected lives. Instead, I became a loner, distrustful of life, parents and most everyone and everything else.

So the museum was an excuse to linger and not an actual focus of genuine adolescent interest in local history. It did house a collection of artifacts. Most of these were to do with the kanaka history of this regional Queensland sugar town. The kanakas were the labour ‘recruited’ from the south pacific islands and treated little better than slaves, although Australia lays no claim to ever having been a county that made use of slavery. It’s all in the definition you see. You perceive what you want to perceive and perceptions define individual realities if you happen to hold to the belief that life is fundamentally logical. The intentions remain the same. Usury if not slavery. Cheap labour to develop the entrepreneurial interests of the white settlers. Those early pioneers were hard-working and destined to be successful so they founded a sugar industry, without too much ethical encumbrance.

The sugar industry grew and prospered. Eventually, some altruistic soul decided that kanaka labour was not appropriate and that it was a form of slavery after all. So the kanakas were shipped back to their homes, including their offspring. No doubt those innocent children ended up being strangers in the Pacific islands to which they were repatriated. Not that people cared too much about that. Shipping them home had the motive of keeping Australia ‘white’ for a little longer at least. A few of them escaped the net and stayed on to become model citizens of Bundaberg. A couple of the boys in my age bracket made excellent rugby league players. I’ve noticed that people look at you differently when you are a sporting star, no matter what your ethnicity. I was capable but somewhat mediocre at sports. Most of us are I guess. Hence we idolise our sporting heroes who live the charmed life of which we can only dream.

But the south sea islanders were not the only blacks in the early history of Bundaberg. The Bunda Aboriginal tribe were the custodians of the area at the time the first white settlers decided it was ideally suited to other activities such as timber and cattle. Sugar came later. My school teachers had told me that the Aboriginals were savages and that it took a lot to educate them on the white man’s ways and religion. The teachers left me feeling that we had done these people a great service in guiding them away from such savagery. Young minds are so plastic and eager to accept the bigotry of their elders and thus have values compromised with such rubbish and prejudice. Somewhere in those early ‘understandings,’ instilled by teachers and the like, the seed of my future was planted. I suppose that is why I am dwelling on the cultures of Aboriginals and islanders. I am not genetically linked but somehow, on a much more fundamental level as you will come to understand, I am. Life fucked me about just as their lives were fucked about, albeit in a different way and with a different outcome, but clearly linked.

There were a few artifacts and photos from those pioneering days in the School of Arts museum. When I looked at the blurred and ancient photos, curled at the edges, from decades on display, it was hard to see that they were savages. They just looked like scantily clad, undernourished black people. But of course, I was young then and didn’t understand the barbaric nature of the Aboriginals as well as my teachers. My innocent young mind had yet to be indoctrinated with the adult biases of the time. Foolishly, I trusted the teachers to tell me the truth. Truths instilled back then which took many years to exorcise.

The museum display cases were kept locked, to protect the contents from souvenir hunters and the prying hands of idle school boys. One of the display cases held a long sliver of bone, pointed at one end and rounded at the other, with a tiny hole which must once have held a cord of some description. The card read. ‘Kundela, used by the Aboriginal medicine man. Aboriginal myth has it that the medicine man or someone appointed by him, sometimes called the kurdaitcha, would point this bone at an intended victim and cause the victim to die, an often agonising death despite the intervention of orthodox medical treatment.’ That mightn’t be a totally accurate recollection of the handwritten card sitting just below the artifact but the meaning went something like that. It looked like a crudely made chemists spatula. It fascinated me, with its dark evil, as did the idea of a medicine man using it to kill people. How could a piece of lifeless bone kill? I used to look at it every time I went to the museum and wonder about such things. I would stop to stare at the bone until my friends dragged me away. It represented a mystery and such mysteries were intriguing to adolescent boys. Call it a morbid fascination if you will. But now I like to think of it as a connection with what was then, a future that has now become my present.

Remember those were the days when most young boys like me, used to read Superman and Phantom comics. I couldn’t wait until each Saturday come around and I could ride my pushbike into town to buy the Hotspur magazine from the news agent. I still remember that the newsagent’s wife committed suicide by gassing herself in a gas oven and the town was agog with this horror for quite a while. It struck me then that people abhor death but are morbidly attracted to it, especially if it is self-inflicted. I could never read Hotspur again without thinking of her.

