INCIDENT AT CHARLES CREEK
“… a dull, opaque light that was in the form of a naked Aboriginal woman… “
Almost three years ago, while driving one hot night from Tennant Creek to Alice Springs along the Stuart Highway, I was rather surprised to find a semi-trailer pulled over by the roadside, all lights blazing.
The driver was standing outside his cab waving a torch at me, obviously intending me to stop awhile for a yarn.
Although he was heading north, and I was travelling south, it wasn’t uncommon in those days for motorists to stop along the track to boil the billy and swap information about things seen and done.
The truckie, I was soon to learn, was in a highly agitated state. His manner was anxious and he was extremely nervous.
“What’s wrong, mate?” I asked. “Did you hit a cow or something?”
“No,” he replied. “I just wanted to warn you about something … See that big dip behind me where it crosses Charles Creek … Well, when I was driving down the slope towards the creek, I thought I saw something glowing off in the scrub, like a soft light. I thought at first it might be someone camping there overnight, and their campfire was still burning.”
“Maybe that’s what it was,” I suggested, “just an old campfire that suddenly flared up in the wind.”
“It … it was no campfire,” he stuttered nervously. “You see, I slowed the truck right down to a crawl so I could get a better look at where the light was coming from. It was then I saw it, and it frightened shit out of me. I put my foot down to the floor and I slipped past the damned thing as fast as I could and I didn’t stop until I got up here. I could see your lights coming a long way off and I thought I should do the right thing and try to stop you and give you a fair warning of what was down there in the dip.”
Cautiously, I enquired: “How many drinks did you have before you left the Alice?”
“I’m not drunk,” the truckie insisted. “I’m stone cold sober, mate. I never drink while I’m on a long haul.”
“Well, what scared you?” I enquired. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
The word “ghost” stopped him.
He was visibly shaken.
His startled eyes were darting in all directions.
At last, he said: “Look, mate, I don’t want to frighten you, but I saw something down there. I won’t say what I saw. You make up your own mind. Tell you what, turn off your headlights and just let your car cruise down the hill very slowly. When you start to climb up the other side, keep your wits about you. Look out into the bush on your right side. That’s all I’ll say. Okay?”
More to humour him than anything else, I started my ute down the hill with no headlights, watching at the same time the scrubby bush country to the right of the road.
As the car slowed, I was about to press the accelerator when I heard a piercing scream, a woman’s scream, coming from the scrub.
I stopped the vehicle, walked across the road to the opposite side, searching the darkness for the source of that terrifying scream.
Suddenly, not far ahead, through the spinifex I became aware of a dull, opaque light that was in the form of a naked Aboriginal woman. The form appeared to be seated on a fallen stump and she was nursing a baby. As I concentrated on the eerie apparition, I could see the long shaft of a spear protruding from her breast.
Once again the woman screamed; it was a deeply chilling sound that started tremors of fear rippling up my backbone. I wanted to run, but was somehow transfixed, as though frozen in time.
I don’t remember getting back to the car parked by the highway. My next awareness was driving hell-for-leather towards the Alice and, finally, locking myself inside the house with a stiff whiskey.
Months later, when the effects of the experience had lessened, I remember asking an old Aboriginal mate of mine about the events I had witnessed that night near Charles Creek, and I asked him if he could rationalise it for me.
image
The old man told me I had seen something that usually only full-blooded Aboriginal people could see.
Back in his grand-father’s time, he said, a young woman had broken a serious tribal law; she had absconded with a man who was “wrong skin” to her that is, too closely linked in blood ties and this offence constituted incest and was punishable by death.
Her lawful husband asked the woman one evening to go off into the bush along Charles Creek to collect firewood.
Unbeknown to her, tribal executioners were lying in wait and, at the opportune moment, one man leapt from his cover and drove a shovel-nosed spear deeply into her chest, killing her as a terrified scream died in her throat. Her baby was also speared.
Their bodies were interred in shallow graves on the hillside and covered over with logs and rocks.
“Sometimes,” the old man reminisced, “the spirit of that girl come out at night and scream one more time, just to remind us if we break the law, we die, and that’s how it is.”
© C. J. H.
