Riding the Black Cockatoo (14 page)
Just as we were about to turn left onto the main feeder road that led to the University, Bob called out, ‘Hang a right at the bridge up here, we’ve just got to pick up a coolamon from West End.’
In an instant we were crossing the river and heading in the opposite direction. I looked at my watch; an hour to go, we’d be okay. Every now and then Bob would interrupt the conversation to call out, ‘Right, left, up this way, down here,’ all the while punctuating his directions with involuntary thumps to the floor with his brake-pedal foot. What a sight we must have made: a super-cool hugely Afro’d Yorta Yorta songman, a jittery, bearded Kamilaroi man, a balding white chauffeur, a didgeridoo, a feather headdress, half a forest and a mysterious black case, all crammed into a blue Mazda hatchback.
‘Here it is, whoa, brother, in here!’ called Bob.
I hit the brakes hard; the delivery truck on our tail tooted in protest as Bob muttered a few more choice words about the holy mother.
Loose bitumen crunched under our tyres as we climbed the narrow service road that snaked into Musgrave Park. Apart from the occasional music and cultural festival, Musgrave Park isn’t generally frequented by too many white folk. An Aboriginal meeting and ceremonial place for thousands of years before settlement, and for almost 200 years an epicentre of Indigenous resistance, this was the place where Brisbane blacks drew a line in the sand and said, ‘This is ours.’ I'd always thought of Musgrave Park as a no-go zone, a place where Indigenous locals gathered to obliterate their brain cells with cask wine, solvent fumes and fists. So it was a surprise for me to find a cultural centre tucked away in the park. Three older fellows lounged on the railing of the prim little weatherboard hall; they were snappily dressed in the way that people who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s tend to dress – in high trousers, collared shirts and felt trilby hats. They greeted us all warmly and shot the breeze with Bob for a while. The centre was staffed by a couple of older ladies who greeted us like long-lost friends when we entered. There was something so genuine about these people; they possessed an unhurried generosity of spirit that now seems so rare – so endangered – in twenty-first-century Australia.
Bob asked the ladies if he could borrow a coolamon for the smoking ceremony. The ladies poked about the office, behind boxes, on top of filing cabinets.
‘Sorry, dear, someone must have borrowed it,’ said one with a shrug and a smile.
As Bob and Jason talked over the coolamon situation, one of the ladies approached me. ‘Where are you from, love?’ she asked with a face that radiated pure grandmotherly love.
‘My family’s all from Texas, but we live in Brisbane now,’ I said, and then added quietly, ‘What’s a coolamon?’
‘It’s a wooden bowl,’ she said, elegantly conjuring a long, shallow shape in the air with her hands.
I felt quite privileged to be in that place with those people, even if it was only for a few minutes. Musgrave Park proved the perfect metaphor for my experiences over the last two weeks. Here was this place that from the outside seemed so intimidating, so poisoned by bad press; Mary had forced me to push through the skin of negativity (and what a deceptively thin skin it was!) to the rich and welcoming cultural centre that awaited.
The warm, fuzzy interlude was soon shattered when I heard Bob announce, ‘No worries, I’ll just make one.’
‘Make one!’ I thought, looking at my watch. The ceremony was due to start in 45 minutes.
We drove back down the service road. My two companions were having a chuckle about something when two drunken or drugged Aboriginal men crashed out of the bushes and lurched across the road in front of us. One of the rubber men paused, his unsteady eyes fixed on me for a moment; in them I saw his bewildered spirit entombed in bloodshot madness.
‘Don’t run over the drones,’ said Bob in that samurai-sword voice of his. He shook his head and uttered a few more choice words, but beneath his anger I noticed a hint of embarrassment. For some reason, Bob’s reaction to the drunks surprised me. I suppose I’d naively thought that Aboriginal people were one big club, one big mind united in the struggle. I was fast learning their society was just like any other, with its own hierarchy of politicians and poets, jokers and brooders, winners and wastrels.
Bob’s good humour returned when we hit the streets again. ‘What we need is a good paperbark tree; keep your eyes peeled, boys.’