So I read Hotspur and comics until my elderly grandmother, who was at our house on a visit, came one day, confiscated all of my adolescent reading material and threw them down on the front porch beside me. She placed a copy of Charles Dicken’s, ‘David Copperfield,’ on my lap to read, with a very clear instruction to ‘stop reading that trash and learn to read decent books.’ I did read Dickens and benefitted enormously from the reading. Dickens gave me a sense of social wrong and the evil nature of money and class.

That is not what I want to tell you about but it is worth mentioning that my grandmother and Dickens catalysed my growth from a boyhood fantasy to adult reality, in the space of the weeks and years that followed. The book I was repulsed by at page one, became a wonderful portal into adult perceptions, particularly the false perception that all was good and wonderful in the adult world. Dickens and my paternal grandmother showed me that beneath a veneer of niceness and stability lay injustice and horror. I suppose in retrospect I had something akin to the Buddha’s ‘reorientation’ when he first perceived misery, disease and death outside the sheltered palace of his boyhood. Of course, Siddartha Gautama went on to a supposedly big and beautiful revelation. I went on to something else, something on the other, darker side of the spectrum of life opportunity, a less than beautiful revelation but equally as enlightening.

Eventually, I moved on to other adolescent activites. I had no more need to go to the museum and the medicine man and his kundela became a distant and forgotten memory. Well, as it turned out, it was never completely forgotten.

So with youth and adolescence partly under control, or at least a safety valve found for adolescent pressures, I was on the road to a ‘normal’ life, or so I thought.

Looking back, I’m not quite sure where my normal life started down this path to a living hell. Three years ago, I was a successful civil engineer in Brisbane, enjoying my life with my wife and my two children. I was going places. Some of those big construction projects you see on the rapidly changing Brisbane skyline are largely my design. I was instrumental in converting other men’s commercial and egotistical dreams into realities of concrete and steel. And generally, crystallising these dreams into realities below budget, a veritable white-haired boy in the eyes of the Board of Directors of EJA. By the way, my name is David Wayne.

The fruits of that success were a solid professional life, respect from my peers and a nice home in the suburbs. As a consequence of a successful career, my wife Linda and I were stashing away respectable savings and living a pretty good life as we did so. It was likely we could upgrade the house and car within the next year or two and the 4.8-metre runabout was beginning to look like a distinct possibility. I had always wanted a boat ever since I had been a sea cadet.

And friends, yes friends aplenty, friends who valued our success and sought us out as accoutrements to their own success, perhaps even to authenticate their own versions of success. Parties, dinners, invitations to the Sunshine Coast, weekends on the boss’s yacht. It went on and on. Good days. Heady days. Self-destructing days. Maybe that’s not quite right. Self-constructing days in some ways but, unlike my high rise projects, a lifestyle, self-constructed on foundations doomed to fail in the long term.

Now, I’m not sure who I am. I am not even sure what I am and where the present horror is going to finally deliver me. I can feel myself sliding deeper and deeper and I know there are likely going to be more people die as a consequence of my actions and my ‘knowledge.’ But the die is cast and I intend no pun. I have become something alien to my old self and there is no going back to a self that is now extinct. And going forward, well that may well be further into hell. Of course, it is to hell because I am already there. The burning fires of hell are of the mind.

Oh yes, the ‘knowledge.’ I have learned too much. I have penetrated some of the deep mysteries and paid a heavy price in lost happiness and destroyed identity. I have learned the falsity that sits at the axis of ordinary life, I have discovered that a nest of maggots exists at the centre of the apple we call ‘success.’ At least that’s how it turned out for me. I hope you have more luck. And I caution you about thinking me just a bitter and twisted unfortunate, a victim of the vicissitudes of life. There is a lot more to it than that.

And yes, I developed certain skills in the killing. But don’t think too badly of me for that. When I was eighteen, the government was quite happy to teach me these killing skills with state of the art equipment and offered me the wonderful opportunity to test and refine those skills in Vietnam. I learned a great deal from that experience. I learned that anger and hate can be put to good use. I thought about that a lot the day I killed my first Viet Cong guerrilla. A young boy and my killing shot through the side of his head looked oddly out of place on his young, almost angelic face, a face distorted in a rictus of surprise as my bullet ploughed through juvenile neural tissue. No time now for such sentiments.

