Ghost Gums

Here's an Australian ghost story for you...loosely based on an Australian legend of the Quninkan, a ghost spirit of the bush. I wrote it after I read about how some young women who come to Australia in search of a better life are abused by their Australian husbands. As we have much loved Phillipino partners in our family, I was deeply touched by this and wrote my revenge on those worthless males...


Ghost Gums


Corazon stood on the veranda and gazed out over the alien Queensland landscape as it sloped away from the house.

It was what her husband Reg called a ``long block” that rolled down the hillside to the front gate, marked off here and there by broken down fences. The block was disected by a winding driveway from the gate to the house.

The paddocks on either side of the driveway held nothing but clumps of spiky grass, a couple of deep, dark dams and thickets of trees, strange white-barked trees. These trees grew no fruit. They simply existed, looking like dancers in veils, their long tortured limbs stretching up to the sky, shrouded by shreds of bark that moved gently in the breeze.

Corazon thought it strange and wasteful. Reg did nothing with all this land. He parked his semi trailer and his ute in a big shed nearby and let nature have the rest. Her father would have cried to see this sloping hillside untilled, untended, where there could have been terraces of rice paddies.

And this waste went on all over. The rest of Australia crouched like a sleeping beast, never rousing itself to produce anything she would regard as edible.

Some of the neighbouring farms, which she could see in the distance, looked more productive. Some had fruit trees, others grazing cattle. But Reg was no farmer, he was a semi driver, He laughed at her attempts to grow herbs at the back of the house. He wouldn’t let her cook the Filipino dishes she had learned from her mother. When he was home, she cooked slabs of meat in the electric frypan, beat potatoes to a mash and defrosted frozen peas.

But when he was away, she ate dried fish and rice, chillis, and coconut, which she had smuggled home in the monthly shopping and hid at the back of the kitchen cupboards. She grew a lemongrass plant in the backyard and inhaled the scent deeply as she chopped the leaves and tossed them into the rice. She took her meals out onto the veranda when he was away and watched the stars blaze overhead.

Reg was often away for days at a time with the semi. She saw no one when he was away. The post was left by a van that pulled up and sped away in a cloud of dust, and the neighbours, none within hailing distance, kept to themselves.

She heard the semi approaching, the sound of the engine going down through the gears, and then its snub nose appeared from behind the trees and stopped at the gate.

She watched Reg climb down from the cab of the semi and unlock the gate, then drive the semi through, get out and lock the gate again.

She never understood why he kept the gate locked. He said it was to stop someone stealing his vehicles, but the semi and the ute were already locked up in the shed. Surely anyone who wanted to come in would just climb over the gate.

She guessed it was to remind her that she could not leave, or perhaps it was Reg’s way of telling the world to keep out of his private domain. But she never challenged him about it.

The semi roared up the long drive. Too fast, Reg always drove too fast, although not as fast in the semi as he did in the white ute, skidding and skipping over the rough track. The semi disappeared into the shed and she waited for the whistling.

If he was whistling, he would be in a good mood. She would go back into the kitchen and start dinner.

If he was not whistling, he would in a dangerous mood. She would go back into the kitchen and make dinner. But her shoulders would be hunched, and her eyes darting about to see if anything was out of place.

Once he came home and found that the beer fridge on the back veranda was unplugged. She must have accidentally knocked the plug out when she was cleaning down there. He beat her with his belt for that.

Another time there had been flies in the kitchen because the fly screen had fallen off its hinges. He hit her, sending her crashing into the kitchen bench.

But if he was whistling, if the trip had gone well and he had no speeding fines, he didn’t notice little things.

``That’s my girl,” he would say, and slap her on the rear, leaning appreciatively over the frypan where his steak sizzled. ``that’s my good little girl.”

Big things still annoyed him, like his steak not being perfect, or lumps in the mashed potato. But she was a master with these big slabs of meat now, even though she still hated to eat them, the blood oozing out of the centre, the mash and peas stained red with it. And she beat the potatoes until they were smooth as butter.

She heard his tuneless rendition of some pop tune echoing out of the shed and her fingers relaxed their grip on the veranda rail. But the steaks had better be frying before he got into the house.

``That’s my girl,’’ he said as he came in. ``That’s my good girl.”

After dinner he watched TV for a while, until she finished washing up. Then they both had a shower before bed. He was very particular about the shower. He had to wash her body and hair himself, ``to get off that Filipina stink,” he said, although he never explained why he had flown to the Phillipines specifically to buy a Filipina bride if he thought they stank.

``No offence, love,” he said, as he soaped her hair with a shampoo that smelled of flowers, ``it’s just that curry shit you lot put in your cooking. Fair oozes out of your pores, it does.”

