Riding the Black Cockatoo (7 page)
He let me catch my breath after I’d finished.
‘Well you’ve phoned the right place,
if
they are Victorian remains. I don’t suppose you have any idea where the cranium came from?’
‘They came from just outside of Swan Hill,’ I explained. ‘I’ve been studying the maps and I’m pretty sure it’s from Wamba Wamba country.’
There was an audible intake of breath on the other end of the phone; a sort of sucking noise – not fear or shock, something more like astonishment. I heard him mutter to himself, a barely audible few words slipping through the earpiece like wisps of smoke: ‘weird . . . can’t believe . . . just keeps happening’.
Simon returned from his private thoughts.
‘John,’ he said evenly, ‘are you sitting down?’
‘Mmmm, yes,’ I lied, more intrigued by Simon’s curious reaction than concerned with finding a comfy chair.
Simon explained that the day before he’d received a fax from the Wamba Wamba tribal council informing the Museum that a reburial had been scheduled to take place on Wamba Wamba land in two weeks time.
‘How often do these reburials take place?’ I asked, imagining that they were a regular occurrence.
‘Almost never,’ Simon answered, ‘at least not like this one. Every so often a single set of remains might go back into the ground, you know, quietly, but this one’s big. Thirty sets have been returned from different institutions from all over Australia and as far away as Scotland.’
We talked some more and Simon promised to get back to me the next day with the telephone number of one of the elders.
‘They’ll be
very
interested in your story.’
After the call, I sat in the kitchen and stared through the louvred windows that opened to the back yard. Rainbow lorikeets twittered amid the bright yellow explosions of golden penda flowers, bees droned about the nectar-laden coils of grevillea. In that moment of contemplation, in that neutral space between the whirling gears of thought, I understood the perfect synchronicity of it all; the pushing feeling, the fax, the reburial in two weeks. Mary’s people were going home and he wanted to go too! I phoned Dad and excitedly filled him in on developments. As usual, my mind raced ahead of my mouth and I announced that I might fly Mary to Melbourne and hand him over personally. There was a gruff silence, then, ‘Christ, son, you’re going to a hell of a lot of trouble for an old Abo skull.’
{ 23 SEPTEMBER 2005 }
The next morning, Simon from the Melbourne Museum phoned as promised. He’d been in touch with the Wamba Wamba elders. ‘They’re thrilled that another of their people is going home, they’re over the moon.’
Simon gave me a name and phone number.
‘Thank you, John,’ he said, ‘and
please
pass on my thanks to your mother and father.’ It wasn’t a hollow, greeting-card thank-you, it was one of those rare thank-yous that remind you what a powerful combination those two words can be.
I nervously phoned the number, expecting to hear something like the gravelly, earth-weathered voice of Skippy’s Tara. Instead a young man answered with a breathless energy that suggested his life was a full one. Caught off guard, I opened my mouth and the voice of a stranger oozed forth; my tone lacked any sense of warmth, completely at odds with the way I truly felt. I sounded like a hard-nosed property developer negotiating a transfer of land rather than human remains. I sensed a negative energy in the phone line. Then Jason explained that it was a bad time to talk, there’d been a death in the community that he had to attend to, but he promised to get back to me soon.
What a letdown; I’d been expecting my first contact with Mary’s people to be something special – magical, even. Later on I phoned Dad to pass on Simon’s thanks.
He grunted in that stubborn Greek way of his and moved the conversation on to something else.
{ 24–25 SEPTEMBER 2005 }
I waited all weekend for Jason to call. Nothing. Mum phoned on Sunday evening while Dad was out and told me how happy she was that Mary was going home.
‘Your grandmother would be just so, so pleased.’ The words caught in her throat. ‘Do you remember when she used to visit, the first thing she’d do was take a clean teatowel from the kitchen drawer and place it carefully over Mary. Remember how annoyed she used to get with your father and uncle – “The poor devil should be back with his own people,” she used to say.’ My mother doesn’t often get emotional but when she does it comes from a very deep place and means all the more. Her words steadied my uncertain spirit and gave me the reassurance I needed.
{ 26 SEPTEMBER 2005 }
I dropped the kids at my parents’ place. In the background the morning show ping-ponged between serious news and inane chatter.
‘I’ve spoken to your uncle,’ said Dad, handing me a sheet of notepaper with the details of where Mary had been unearthed. The location was precise: the Old Kannon Property, 15 kilometres east of Swan Hill on the New South Wales side of the Murray River.
‘There he is.’ He nodded to a plastic shopping bag on the dining-room table. ‘Found him in the old TV cupboard.’
That evening I returned home from uni with two tired kids and Mary. My wife Stella greeted me with the news that a Wamba Wamba elder, Jason’s uncle, had phoned earlier in the day; his name was Gary Murray.
‘What’d he say, what’s he sound like?’ I pumped Stella for every little detail while the girls ran around us squawking for their dinner.
‘He sounded really nice,’ said Stella.
‘What else, anything else?’