The platoon had its LBJ ordained, Menzies endorsed objectives. Ah. Life’s imperatives, reality forcing necessity forcing reality forcing …? Stop the spread of communism at all costs my young mind confused the horrors of the cold war and the growing threat of atomic weapons with the spread of communism. The fact that the west especially the Americans ‘invented’ such horrors wasn’t known. Western society remained the goodies in the story which automatically inferred there were baddies, so that had to be the communists. I somehow believed it at one level but knew its falsity at another. It took an actual tour of duty in Vietnam to crystallise that distinction. I should have stayed with my inner intuition.

So here I am, sitting on a dirty park bench in Birdsville, in southwest Queensland, a little oasis of civilization positioned at the beginning of the Birdsville Track, with the Walkers Crossing track leading south-east to the Strezlecki Track. Both lead by different paths into the unforgiving perils of the desert heartland of Australia. Birdsville has a hotel, a few houses and shops, there is not much else beyond a tightly knit community of good people. But that is the superficial description. Birdsville, in fact, has just about everything you need but that depends on your needs, I guess. I at least found physical self-sufficiency in Birdsville. Mentally … well that’s another story.

Let me give you a sense of that day.

Two new off-road caravans towed by month old 4WD Toyota Landcruiser ‘tugs,’ sit at the little CCA treated rail and post fence bordering the park, a little touch of modernity in this old and dusty place, that had its beginnings as a customs post controlling the movement of goods and stock between Queensland and South Australia, in those early days of Australian history, when such revenue options were deemed necessary to fill the impoverished coffers of newly formed State Governments. Gympie and its gold came later, just in the nick of time to save the Queensland Government’s fledgling arse.

The owners of the caravans sit at a table made from rough-cut timber, painted the obligatory mission brown. The table is marginally cleaner than my bench but not by much. Dried food, spilled drink and bird shit add a certain negative character to the park furniture. And of course there is a veneer of the red-orange dust of the region, in fact of most of central Australia.

Two men and two women, obviously couples, are eating and drinking their way steadily through sandwiches and coffee, prepared in the mobile luxury of their identical twin caravans. The food is spread on a check table cloth in deference to their civilised ways and to the red Birdsville dust. I thought to myself, food always tasted better on a tablecloth. Distant memories of Linda and the kids and picnics in the bush intrude incongruously with my less than well-intentioned, present objectives.

They are happy in each other’s company. The women are nicely dressed in shorts and blouses. One in a red blouse the other in a pale mauve colour of identical sleeveless cut. Both reveal ample bosoms that have been subjected to the mammary sag that goes with gravity’s sure effect on 60 to 65 years of western living, despite Berlei cross your heart support. They could be sisters, hard to say. But one of the women has a special allure missing in the other. Not all sisters are born equal. Maybe they were once equal as sisters but life and matrimony have erased the allure in one and caused a flowering of the other. Who really understands these things? Like two azalea bushes who sit by side, both rooted in the same soil, one flowers magnificently while the other remains a mere shadow of its sister. Why?

The husbands vary a little more than the women. One is at least 185 centimetres tall and seems to be in very good shape for his age, a relatively thin athletic body that has been reasonably well maintained. Perhaps he escaped the office belly syndrome. The other man is shorter, a little more paunchy, a little less desirable to the lady who is probably his wife but who has her attention turned to the taller guy, as he talks to the group. Something tells me the shorter man is younger than the taller one by a year or two but nowhere near as fit. He could have a hypertension problem. Am I interested in this detail? Yes but not out of any need for ordinary information. I need to know my victims, especially their state of health.

Birdsville is a quiet place, so quiet it gets a little creepy sometimes. Not much happens, so any diversion fills in the time and keeps my mind free of that other mind and its horrors. Besides I am down here watching these folks at the direction of others. These modern nomads come through here in droves, doing their baby boomer retirement thing, doing the obligatory caravan trip around Australia, or through ‘the centre.’ Both are options for those whose nomadic instincts are rather more developed than those of the average man or perhaps they are simply less easily held in check.

