Riding the Black Cockatoo (24 page)
‘Welcome to Menera, brother,’ said Jida as he turned off the road and through the gates of the property. We drove down the long central farm road. Jida waved to a harvester in a distant paddock and the driver waved back. Properties of this size cost a lot to maintain and Menera is still a working enterprise, but the best land has been set aside as a cultural sanctuary, a place to conduct spiritual business and as a final resting place for Wamba Wamba ancestors. We pulled up at the shearers’ quarters, a long, well-kept, corrugated-iron building. At one end was a basic kitchen and an adjoining room containing a few worn-out lounge chairs. The rest of the rooms contained beds, holding bare mattresses that looked almost as old as the Dreamtime. Jida took me to the last room and opened the door. ‘This is where we housed the remains for a few weeks while we made preparations for the burial. Mary waited here before going back to Mother Earth.’
We continued across the property to the river and parked at the main house. The farmhouse was surrounded by a green lawn and rickety, vine-covered fence. The station manager was out. Looking for a suitable place to store the camping supplies and equipment he had brought up from Melbourne, Jida wandered in and out of machinery sheds and outbuildings. The smells of fertilisers and feed bags brought back memories of my childhood, when I followed my father into sheds just like these.
When Jida found the right spot he backed the car into a shed and unloaded his gear before carefully covering everything with an old canvas tarpaulin. ‘I’ll be back in a few weeks doing some cultural business, this is some of the gear I’ll need,’ he explained.
We wandered up onto the levee bank and sat watching the river slide past. An ancient aluminium houseboat, no bigger than the smallest caravan, sat tethered to the great root of a river red gum. A lone shirt dried in the still air and a fishing line ran limp into the water, but no one was home.
‘Who lives there?’ I asked.
‘Can’t remember his name,’ answered Jida, ‘but he’s a good fella, a Vietnam veteran. Hardly leaves the river; spends all his time travelling up and down in his tinny pulling rubbish from the water. Collects garbagebags full.’
I followed Jida along the riverbank. A neighbouring farmer eyed us suspiciously from the far bank before Jida disarmed him with a wave and a smile. He walked though the scrubby bush easily, silently, while I crashed and crunched behind.
‘We’ve got big plans for this place: ecotourism, bush tucker, an education and training centre for our young people.’
‘See this dried-up billabong,’ he said, pointing to a large patch of ground which to me looked just like a hollow. ‘I want to pump water back into it and create a living water stage where we can put on night-time creation stories and concerts. It won’t be like some fake Disneyland; I know how it can all be done so it blends in naturally. My family knows all the contacts to do it right: lighting people, sound people. I want people to come here and learn, so that when they go away they’ll see the country the way we see it.’
As I looked about I could see it. And I believed that I’d one day return to see Jida’s vision a reality.
We drove on through a desolate expanse of the property in silence. It was sparsely vegetated with stunted saltbush – not even weeds grew here. It reminded me of the badlands from a Western movie. Decades ago, some farmers along the Murray learnt that the ‘camp ovens’ or middens – some of which were up to two kilometres long – made inexpensive and fast-draining road surfaces. Entire middens, which often included burial sites, were excavated and turned into service roads. I wondered if we were driving over one of the infamous ‘oven roads’ now, across the ground-up bones of Mary and Jida’s ancestors. Considering our destination, I thought it prudent not to ask. We parked at a dried-up creek crossing; across on the other side the land softened into green again.
‘The burial site is on the other side,’ Jida explained. ‘We need to be smoked before we can cross over.’
As Jida built a ceremonial fire I looked around at the surrounding trees. They were ancient trees and in their gnarly knots and bark bunions I saw their spirit faces. These were the sentinels of the bridge and our observance of Law determined whether we would receive their benevolence or suffer their wrath. White smoke curled skywards and Jida came towards me with a smoking sapling. I stood with my arms outstretched, as if I was passing through an airport security gate. I let the smoke pat me down and remove bad spirits from my pockets, from my soul. The air began to vibrate against my skin, as if the atmosphere around us had changed to a higher, faster frequency.
‘It’s okay, we can cross now,’ said Jida quietly.
We climbed into the car and drove across the wooden bridge. The faces on the trees were close, watching us as we passed. I felt their breath.
‘Those trees had faces, did you see . . .’
Jida drove on slowly without answering.
As we rose up out of the dip the atmosphere returned to a more familiar frequency. I say ‘frequency’ because that is the only way I could describe it.
We drove to a gated fenceline and Jida announced our arrival. Passing through the gate I stood before two rows of mounds. Beneath each one lay a Wamba Wamba man, woman or child. Jida walked to one of the mounds and said, ‘I’m pretty sure that this one belongs to Mary. I put him in the ground, I remember because he really stood out.’
