Riding the Black Cockatoo (5 page)
At lunchtime, I spied Craig from the Oodgeroo Unit (the campus Indigenous education and support department). He was eating lunch, alone.
‘Do it, man, just walk over there and do it,’ I told myself.
Craig had been a guest lecturer last semester in one of my Community Studies units, so I felt as though I knew him a little. He had opened his lecture with a simple yet powerful little ‘party trick’; he fished all the loose change from his pocket and laid the coins out in a neat line on the overhead projector, from the lowest denomination to the highest.
‘Five-cent piece – the echidna,’ he began. ‘Ten-cent piece – the lyrebird; twenty-cent piece – the platypus; one-dollar coin – a mob of kangaroos; two-dollar coin – a blackfella.’
He paused for a moment, waiting for the penny to drop; it hadn’t yet for me.
‘That fella there is supposed to represent Indigenous Australia,’ he said, pointing to the chiselled face of the black bushman on the coin. It was the sort of iconic cliché that is part of the Australian lexicon; an Aborigine frozen for a moment as he stares out from some faraway escarpment at his vanishing country. It’s the same blackfella who appears on old prints, postcards and biscuit tins; he balances on one sinewy leg, leaning ever so slightly on a brace of spears. It’s an image that acknowledges a certain wisdom and grace, yet has a loneliness about it suggesting this fellow – like Tara – is the last of his tribe.
‘And look at this, here’s an extra little insult.’ He pointed the tip of his pen to a grasstree cast into the background of the coin. ‘You know what those are called, don’t you?’
Half the students in the lecture theatre mouthed the word ‘Blackboy’.
Craig nodded. He looked pleased that he’d made his point, yet there was a hint of weary bitterness simmering just below.
‘You see, this is where we fit into the white scheme of things, as fauna, part of the animal kingdom, part of the landscape.’
One brave soul raised his hand and reminded the lecturer that the fifty-cent piece could have any number of things on it, like Captain Cook, or Charles and Diana. Craig laughed as if he’d expected the comment, ‘Ah, the fifty-cent piece, that’s the wild card, it can have anything on it, but it’s usually a famous whitefella.’
Then he asked, ‘How would you like to see a generic white person on that coin? Can you imagine where you would even start? You’re all so different, you’ve all got different stories. Well, it’s the same with us.’
Now I wandered across the grey expanse of concrete to where Craig sat outside the bustling University refectory. I asked if I could join him. He looked up, a little surprised, not sure if he should recognise me or not.
‘Sure,’ he answered, ‘but I’m heading back to the office in a sec.’
As I explained that I needed to talk to him about ‘something sensitive’, I realised that this was the very first Indigenous Australian I’d ever spoken to one-on-one. Then without missing a beat I announced that my family had had one of his kin on display in the family lounge room for 40 years. I might as well have just walked up to the man and punched him in the guts. He recoiled in his seat as pain and disbelief tore across his face. Again, the seconds groaned – taut, dislocated from the clock time that marched on about us. Craig recovered, pushed away the last remnants of his sweet-and-sour pork, and rose to his feet.
‘You’d better come with me,’ he said; there was just the hint of an order in his tone. Not a word was exchanged as he led me to the Oodgeroo Unit, named after the famous Aboriginal poet and activist Oodgeroo Noonuccal.
As we entered the office I immediately felt like an outsider, a whitefella in a blackfella place. It wasn’t threatening, but the very atmosphere felt different. If you have ever visited a foreign consular office you’ll know the feeling I’m trying to describe, it’s as if a tiny piece of one country has been transplanted into another, and that’s what this was like, a portal into Indigenous Australia. Black faces looked down from posters, and dot paintings, flags and panoramic photographs of wild Australia adorned the walls; there was familiarity about much of what I saw, yet at the same time everything was imbued with a different meaning. It was as if I’d stumbled into a parallel universe and now I was the foreigner!