Depends on how you look at it. The last adventure for folks who have never had any adventure in their lives, who have lived happily within the dreams of their own creation and who want to do something individual and adventurous and unique before they drop off the perch. So, not knowing how to be adventurous, they follow the other lemmings in their caravans, around and through Australia, orbiting this vast and diverse continent geographically but remaining within their entrenched lives, never quite freeing themselves from the patterns of life they have created in the sixty or so years of their early existence, although that is the intention. The adventure of a lifetime. Perhaps I have a different idea of adventure. I incline to the Indiana Jones variety, something more physical, more motivated by adrenalin. But then again, Indy was a good guy at heart. I am not a nice person it seems and I’m nowhere near as capable as him with his whip, physical agility and capacity to detect and thwart bad guys.

I am denigrating these grey nomads and I don’t mean to. In the main, they are good people, certainly better people than I am. I am not always down here at the instruction of the others. Sometimes I am just drifting around the park or the pub with nothing better to do than to run into people and have a yarn. You can’t be a kurdaitcha 24 hours a day and when I am ‘off duty,’ I admit to getting lonely and in need of some contact time with interesting strangers.

So the nomads and I sometimes chat here in this park or at the pub, especially when they are travelling on their own and need to talk to a local about the track ahead, the weather or whatever. Most often, they just want to talk to someone other than their wives for a little while. I suppose it substantiates being out here in their seventy thousand dollar caravans, towed by their much more expensive Toyota Landcruisers and such like. They haven’t got a clue about the potential adventure that lurks out here in that desiccating, desert heat and probably better they don’t go chasing Indiana Jones fantasies. Better to sit in the air-conditioned comfort of their vehicles and watch their GPS plot it’s way from point to point and note each waypoint off on the obligatory map, down the hot winding tracks, across a desert that goes on and on and ultimately leads them back into lounge rooms of wine and laughter and the telling of desert anecdotes to admiring friends.

Carry plenty of water and fuel and put trust in the superior Japanese 4WD technology and there will be no need to look for adventure beyond the tinted glass of the cabin. And such stories to tell at the end of it, how they traversed in a matter of days the country that took the lives of so many earlier explorers who tried to cross this wilderness on horseback and camel, some of whom ended up on foot. Many perished. Today’s explorers look out through the windows of their modern, reliable vehicles, sipping coffee and sweet drinks, how can they compare in courage with Simpson of the Simpson, or Burke and Wills or Sturt or the many other courageous, if sometimes foolhardy, explorers of infant Australia?

I am becoming supercilious, even cynical again and I don’t mean to be. This dry unforgiving desert is a beautiful place when you get to know it. There are occasional gorges, mountains and little camp sites of incredible but often Spartan beauty. They deserve to see these places that are part of their Australia. They deserve to see the beautiful canvas of the Dreaming come to life, the blazing dawns, the hazy mornings, the blistering midday heat, the long torrid afternoons, the magical sunsets with colours that defy any earthly painters palette, the billions of stars set like jewels in the desert night sky, the sounds, the smells the colours of this beautiful country. Some of them will see it. All will photograph it but will they live within it and understand its message? I am not sure. Maybe a handful will. Most will just gaze at the passing foreign scenery, with the entirely wrong motivation, with a hazy misunderstanding of what the experience really means.

Twenty-first century Dewey Bunnells riding across this desert on horses with names, Toyota, Nissan, Pajero, Land Rover. And the desert has different names as it unfolds across central Australia, a huge stretch of wilderness divided up into mentally convenient geographical chunks, the Simpson, the Gibson, the Birdsville, Strezlecki and Oodnadatta Tracks, the Sturt Stony Desert, just to mention some. And all of them add up to the outback, the so-called Never-Never, the dry unforgiving heartland of Australia that is totally alien and inhospitable to ordinary men. Certain Aboriginal tribes have come to live in harmony with it and have learned to survive by being a part of it. Some whites have also developed this skill but they are a different kind of people who shun the preoccupied madness of the cities and coastal living and who are maybe living out their own form of insanity in isolation on vast properties. All of us are a little mad when we start to pursue singular objectives and lose sight of the bigger picture. Who really understands our inner motivations? Are they the product of clear consideration or simply the result of the random flow of human action?