When he was satisfied that she smelled like an Australian woman, he took her to bed. Her mind never dwelled on what happened there. It was mercifully quick, for that she thanked God.
``Better take yer shopping,” he said next morning.

Every now and then he took her into town to shop. He gave her a list of things she had to buy and the money to cover it. She quickly learned that actual prices differed from those he wrote down – the shop keepers sold marked down goods and she could save a little money on these. She bought a little food for herself with what she saved.

She was not allowed to talk to anyone while they were in town. If they met one of his friends, she had to stand behind him and keep her head bowed. If she looked up, he accused her of flirting and beat her when they got home.

`Town’, as he called it, was about ten miles down the dusty track that led to the property. After a mile or so, it smoothed out into a bitumen road, and more houses started appearing along the roadside, gradually thickening into a suburb. The road continued through town, forming the main street, then split at the end of town, one road leading north, one south.

Reg parked in the main street, cruising up and down until he saw a gap. There was a pub across the road from the shopping centre, and he would go in there, and give her an hour to finish the shopping.

``Don’t forget the barbecue sauce,” he said, as he slid out from behind the driver’s seat.

The shopping centre was air conditioned, and had several shops beside the supermarket itself. One of her favourite shops was tucked away down the end, near the entrance to the car park. It was a junk shop, run by a young man called Gino who always seemed to be unpacking boxes behind the counter, filling the shelves with old books, vases and other things picked up at auction. Corazon was allowed to buy clothes here, from the racks of cheap second hand clothing.
She always called in after she had finished the grocery shopping.

“Hello,” Gino said. ``I’ve got something for you.” He dived into one of the cardboard boxes behind the counter and came up with a couple of magazines clutched in his hand. ``Filipino,” he said. ``Would you like them?”

Corazon nodded, and reached into her handbag to pay for them, but he stalled her, shoving the magazines into the shopping trolley.

``Don’t worry about it. I’ll keep an eye out for more,” he said.

Excited about her magazines, she didn’t notice the way he looked at her, admiring her pretty face with large dark eyes and full lips, her slender figure not quite disguised by a shapeless t-shirt and stretch pants. Back home, she would have noticed, and returned his smile. Here, she dared not.

He returned to his unpacking and she had a quick glance at the new stuff piled on the shelves. There were several paintings, stacked untidily near the counter and she paused to look at a small unframed canvas, which featured ghost gums and a white splodge of something whirling around in the centre.

``Awful, isn’t it?” Gino said conversationally. ``I picked them up at a garage sale. The artist used to live round here, but she left in a hurry a couple of years ago. Couldn’t stand it any longer, I guess.” He sounded as if he had some sympathy with the woman. “That’s supposed to be a local legend, something called a Quinkan.”

Corazon’s ears pricked at the unusual word. ``What is that?” she asked, too interested to be cautious.

``Quinkan? It’s a spirit – an Aboriginal legend – the hills are supposed to be full of them.”

``Like a ghost?” she said.

``Yeah, I suppose.”

She looked at the painting again. The white splodge did have a human form in it as it whirled through the ghost gums.

``How much?”

``Two dollars?” Gino said, almost apologetically.

She paid for the painting and hurried toward the exit. But before she got there, she rearranged the shopping in the bags to conceal the painting and the magazines. Reg barely glanced at her, except to grunt, ``that took long enough,” as she stacked the bags in the tray of the ute.
He left her to take the shopping into the house as well, while he went off to get the semi ready for his next trip, so she was able to hide the painting and the magazines in a cupboard until he was gone.

He left two days later, and she stood on the veranda and watched him lock the gate before he drove away, the semi charging up through the gears as it gathered speed.

Corazon tended to some neglected chores, watering the lemongrass and weeding her herb plot, before she dug her treasures out of the cupboard and went back to the veranda to examine them.

The painting she propped up against the veranda rail, looking first at the ghost gums growing in a clump near the house, then back at the painting. Her first impression in the junk shop had been right. They were the same ghost gums, in the same position. The picture had been painted on this very spot.

She knew Reg hadn’t owned the property for long. He had told her father, when they were doing a business deal for her future, that he had just bought a house where she would live. He had made it sound like a palace, or so her younger sister Marisol had said. Corazon had been at work in the factory when the conversation took place.

``He is an ugly man,” Marisol had reported, ``but he is very rich. A rich Australian.” She had sounded envious.

Corazon settled back on the broken down sofa and opened one of her magazines. It was in tagalog, and she read one of the stories, savouring the sound of her own language in her mind. Back home she wouldn’t have read this magazine. It was dry, and political, and there was nothing about movie stars in it. The other magazine was in English, and was more like the kind she would have bought.

But as she was flipping through it, she found advertisements for Filipino brides.