‘Why, did you get a sense that it was him, did it feel different to the others?’ I asked, expecting a mystical, otherworldly explanation.
‘No, it was because he was bright yellow.’
I burst out laughing and when I explained the coats of lacquer that Dad had applied over the years, Jida laughed too. How was I expected to stay solemn now! Jida left me alone. I tried to feel profoundly moved, appropriately emotional. I removed my boots and socks and wiggled my toes into the red earth, trying to feel something more, some connection with my old friend, but I couldn’t. Mary was back in the ground where he belonged and that was that.
I walked back to the car and placed my boots on the bonnet. Jida was nearby, scratching about in the faint remnants of a fire. With a stick he overturned old coals, revealing half-melted metal tags. The tags bore serial numbers. ‘This is where we burnt the specimen boxes,’ he explained. ‘Our ancestors were all tagged with numbers; Mary was the only one with a name.’ He pointed to a large patch of bare earth. ‘We set the marquee up over there, that’s where the guests sat. Koories from all over Victoria and New South Wales came to say goodbye. At the end everyone came forward and threw gum leaves into the open graves upon the bones.’
Jida led me to a large mound behind the burial site which he explained was a camp oven. I imagined it was just like the one my uncle had pulled Mary from, over 40 years ago. Rabbits had burrowed into its sides, displacing century-old clay balls used for cooking. As I gazed upon Wamba Wamba country from the top of that ancient mound, a clay ball in my hand, the feeling I’d had in the bush as a child returned. It felt as if the original occupants had been here only moments before. And in a sense that was true.
Jida walked towards the nearby billabong, and as I followed I walked into a clump of thistles. Falling to my backside I yanked the painful needles from my tender soles.
‘What did you take your boots off for?’ demanded Jida as I sat wincing on the ground.
‘Well, don’t you ever like to feel the soil under your feet?’ I shot back.
‘Not around here, I don’t; I’m not silly, you know.’
We both broke up laughing again. I hobbled to the shady bank of the billabong and plonked down besides my friend. With my pocketknife I managed to scrape most of the thistles from my feet.
A couple of ducks glided by and I asked Jida if they were good to eat.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘You mean you’ve never had roast duck?’
‘So how would you get them, with a spear or a shotgun?’ I asked, thinking I’d covered all bases.
‘Too hard with a spear, too messy with a shotgun. What I’d do is get into the water and gather up a whole bunch of reeds and sticks. Then with my face just sticking out of the water I’d gently,
gently
, float close by. Then when a duck swims by I’d just grab him by the legs and pull him under. No noise, no mess – easy! His duck brothers wouldn’t even know what had happened to him.’
I nodded. ‘That does sound like a good way to catch duck.’
We sat for a long time in silence, soaking in the spirit of the billabong.
‘You know,’ said Jida eventually, ‘Mary’s journey home is a story about love. I think I’ll write a song about it.’
I didn’t answer; the breeze that rippled across the water did that for me. And while I sat there with Jida under that clean Wamba Wamba sky, lazily watching those ducks that would live to swim another day, I can’t say I felt healed. I just felt good. As though I belonged. As though I had come home.
I met John Danalis once in 2005, after he contacted me to ask if he could use a black cockatoo feather headdress he had seen on display during one of my talks at the Brisbane Writers Festival.
I will never forget the impact of those words, ‘a skull on our mantelpiece’; he might as well have kicked me through my gut with the heel of his foot. But I immediately thought that if this whitefella was bold enough to first call me about the headdress, and then make an effort to turn up at my doorstep in pursuit of it, I should at least listen to what he had to say, and I mean really listen.
I knew it wasn’t a decision that I had the right to make; my spirit belly knew that the decision had already been made by the Spirits, our old people. This was business that did not need my reaction, but my contribution.
I remember clearly and quite simply saying to Johnny, ‘He or she needs to go home’, and this story confirms to me over and over again that John Danalis got the message. We need to go home. To Country. At any point throughout time . . . we need to go home.
This story is the first yarn I know of told by a whitefella who appears to have entered into
our place
. He has begun to
connect
, to quite simply,
get it
. The journey is yet to unfold from here on now, but the connection process has begun, Johnny Danalis has begun to see things, this place, this country, the people, through the eyes of The Dreaming.
I can only imagine how strong the
heartbeat
and
Spirit face
of this Country would be if our collective eyes could begin to do the same.
{ FIONA DOYLE OOCHUNYUNG
CAIRNS, APRIL 2009 }