The two couples in the park are so preoccupied with each other, they don’t give me a glance. And of course, Tommy sits next to me on the bench, as black as an obsidian statue and as taciturn as the Sphinx. I doubt they want to talk to him either. I also don’t have to say anything to Tommy nor, most likely, him to me. We are both ready to go. So I simply stand up and he rises in unison, moving as if he is my shadow. We walk past the party of four on our way to the park gate. The tall man nods us a brief hello. I nod back. There seems to be a moment of partial recognition in his eyes, not of someone he knows but a subconscious awareness of his nemesis, now incarnate before him. The women and the paunchy man are deep in conversation and say nothing. They don’t give the slightest suggestion they are even aware of us. No matter, I will ‘see’ you all in the next few days. There will be no courtesies then.

I take my digital camera and pretend to do the obligatory tourist thing, snapping off a few photos of the park and then pivoting slowly, clockwise, on my heels. I ease the travellers into the view finder and take a series of photos in rapid succession. Then sweeping past, I take a few more, simply to hide the fact that they were my prime interest. I needn’t have bothered. They take no notice of me anyway. Except for the tall man. He glances up once or twice, feeling something on his shoulder, a subconscious understanding beyond the threshold of normal awareness, evil enmeshed in this desiccating, dry heat.

Tommy and I walk on past these 21st-century nomads to my battered Toyota 4WD ute, passing within a few feet of them so that I can sense their auras, gauging their pulsing life force. The men are not well. Not even the tall man who looks fit. One of the women is not too good either, the lesser sister. I slip in behind the wheel and coax my old Toyota tray back into hesitant life with a few pumps of the accelerator, draining the tired battery to near exhaustion. The reluctant groaning of the starter motor reminds me I need to replace the battery. I ease away from the park and back to the Anderson house. Tommy simply walks away from the park and disappears, like a shadow in the midday sun. I take a mental note of the number plates but it is hardly necessary. The caravans are easily remembered and besides, I will be remembering and seeing them in another way.

I like to give my victims names, even if they are interim names until I get to know them better. But I am mostly right in reading their auric fields and knowing who they are. It’s a little skill I’ve developed thanks to Donald and the others. The tall man is Robert. His paunchy mate is Alan. The red head from the bottle in the red blouse is Betty. The other blonde from a bottle lady is Natalie. The name Natalie has an exotic ring to it, perhaps via association with Natalie Wood of the silver screen but Natalie lacks Betty’s allure, she is not as exotic as Betty who, even in her advanced years, exudes sexuality and allure. Perhaps marriage to Alan has eroded Natalie’s sensuality. I notice I have a slight erection. I wonder if it is Betty’s slightly freckled breasts showing above the low cut hem of her blouse. Perhaps it is just the stimulus of what lies ahead for Betty and her companions. Not just sexual. Something far more primal, the driving motivation of sex is conquest and enticement for the perpetuation of our species in nature’s eternal dance of life.

I concentrate a little and read the details. Natalie is married to Alan. Robert and Betty are both second timers in the marriage game, married this time in spirit but preferring the legal status of partners. A paradox. There are children. It seems that Robert and Betty have four kids, two boys and two girls, a pigeon pair from each of their previous marriages, a mini Brady bunch. And the kids like each other. Alan and Natalie have three daughters. The lack of a son sits badly with Alan, especially when Robert and Betty talk about the adolescent escapades of their boys, their sporting prowess and other such things.

I feel a slight twinge of sadness that there are children involved. It means there will be collateral loss and subsequent pain for those not singled out for the fate that I have to administer. But such sentiments are irrelevant in this harsh reality. A hunter has a victim. The lioness does not pause to consider the calf of the buffalo or the foal of the zebra, as she surrenders to this same primal urge. There is only the kill and its objective, to live and sustain life. And besides, I am working under orders. Mine is not the reason why! Mine is to do and the victims to die.

‘See you soon in my Dreams, my new friends,’ I think to myself, as I walk away.

I park the ute about two hundred metres down the road looking back toward the park and wait. Within about twenty minutes, the two couples rise and move back to their vehicles. The men walk around their 4WDs and caravans, inspecting tyres, mirrors, spare jerry cans etc., while the women sit in the front inspecting their faces. A touch here, a daub there. Important to look their best for the harsh track ahead. Within another ten minutes, the vehicles are underway, moving slowly away from the park.