``Filpino Hotties for sale,” said one. She threw it aside.

That was how Reg had found her, through an advertisement. Her father had spoken to a man who put her picture on the Internet, and she had been put up for sale. They had told her it was her one chance to get out of the factory, out of Manila, and into a life of luxury. She could send money home to her family, her bride price would send Marisol to school.

But she couldn’t send money home. She wasn’t even allowed to write letters home, or go into a post office. She always ran for the mail when it was dropped off, but there were never any letters with a Manila postmark.

She burned the English-language magazine in the incinerator behind the house. She kept the tagalog magazine – it reminded her of her childhood, before her family moved to the city and became just another poor rural family lost in the scramble for money.

The sun had reached the top of the sky and beat down on the house, casting no shadows. Even with all the fans going, it was too hot in the house for comfort, so she went back to the veranda to look at the ghost gums and imagined the dancing movements that caused their twisted shapes.
The leaves rustled as an eddy of warm air passed over them, and Corazon felt it caress her face as it moved over the veranda. She leaned on the rail, watching the trees, her eyes half closed.
The breeze returned, this time picking up a handful of leaves from the ground and swirling them around in a funnel that spun up toward the lower branches of the ghost gums. For a few moments it hovered there, spinning the leaves in a wild dance, then skittled across the ground toward her.

She had seen this before. Reg called it a ``willy-willy”, and laughed at her alarm when she had first been caught in one, the leaves swirling around her as she tried to escape it. But now she watched as it skimmed across the ground and danced about in front of the veranda.
She went down the wooden steps toward it, but it moved away from her in a teasing fashion. She followed, and then it suddenly changed direction and flew at her, catching up her hair and slapping her face with the dancing leaves.
In the centre of the willy-willy, she felt the soft currents of air brushing her body, enclosing her in a cocoon that made the world outside seemed very far away.

Then, with a last playful tug at her hair, it was gone, skittering across the grass to disappear altogether, the leaves finally settling yards from where they started.

``Quinkan,” she murmured, and a shiver went up her spine

That night she slept poorly. She seemed to hear the wind beating on the windows, trying to get in. She got up and went outside, but the night was very still. The ghost gums shone in the moonlight, and seemed more disarrayed than usual, as if she had almost caught them moving.
Reg was away for three days, and he returned in a bad mood. He had ``copped”, he told her, two speeding fines, and this was clearly her fault. His steak was too dry for his taste, and she hadn’t bought the right frozen peas. She knew he hated the mint flavoured kind.

She slept out on the veranda, nursing her wounds, while he snored in their bed. The moon was waning now, but still bright enough to see by.

Her face felt numb where he had hit her with his closed fist, and there was a welt on her arm where the belt buckle had bit in. She couldn’t do anything about either of them, because he would know if she went back into the house. He placed a bucket inside the door which would fall over and wake him if she tried to open it.

For a while, she tried to take her mind back to her childhood, back to the days before Manila, when even poverty didn’t seem so hard, when her mother was alive and would take her and her younger sister for walks, pointing out anything of interest along the way.

But even that had no power to comfort her. She wept for her mother and the younger brother she had never known. It was after they died, the night the much long-for son was being born, that her father had changed, become a bitter, angry man, and announced they would be moving to Manila, where they would have a better life.

Unable to make herself comfortable on the sofa, Corazon sat up, and stretched her stiff legs. The ghost gums rustled as a night breeze passed through their leaves. She watched them, the leaves blowing about like fronds of hair, the tall white trunks turning gracefully to music she could not hear.

She did hear another sound, though, a ripple of woman’s laughter, carried on the night breeze.
The silver white trees shimmered in the moonlight. Corazon fancied she saw a long, slender limb move, as if tired of holding its position.

Then the leaves on the ground sprang into the air, and started to dance in capricious circles around the sinuous shapes of the trees.

Corazon forgot the pain of her wounds. She hurried down the veranda steps, across the grass and into the group of trees, trying to catch the little whirlwind as it bobbed about, teasing her, sometimes coming close, sometimes flitting away.

Then she was in the centre of it, and she felt long arms fold around her body, and warm breath on her face, and she closed her eyes and let the Quinkan dance her round and around. She felt the touch of other hands, soft female hands, caressing her as they moved between the trees, heard the silver laughter again and she opened her eyes and they were swirling around her, their white bodies shining in the moonlight.

She was lying on the sofa when she woke with the dawn. Her sore arm was stiff, and her face still felt puffy. She could hear Reg moving around inside the house. The front door scraped open.

``Get in here and make me some breakfast,” he said.

Frying bacon and eggs in the kitchen, Corazon kept out of his way as he stormed around the house.

``Where’s my clean clothes?” he roared.