Craig led me through to his office. A poster of the boxer and football star Anthony Mundine glared at me as though he was about to jump from the photograph and jab my soft white nose repeatedly! I stiffened for a moment, and then understood how this fighter, whom I’d always dismissed as an angry egomaniac with a super-sized chip on his shoulder, could be an inspiration to many of his people. Why had I looked down so disapprovingly upon black anger? Why was it acceptable for whites to get angry, but not black people? I looked around the room for a softer visual to grab hold of and my eyes settled on a photograph of Craig’s wife and kids. There were photos of the land too – beautiful photos of rippling red soil and purple skies, the steamy, still breath of wetlands, and eternally teetering mega-boulders. I breathed easily again, comforted by these things that bind us.
Craig asked me about the skull and I let my story unfold. Every so often I paused and he shook his head rapidly as if to make sure his ears were not playing tricks on him. He looked at me with equal measures of sternness and sadness. ‘It has
got
to go back, there’s no question about it. You’ll just have to convince your old man to give it up. It has to go back.’
At first I was a bit shocked; I wasn’t exactly expecting a pat on the back, but I hadn’t anticipated such grave (no pun intended!) seriousness either. I’d just presumed that there was some
place
, some
department
to send ‘lost skulls’ to and that was the end of the story.
I told Craig that all I knew about Mary’s origins was that he was pulled from earth somewhere outside the Victorian town of Swan Hill. Craig led me outside to the hallway, where a tribal map of Australia was displayed. It was beautiful, a 200-piece patchwork of colours, but the only thing familiar was the map outline. I was staring into a country – or rather a collection of nations – I had never seen before. I looked for the state of Victoria and struggled to find where it started or ended. Each coloured patch blended organically into those around it; there were no neat pieces and no straight lines, the surveyor’s straight edge was totally absent. Craig smiled as I struggled to navigate my way about a country that only a few minutes earlier I’d thought I knew so well – I was lost.
The patchwork pieces were much smaller and more numerous in the fertile floodplains of northern Victoria. Tribal names like Yorta Yorta, Wadi Wadi, and Nari Nari jumped out from beneath Craig’s circling finger. He located Swan Hill, one of the few English placenames printed faintly on the map as a whitefella reference point.
‘Mate,’ Craig said slowly, his finger lightly tapping the tiny spot on the southern banks of the Murray River, ‘if he was dug up outside of Swan Hill, then there’s a good chance he belongs to this mob.’
I had never read or heard of the name before. I said it aloud – ‘Wamba Wamba’ – and in their enunciation the two words would be forever forged into my own family’s dreaming.
As we settled back into Craig’s office a large figure sailed past the doorway.
‘Rob! Got a sec?’ Craig yelled into the wake left by the big man. ‘That’s Rob, he’s the fella we need to speak to.’
A wild head of hair poked around the door. Craig recounted my story, and with each sentence Rob inched into the room like a bear being drawn out of the forest by the promise of honey. When Craig got to the part about the mantelpiece, Rob flinched as if he’d been stung on the nose.
‘Wha-huh, how could anybody do such a thing?’ he asked.
Craig shrugged and shook his head again. ‘Listen, John, it’s nothing personal, you’re doing the right thing, but I just can’t
imagine
keeping a skull on my mantelpiece. It’s like me ringing up Rob here and saying, “Hey Rob, I’ve got the skull of a dead whitefella on my bookshelf, wanna come over and see?” ’
The two men chuckled, and for the moment I felt a little better.
‘Yeah,’ said Rob, ‘just imagine what the papers would say: “Savage headhunters display white man’s head.” ’
I sat there, wondering how on earth I was going to bring up the subject with my father. I asked for some advice on how to approach him, some arguments that would help back up my case. Craig looked at me as if I had just asked the dumbest question of all time.
‘What justification do you need? It’s not yours. What your family has done is wrong.’ Craig’s tone was firm, but still, there was no animosity in his voice.