I watch the caravans as they move slowly to the edge of town. Within a few minutes, they are out of sight, an ordinary sight that is and it is time for me to move. Without a word, I ease back into the ute and prepare to drive to my little weatherboard house on the northern side of town. Birdsville is a tiny place, with an official population of just over 100 souls. There are sometimes many more visitors in town than those who live here such as the running of the Birdsville races and such other events.

The door to the house catches slightly on the jam as I unlock it and push it open. I am careful as I close and lock the door. For some reason, it seems necessary to maintain absolute silence as I enter the kurdaitcha room, as I call it. That door is closed and locked as well. I switch on the low wattage red lights, just enough to see with but I hardly need light at all. I know this routine well.

I start the laptop computer and while it is booting itself into a coherent cyber life, I extract the memory card from the digital camera, insert it into the card reader and wait for the computer to come up with the window giving me the various options for reading, copying and running slide shows etc. In a short time, I have copied across the eight shots taken that day at the park, in the maximum resolution possible, on my less than optimum six-megapixel camera. All good clear shots despite its limitations in resolution. I have become quite the photographer as a consequence of my kurdaitcha activities.

Then comes the task of cropping the photos so that I have clear separate images of the faces of each of four people, the two men and the two women who have been sitting and drinking coffee at the park. There is an initial problem in obtaining images of their faces without sunglasses but yes, there it is. I have what I need after all. While one of the men had been taking a group photo of the other three in the shade of one of the few trees in the park, I had snapped a photo of the entire group. Add that to another cropped photo that showed the photographer in their group without sunglasses, I now have what I need, four clear images of four faces in the maximum possible magnification. The four photos are soon laying on the discharge tray of the printer in clear colour, in A4 format. Wasteful of expensive colour cartridges I know but the job has to be done properly. I will settle for nothing less than complete professionalism. Besides, my victims provide financial support for such operational overheads.

I set each of the photos down on a large round table at the four quadrants of the table, with all four faces looking in toward the centre and anchor each photo with a set of four special stones on their corners, sixteen stones in all. I am very careful how I place these and keep repeating the process until they feel just right. Hard to explain but it’s more to do with feelings of energy alignment than with geometric symmetry and neatness. The voices let me know when it isn’t right. I am sure it’s not an obsessive-compulsive thing, just instructions coming from out of the void.

The centre of the table is covered with a circular piece of black velvet, about fifteen inches in diameter. Months ago when I was preparing my tools of the trade, I had hand-stitched a piece of red beading to the perimeter of the cloth for reasons that I didn’t understand at the time. My boy scout proficiency badge in sewing now put to good use at last. At the centre of the velvet on the cloth rests a long thin sliver of bone, the kundela. It has been carefully filed and smoothed so that it looks like an odd-shaped tool that a plasterer might use for fine work such as fitting cornices, faithful in detail to the one in the Bundy museum of my youth, thick in the centre and sharpened to a needle-sharp point at one end with the other end rounded. The sharp end is black red from where it has been dipped in blood. The blood has blackened in time. My blood by the way. No animals were killed or injured in the making of this horror and the bone came from a kangaroo deceased by nature, not by my evil hand. I have a special abhorrence for killing animals. The blunted end has a small tassel of my hair attached to it, held in place by resin from Spinifex grass. The first kundela came from Donald but I made a second kundela from the desiccated femur of kangaroo, killed by an unfortunate excursion across the road searching for scarce grass, in the path of a semi-trailer. I used Donald’s kundela for my design but I will tell you more about him later.

I point the blood-covered end of the bone needle exactly between the eyes of the first man and stand back. Then I sit on the chair on an ordinary pillow with eyes, shutting down all thought. Slowly an image forms and I see the caravans working laboriously through the sandy and gravelly ruts of the Birdsville Track. Then as my mind moves to an observation point immediately beside but slightly behind the driver of the second van. I can see I had targeted the correct man, the shorter, pot bellied one, the one whose name is Alan. The bone is pointing in proper alignment. I concentrate and enter the trance, enter the dreaming, the visualisation state where I can make the changes, where I can control and stop their fragile, illusory lives. There are two minds extant, a deep primal mind now in control and my own mind chattering away in the background, an observer only, quite powerless in this illogical horror.

