/ EXTRA THE AGE SATURDAY OCTOBER 21, 2000 And the hobyahs come creep, creep, creeping Rereading an early school book brought back bad memories for Inga Clendinnen including one she has never been able to escape. - HAVE just been reading a small, grim book - or rereading it. It is The Second Book of the Victorian Readers, where "Readers" means books, not people. It was first published in 1930 by the government printer, and thereafter distributed to every child in second Victorian state schools. The book brings back bad memories. It is prefaced by a grey reproduction of Sir Joshua Reynolds' (1723-1792) The Age of Innocence, in which a little girl, barefooted, fullskirted, sits with hands clasped on non-bosom gazing apprehensively at nothing we can see. The drawings, all from the hand of one lady illustrator, are impossibly cloying. It was, presumably, cost that restricted her to only four colors - red, an unnaturally virulent green, black, an exhausted pink for faces, legs and toadstools - but the sensibility is all her own. Sweetness rules. Her children, adults and an assortment of putatively male fairies all affect ersatz mediaeval gear: tights, jerkins, pointy hats, pointy boots. Female fairies ballet about stretching their skirt hems, and have huge hair. They all share a pouty-lipped simper, even when playing the flute. The words are worse. The book's epigraph promises pleasure: R. L. Stevenson's so full of a number of things/ That I we should all be as happy as kings". But we don't find a r number of things in here. What we find are terminally narcissistic fairies or brownies or elves preening in carefully-itemised clothing in a weird portent of American "tough" writing ("'he was wearing a blue and white bandana, Halsey shirt, blue Levis and tooled cowboy boots"). The core drama is about not getting these glossy clothes wet, which is where the toadstools come in. There are a few of the standard nursery horror stories - the brothertrading Billygoats Gruff conning the trustful Troll, the pathological old woman set on getting her pig over the stile, and ready to murder an ox and hang a butcher to do it, a proto Mrs Thatcher if ever I saw one. There are also lots of Rossetti lullabies and buttercups and daisies. There are shepherd boys, which is a strange idea in Australia. There is, fortunately, only one rabbit, addressed with cute formality as "Mr Rabbit". I used to see rabbits regularly, swathes of limp grey corpses festooning the re bike as he wailed through the empty streets, "Rabbit-Oh, Rabbit-Oh", and my mother would send me out to buy a pair for two shillings and she'd cut off their heads and rip off their skins and cook them with bacon and a rich brown gravy we'd mop up with bread. As for native animals - the marsupials of the Oldest Continent aren't easily made cute. They're nocturnal, solitary and taciturn. Beside them Badger is a clubman. They don't appear in these pages. Instead we have 'The Ducks' Ditty, the one bright flash of humor in the whole 100 pages. We have the Little Red Hen; we have Half-Chick to teach us to be polite and helpful or take the insanely disproportionate consequences. We have twee rhyming riddles I couldn't answer then and can't answer now. The only overtly Australian thing is one story about the usual selfobsessed fairies playing their gormless show-off games and failing a three-riddle test administered by a Like too many female characters in Australian fiction, she was a prize, but also a cipher. Did they want to eat her? To violate her? To violate and then eat her? We never know. All we know is that the hobyahs poked her with their long skinny fingers as she jounced in the sack. Then they settled to sleep because the day was dawning. Hobyahs sleep during the day. They do their mischief at night. HE LITTLE OLD MAN, who had remained cosily hidden while the house-pulling-down and the kidnapping scent book The the Victorian Coutur "black giant", in actuality an Aboriginal boy, who accuses them of trespass. They don't mind the penalty for failing the test, their permanent loss of freedom, in the least, because their golden hair turns into golden fuzz, they turn into wattle flowers, and happily settle to admiring their reflections in the river for eternity. Why feed such pap to seven-yearolds? Did any half-way sensible adult ever read these stupid stories? Unsurprisingly, with such stuff as meat, I was painfully slow to learn to read. I remember staring at pothooks that refused to arrange themselves into meaningful sounds: they'd just stare dumbly back Slowly, slowly, I got the hang of it. Staring at these pages today I can hear a breathy voice sounding out the words, growing slower and more dispirited as the vacuous meanings sink in. One "poem" went like this: White sheep white sheep, On a blue hill, When the wind stops, You all stand still. When the wind blows, You walk away slow; White sheep, white sheep, Where do you go? I blubbed with rage and disappointment when I finally deciphered that one. OWEVER - • between H a live page there because terrified 56 is there. no and the voice, silence, page Someone hobyahs 63 only who knows tells me that hobyahs were originally inhabitants of the German forests, but they don't feel German to me, in spite of the illustration by the lady illustrator. She draws them as stout-bodied, long-nosed creatures in the usual fake mediaeval fig, with black cloaks and flat, black, backward-pointing hoods. I knew then that however they were pictured they were lithe, naked, and moved terribly fast. And, wherever they might have come from, that now they lived here, in the grey Australian bush. The story goes like this. A Little Old Man and a Little Old Woman lived in a bark hut "in the middle of the bush". (This struck me as wrong: how can the bush, with no beginning and no end, have a middle?) They lived with the bush all around them, and they had a little dog, Yellow Dog Dingo, for company and protection. They needed the dog because when it was dark the hobyahs would come: "Out of the gloomy gullies came the hobyahs, creep creep creeping. Through the grey gum trees came the hobyahs, run, run, running. Skip, skip, skipping on the ends of their toes came the hobyahs." The first night the hobyahs came Little Dog Dingo barked, and scared them off. The Little Old Man responded with the stupid, phobic cruelty customary among nursery tales males: he cut off the dog's tail. When Little Dog Dingo barked the next night, he cut off his legs. When on the third night the little wriggling trunk still gamely barked, he cut off his head. So on the next and fourth night the truncated dog could not bark and there was nothing to stop the through the dark and hobyahs. They came running, down the bark hut (the Little Old Man hid under the bed) and made off with the Little Old Woman in a sack. What did they want with her? were going on, repented his earlier actions and reassembled the little dog, having frugally kept the bits. Yellow Dog Dingo tracked the hobyahs to their lair, chewed a hole in the sack, and let the Little Old Woman out. She (mindlessly) ran back to the Little Old Man and the re-assembled bark hut while Yellow Dog Dingo hid himself in the sack, and when the hobyahs woke up and started poking him he jumped out and ate them all up. like an idiot he ran back to the Little Old Man who had dismembered him. That's what it says in the book. But we didn't and we don't believe it. There were too many hobyahs. How could one little dog possibly eat them all up? At best he might have bitten one or two and then made a run for it. So they must be still out there in the bush. Among the grey gum trees, in the gloomy gullies. They're not German. I don't know where they came from but I think they've lived here for a very long time. They have dogs, but their dogs don't bark, and they don't need bark huts because they don't feel the cold and they're not afraid of the bush or the dark. And in the night they come creeping, come running, come skipping on their long swift feet to get the people fool enough to live in bark huts deep in the bush. You don't believe me? Try whispering "'Hobyahs!" to anyone over 40 when you're out in the bush, when the dusk comes creeping from the gullies, between the grey gums. Then watch them run.