‘Okay, okay.’ His voice softened. ‘You could talk about the dignity of the dead – you know, look at how much effort you whitefellas put into finding and bringing home lost servicemen from the various wars. It’s the same thing.’
I nodded. As a paid-up RSL member, Dad
would
relate to that. Then Rob brought up the subject of curses. You only had to take one look at Rob to know he was a nice bloke with a big heart to match his sizeable frame, but he was clearly unsettled by the very thought that anyone would be foolish enough to keep human bones under their roof.
‘Mate, have you been to Uluru and seen that pile of stones?’
I shook my head. With the wide eyes of someone who clearly believed in bad juju, Rob described the steady stream of packages that arrive at Uluru containing rocks returned by pilfering visitors.
‘Those rocks come back from all corners of the world; there’s a book full of the letters from people detailing the bad luck they have had and begging for forgiveness. The rangers don’t know exactly what part of the park the rocks come from, so they add them to a pile out the back of the visitors’ centre. It’s a big bloody pile, brother!’
He shuddered visibly. ‘If a little pebble from Uluru can bring bad luck, what kind of trouble do you think taking a skull from its country and keeping it in your home is gunna bring you?’
{ 20 SEPTEMBER 2005 }
I fished out a piece of paper from my wallet. On it were a couple of hastily scribbled numbers.
‘Uncle Bob Weatherall, he’s the expert in the business of repatriation up here,’ Craig had told me before rattling off the numbers. I hoped they were correct; I’d been too nervous to ask Craig to repeat them.
The first number was for an organisation called FAIRA. A pleasant woman answered the phone and explained that the organisation had closed, but that someone came by every few weeks to collect the mail and messages. I phoned the next number and another woman, who I assumed was Uncle Bob’s wife, told me that Bob was away on a fishing trip and wouldn’t be back for at least a week. She gave me his mobile number, which I tried a couple of times only to receive the out-of-range message. I resigned myself to waiting until he returned.
After dinner I read my daughters their bedtime stories, but my mind was elsewhere. I settled in front of the computer and ran a search on ‘Aboriginal’, ‘remains’ and ‘repatriation’. Pages and pages of results came up instantly. Before I knew it I was diving in and out of websites, trying to piece together some sort of understanding. Newspaper articles, academic papers, essays and links flashed before me. I was too impatient to read anything fully; if something looked relevant I hit the Print button or bookmarked it. The printer screamed for paper and fresh ink. I darted in and out of search results like a shark feeding on a cloud of silver mullet. The deeper I went, the greater the urgency I felt. A couple of hours later, I fell back in my chair, exhausted; I’d expected to find perhaps half a dozen obscure articles, but instead I’d waded into a cultural, political and emotional riptide.
There were articles about institutions stubbornly refusing to hand back collections of Aboriginal remains that sometimes numbered in the hundreds. And there were stories about personal collections, cobbled together by enthusiasts in garages and back-yard sheds. After a quick perusal of my random printouts, it dawned on me that the issue of repatriation didn’t concern just a few hundred sets of remains, it was of a far greater magnitude – there were tens of thousands! The very scale of the issue was too mind-numbing to get my head around; images came into my head of those terrible expanses of bleached skulls on the Cambodian Killing Fields. Why? Why had so many Aboriginal remains been shipped off to the four corners of the globe? It seemed so utterly unreasonable that the British Museum needed – actually needed – 1570 sets of remains from Aboriginal men, women and children. Filed in specimen drawers, lined up in glass cases, stuffed into cabinets and crammed into never-to-be-opened boxes, locked in a dusty twilight zone far from country; these were human remains in limbo. And here
I
was, with just one skull tucked under my arm. What difference could one repatriation make?
As the torrent of information gushing from my computer began to sweep away my resolve, there was one story that leapt out – one story about one tiny set of remains that helped me understand, and kept me anchored to my promise to Mary.