Alan, the small man, seems to be wrestling with the wheel of the Nissan 4WD. I know why. It is better to let the front wheels find their own course and limit control to simply steering them away from the mounds of sand on both sides of the road and the centre mound between the wheels, mounds that have been heaped up by the passage of many vehicles, including road trains and grey nomads. The caravan sways from side to side behind the Toyota, with Alan’s irregular and mistimed steering inputs amplifying rather than correcting the steering irregularity.

Alan seems to grimace, his eyes closing as if he had just experienced the kind of pain you get in your head when you eat ice cream too fast but not in his chest, a searing pain deep in his abdomen. Slowly his head droops forward as if he is about to drop off to sleep then suddenly, his head jolts back, his hands slip from the steering wheel onto his lap and he lets out a low groan, as his eyes roll backward in his head, his mouth open.

His wife, Natalie, is looking out of the left window of the 4WD, at the passing scenery. She feels the vehicle lurch to the right and feels the wheels catch in the sand mounds lining the wheel ruts. The sand begins to drag on the right front wheel, throwing the vehicle further right. In the meantime, Alan’s legs have gone into spasm, as he pushes down hard on the accelerator. This sends the 4WD and caravan, careening off the road into the low bush. The front of the vehicle impacts a small tree at a low speed, with the wheels spinning in the bulldust, then comes to an abrupt stop, hidden for an instant in a cloud of desert dust.

The engine screams, running at full throttle with Alan’s leg held firmly in the rictus of dying, spinning all four wheels until they are irretrievably bogged in the sand. The woman’s scream can be heard above the noise of the howling diesel engine. Finally, the man’s foot pressure on the accelerator releases as he passes from life to death. The engine labours, winding down and then stops dead with a last convulsive shudder, still in gear, wheels still raking at the sand. Now there is silence in the bush, disturbed only by the wailing, caterwauling sounds of the woman.

By then, the leading caravan has disappeared from sight, the driver oblivious to the predicament of the following caravan and its occupants. Caravans generally do not follow each other too closely on western, unpaved roads because of the dust.

I stand and carefully rotate the bone on its black velvet cloth toward the photograph of the second man, Robert. This time I point it toward his chest. How would you do that on a two-dimensional tabletop surface you might ask. It is to do with the mental and energy alignments not the limitations of planar 2D versus 3D geometrics. I settle back onto the cushion and re-enter the ‘seeing’ state.

A new scene arises into mental focus. The leading caravan has stopped on the track. Both Robert and his wife are standing beside the vehicle with doors open, looking back down the track. The man reaches into the cab and picks up the CB radio. I can see him clicking on the transmit button and talking, looking down at the handset, leaning back inside to adjust the radio but there is nothing. The radio is working, at least in his mind, but I know differently. It was perfectly OK a moment before but ‘suppressed’ you might say. Besides Alan was already dead and his wife Natalie is hysterical. Robert would not reach anyone even if the radio was operational.

I can see Robert say something to Betty. He motions to her to stay in the vehicle then starts to walk back in the direction from which he had come but then he stops. He walks back to the vehicle and takes a bottle of mineral water from the back seat then sets off again. I watch him stride down the sandy road. He looks suddenly older, greyer and worried but hurries on despite this. The second vehicle, the one in which Alan now lays dead, is about a kilometre behind the first so it takes him about twenty minutes to walk back, weaving his way through the ruts and corrugations. The road surface does not make walking easy. His shoulders seem more stooped as he leans forward to gain traction in the sandier sections.

As he rounds the last bend and sees the second caravan sitting half off the road, perched at an odd angle, with one set of the tandem wheels of the caravan almost off the ground, the second set down in the rut and the Toyota jammed against a tree, he starts to run. The woman is now half out of the cabin, leaning against the window of the open door. She is wailing in a most hideous, almost non-human way. She doesn’t see him until, having reached her, he puts his hand on her flailing arm.

The wailing continues but Natalie buries her face in Robert’s chest, breaking into convulsive sobbing as he holds her. He continues to hold her for a moment then looks into the cab through the open passenger door. I can see him step back in shock, then he reaches in again, his fingers probing Alan’s upper neck for the carotid pulse but he feels nothing. I can see him move his hand around Alan’s neck, feeling for any sort of pulse, with none of the precision of a paramedic. He pushes the door further open and leans into