‘Are you sure you’ve got time to make a bowl?’ I said, nervously pointing at the dashboard clock. ‘I could swing by my place and pick something up, would a wok do the trick?’
Bob and Jason rolled about laughing.
‘Relax, brother!’ Jason said, leaning forward to slap me on the shoulder, ‘you’re running on Nunga time now.’
Bob laughed in that little bird way of his. ‘Tee-hee-hee. They can’t really start without us, can they?’
We must have taken the most indirect route possible to the University. We never seemed to travel in a straight line for more than 50 metres. ‘Over there, brother. No, try up this street.’ Every time I looked in the rearview mirror it was filled by Jason’s big, laughing face. No one could have guessed we were on our way to a solemn ceremony.
‘Quick, hang a U-turn, I think I see some paper–barks over there,’ ordered Bob.
I turned the car hard; one of the wheels caught the median strip, lurching the driver’s side of the car into the air. Bob stomped on his imaginary brake pedal as his hat and beard became airborne. After he’d caught his breath he turned to me and said, ‘Geez, you only clipped it, brother, turn around and have another crack at it, you might kill it this time!’
Tears of laughter streamed down my cheeks; Bob made a show of straightening his beard and hat while Jason’s baritone laugh bounced about the cabin.
‘Here we go, stop here! Look, there’s a whole clump of them,’ said Bob, pointing to a dozen or so paperbarks.
We were on a busy six-lane road festooned with C
LEARWAY
and No S
TOPPING
signs.
‘I can’t stop here!’ I protested as I pulled into the bus-only lane and slowed down.
‘We’ll only be a second – if the law comes, tell ’em we’re on sacred business,’ advised Bob as he leapt from the car.
Bob and Jason laughed like young boys on an emu chase as they sprinted across the park to the trees. The two men studied a few trees and exchanged opinions before Bob pointed to the one he thought was best. I watched in disbelief as he wrapped his arms around the tree and shimmied up the trunk a metre or two like a koala, then pulled until the bark began to come away. He let himself fall to the ground and as he came down a great section of bark came down with him. He and Jason jogged back to the car with a section of paperbark about the size of a small surfboard.
We had our smoking bowl.
A parking space had been set aside for us at the suburban campus. As the heat from the engine block tick-ticked away, so did the frivolity and humour that had filled the car for the last hour. We must have looked as though we meant business; Jason with his mysterious dufflebag in one hand and his didgeridoo case balanced on his shoulder; Bob with his cowboy hat pulled down low and the enormous slab of paperbark under his arm; and me with the headdress in one hand and my black case in the other. We strode with purpose; we were Mary’s minions now, doing the earthly things required to get his waylaid soul back to the spirit world. We were being reeled in. Our path seemed energised, lit up like a runway that only we could see; the throngs and gaggles of people on everyday university business parted before us.
‘Here they come, here they come.’ A rustling of whispers rose in intensity as we passed through the Oodgeroo Unit courtyard. Somehow we had managed to arrive a few minutes early, but already clusters of people milled around, looking at us while trying not to, eyes scanning each of us before coming to rest on the black case. Inside the Unit offices, the mostly female staff flitted about, trying in vain to look focused, as if it was business as usual, but there was a still, twittery tension, the way a forest feels when stormclouds boil across the hilltops and the tempest is about to hit.
Craig rushed towards us. ‘You’re here! We were starting to worry. This way, Victor’s still away, you can use his room, where’s Gary?’
He ushered us into his boss’s office. Craig and Bob knew each other; I introduced him to Jason and the two made smalltalk before Craig pulled me aside.
‘Mate,’ he whispered, ‘ I’ve got to tell you, some of my staff are really upset.’
‘Why, what’s happened?’ I asked, fearing I’d made another cultural blunder.
‘They’re sick, physically and emotionally,’ he pointed to his heart. ‘This is
bad
business, and some of them just can’t deal with it – it’s too strong. They want to know if it’s going to be visible.’
I must have looked at him with a gormless expression.
‘The remains!’ he whispered loudly. ‘Are you taking them out of the case, are we going to
see
the skull?’