‘There is nothing else, he’s just really happy about getting Mary back and looks forward to talking to you. The number’s up by the phone.’
‘And he sounded nice, yeah?’
‘Really nice.’
The number by the phone was a mobile number. A mobile phone; although I instantly realised how ridiculous the thought was, my concept of an Aboriginal elder didn’t include modern technology. My idea of an elder was of an old guy sitting cross-legged in red dust with didgeridoo music droning in the background, in a place untouched by personalised ringtones and SMS. Gary answered the phone, and he didn’t sound like Tara either, or old. My damned conditioning!
Gary’s voice was deep and his sentences were short and uncluttered; he spoke the way people from the bush tend to talk. He was instantly likeable.
‘How’s this for timing,’ he said. ‘Unreal, isn’t it!’
Gratitude poured from the earpiece; there was not a hint of reproach or judgement in his voice. Gary asked if I was absolutely positive that Mary was from Wamba Wamba country. I explained that my uncle found it on the Old Kannon farm, which according to the maps was well within his clan’s territory.
‘I’ll have to check,’ he replied ‘but I think that’s the old name of the property right next door to Menera.’
‘Menera?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, that’s the name of the property we bought, Menera Station, seven kilometres of prime river frontage, it belongs to the Wamba Wamba again.’ Gary’s words unrolled like a soft fabric woven with his love of country. ‘It’s just the start; we’ve got big plans for the place. That’s where the reburial’s taking place, right in the most beautiful part of the property. Farmers keep the best land for crops, we keep the best bits for burying our people. It’s beautiful, you come down and I’ll show it to you – beautiful.’
I was having trouble taking it all in; I’d always imagined that Mary would be returned by post, or that maybe I’d fly to Melbourne and hand it over personally at the Museum. I hadn’t given any thought to what might happen after that. Now I was not only getting a description of Mary’s country, I was being transported there through Gary’s voice.
‘Let me get this right,’ I said. ‘Where the remains are going to be reburied, it’s quite possible he once walked over the same ground – I mean, this is his back yard?’
Gary laughed. ‘That’s it, he’s coming home, that’s for sure.’
I felt an incredible stillness, as if all the air had been sucked out of the room.
‘You tell your old man how much the Wamba Wamba Nation appreciates what he’s doing; in the meantime I’ve got some other business to attend to, we’ve had another death in the clan, but I’ll be back in touch soon.’
After dinner I googled Gary Murray. His name had sounded familiar, and sure enough there he was, right at the forefront of the Jaara Baby repatriation! His name popped up everywhere – if there was a story about cultural theft or the repatriation of Victorian Indigenous remains, there was a good chance that Gary’s name would be mentioned. I ran an image search and followed a link until he filled my screen. In the picture, Gary was wrapped up to his neck in some sort of patchwork fur cloak. He wore an Akubra hat pulled down low, his face a mixture of determination and defiance. His eyes stared right into the barrel of the camera lens. He held a large piece of bark – like a shield – embellished with the worn carving of a dancer, legs and arms spread wide to a world of animals and fish. It looked as old as the oldest cave paintings in Europe.
If I hadn’t had such a friendly chat a few moments ago with this man I would have been very nervous about meeting him. He looked like a warrior. I clicked on the photo to save it to my desktop; the file reduced neatly into a little icon onto my cluttered screen, and it was then that I got my first hateful taste of racism, what it means, what it does. Underneath the folder symbol appeared the photo caption: ABO. Rather than using Gary’s name, the journalist or photo editor had typed in a generic derogatory slur that he thought no one would ever see. Straight away I understood the defiance in Gary’s photograph, and I began to appreciate the anger behind the countless raised fists I’d seen in Aboriginal demonstrations and protests on the nightly news.
It was such a small – some would say insignificant – act, yet for me it demonstrated how the insidious hate worm of racism works. And this example was in one of the nation’s leading newspapers! Racism reduces the individual to a caricature; it undermines the power of story by pushing preconditioned buttons – primarily fear. In this photo Gary stood strong in culture and as a man, yet here was this slur attempting to kick his legs out from beneath him. People often say ‘It’s only a word,’ but language is a powerful force. As an Australian of Greek descent who weathered the taunts of ‘wog boy’ throughout my childhood, I remember the feeling of relief when the bedraggled Vietnamese boat people started washing up onto our shores in the late 1970s. Suddenly the attention shifted from wogs to the newly arrived slopes and geeks. Yet despite the ever-shifting focus of racism in this country, Indigenous Australians have continuously occupied the bottom rung of the ladder. And all too often, when their hands reached up to the next rung, it was the hobnailed boot of language that stomped on fingers of self-determination.
{ 27 SEPTEMBER 2005 }
The alarm clock bleeped. I jumped out of bed and almost out of my skin with excitement; I needed to talk about the reburial. I watched the clock through breakfast. I knew Craig would be at work at 9 a.m., but I took a chance and phoned half an hour earlier. He answered immediately. I spluttered the news of the reburial into the mouthpiece.