Corazon scuttled down into the back yard, and dragged his clothes off the line.

``I forgot,” she said breathlessly as she carried them back up to the kitchen.

``Just give me clean pants and a shirt,” he said. She handed the clothes over and then rushed back to the stove, where the eggs were curling up at the sides.

``You’d better have yourself sorted out before I get back,” he said. ``I didn’t even want you, I wanted your sister. But she wasn’t old enough.”

Corazon dished up his breakfast in silence.

``Burnt eggs,” he said. ``I hate burnt eggs. You could take some cooking lessons from my old mum. Beautiful cook. Beautiful.” He sliced the bacon with relish and shoved a forkful into his mouth.

Corazon made coffee and sat down. She watched him eat, slicing and shovelling, and occasionally pausing to denigrate her cooking.

``I gotta go into town,” he said. ``You need to shop?”

``There is no meat left,” Corazon murmured.

``Get changed then.” He glared at her across the table. ``And if anyone wants to know what happened to your face, you walked into a door, right?”

``Right,” Corazon said. She hadn’t seen her face yet. When she did, it didn’t look so bad. Her eye was discoloured, but her cheek not as swollen as it felt. She bandaged her arm, and wore a long sleeved blouse to cover it.

No one at the supermarket did comment on her face, although the check out girl gave her a sympathetic look and when she said, ``have a nice day”, she actually sounded as if she meant it.
But Gino blanched and asked her if she was all right.

``I walk into a door,” she said.

``Yeah, right,” he said. ``Took a swing at you, this door?”

``I am all right,” she said. ``I want to ask you about that picture.”

He looked blank for a moment. ``Which picture? Oh, the ghost gums. What about it?”

``I think it was painted where I live. What happened to the lady – the artist?”

``I don’t know,” Gino shrugged. ``She just left, that’s all. The local cops were a bit concerned about it for a while, but it seems she did that often – just up and left without telling anyone where she was going. Artists are like that,” he added.

``Can you tell me about the Quinkan?”

Gino shook his head. ``I don’t know much about Aboriginal stories,” he said.

``Do you know anything about that one?”

``There’s all different ones, some are nice spirits, some are not – I heard about a Quinkan, called Yuki, when I first came here. The locals say he turns women into trees.” Gino laughed.

``This place is full of stories like that.”

``Into trees – ghost gums?” Corazon said.

``Could be.” Gino leaned closer. ``Look, why don’t you come for a cup of coffee with me? I can close the shop for a while.”

``No, I can’t.” Involuntarily, her hand went up to her face.

``You should tell that bastard where to go. Leave him.”

``I must go.” Corazon headed for the door, dragging her shopping trolley, avoiding Gino’s eyes as she left.

The next day, Reg drove away in the ute. He was doing a small job, he said, moving some furniture for a mate who lived down the coast. He would be back in the morning.

Corazon watched him go, watched him lock the gate, and thought about Gino. ``Come for coffee,” he had said, and ``leave him.” But how could she do that? She was married, and the only place she really wanted to go was home.

Corazon spent the day attending to anything that might aggravate Reg when he returned. But then the wind sprang up in the trees again and she was filled with a longing she could not name, a longing to dance in the moonlight, and laugh.

She bathed carefully that evening, using the sandalwood soap that Reg hated, brushing her hair until it shone, pulling a dress from her wardrobe that she had not worn since she left home. It floated around her like a mist.

Stepping out into the waning moonlight, she paused only to take a handful of jasmine blossoms from the vine that grew over the veranda and tucked them into her hair.

They were waiting for her, the white slender women and the dark man, his eyes flashing in the moonlight, his wild black hair whipped by the swirling breeze. She felt her feet leave the ground as he caught her up and whirled her in his arms, and her laughter joined that of the silver women.

Reg unlocked the gate and drove the ute through it. He had trouble focussing on the key as he tried to lock it again. It had been a heavy night, he had drunk a lot of beer. Somewhere inside his thumping head was a niggling thought, that something wasn’t quite right, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.

She’d better not have stuffed up again, he thought as he back into the ute. He scowled as he accelerated the ute up the driveway. Should have held out for her sister. He remembered Marisol, young, sweet and pliable. That was a proper woman for you, young enough to train. Corazon had picked up too many independent ways working in the factory. Her father had cheated him. She was no good and he had a right to take her home and demand his money back. No – he wouldn’t demand his money back. He would demand Marisol instead. She’d be 16 now, old enough even for the nit picking Australian authorities.

It would be different with Marisol, she would do as she was told – she would –

Reg never finished that thought, nor any other. He barely had time to register shock before his ute slammed into the tall silvery ghost gum that had grown, quite inexplicably, in the centre of his driveway.