‘Oh no. Of course not!’ I assured Craig that Mary wouldn’t be making an appearance; he’d be staying in the case and we wouldn’t even be seeing that. ‘Your flag will be draped over the whole thing.’
Craig’s body relaxed a little. ‘I’m sorry, Victor’s left me in charge and if anything goes wrong I’ll be getting my arse kicked till this time next year.’
‘You know, Craig, it’s weird, but it’s almost as if Mary’s chosen us,’ I explained in a rare moment of lucidity. ‘Victor’s away, Gary couldn’t make it, my dad won’t personally hand the remains back; instead it’s you, Jason and me – a younger generation has been asked to step up. And we
can
do this, it’ll be fine.’
I don’t know where the words came from, but they made Craig and me feel a little calmer.
I returned to the office, where Bob and Jason were sitting silently. It was well past eleven o’clock now. The three of us sat together for a few minutes; hardly a word was exchanged. Finally, Jason got to his feet and announced, ‘Fellas, I need to paint up and get myself ready.’
We left the Yorta Yorta songman and Mary and headed through the office towards the courtyard. It was difficult to walk more than a few steps without someone asking a question, wanting to know what was happening, wanting to know what the plan was. Out in the courtyard people were gathering at the perimeter of a circle half made up of chairs, half imagined; in the centre stood a lone table. An area had been set for the media contingent, who busied themselves unfolding tripods, unwinding cables and checking over camera equipment. A blur of Indigenous faces – people who introduced themselves, touched me, and asked if I was okay. I was taken aback; I was the representative of a family that had violated the dead, yet everyone I spoke to was genuinely concerned for
my
wellbeing!
Usually it is the coloured faces that stand out in a crowd. Today it was the turn of the white ones; my lecturers and fellow students all floated in stark relief amid the sea of brown skin and dark curls.
My parents – I’d forgotten them! Big Rob was easy to find, he towered above the other guests; I asked him if he could take my family under his wing when they arrived.
‘They got here ages ago, some of the ladies are looking after them in the lunchroom,’ he said, pointing to a set of glass doors at the far end of the courtyard. I poked my head in to make sure they were okay. A blur, a swirling blur, so many people. Bob Weatherall looked serene, as if this was what he had been born to do. He patted me on the shoulder and gestured to the trees that lined the narrow courtyard. ‘Paperbarks,’ he smiled, ‘good ones too.’ He took his bark coolamon to a nearby tap and let water run over it, massaging the moisture into the layers of pulpy fibre so that it wouldn’t catch fire.
A newspaper reporter cruised up to my side like a shark. ‘You’re John, right? Listen, I’ve only allowed half an hour for this job and you’re running late, so what I’d like to do is set up a quick photo of you and that Aboriginal fella holding the skull – with maybe the fire and the flag in the background.’
‘No. We can’t do that,’ I replied, not quite believing what I’d just heard. My mind leapt back 20 years; I’d just left school and wasn’t sure what to do with my life and Dad had gone berserk when I mentioned that I might like to be a journalist. Now I understood why.
‘Well, can we just snap a few photographs of the skull, it’ll take thirty seconds?’
I opened my mouth to explain that no one would be seeing the remains, but I didn’t have the energy, I just walked away. Later I saw him where the rest of the media had gathered; he waited like everybody else.
Suddenly my family was in front of me; Stella encouraging me with her smile, my two daughters, Bianca and Lydia, in pretty dresses and eyes full of wonder. My beautiful mother and father – how small they looked, how nervous; how brave they were to come, to walk through this sea of Indigenous eyes and into this circle. My brother too, in his fine lawyer’s suit; I’d invited him but hadn’t expected him to show up – he was the practical, rational son, I was the dreamer. But Mary had been a big part of his life too, and now here he was, stepping into the unknown when he was supposed to be in court. Big Rob ushered my family to their places and made sure they were comfortable. I invited some of the ladies from the Oodgeroo Unit to sit with my family but they shook their heads. ‘This business is between your family and the Wamba Wamba, darling,’ one of them explained. ‘Our proper place is on the outside of the circle, behind the men.’