The Yield

by Tara June Winch

  When August’s parents found the fridge bare they’d scream, bang things, slam doors. Her father, who had a hard face, would take off his leather belt and loop it, make a fish mouth with a fist at each end and whack! the leather strips together. Though he never hit her. He’d just scare the girls. They’d rinse her mouth with black soap and water and say, ‘Where’d you bloody come from! Were you born in the gutter?’ She’d known she wasn’t, but knew they weren’t really asking her that. She knew where she’d been born, the birth certificate was protected in a plastic sleeve beneath the bottom bed of their bunks. She knew it was April Fools’ Day in Massacre Maternity Ward when August Gondiwindi was born (feet first, Nana later told her). Parents: Jolene Gondiwindi, unemployed. Mark Shawn, unemployed. Siblings: Jedda, twelve months.

  Their family had moved from Massacre Plains five hours south to Sunshine for those first years, into the tumbledown, long rows of fibro cottages where some of her father’s family lived too. They had visitors all the time. August remembered always trying to hear what they said. Everything was strange to Jedda and August at home, not just the food and the disorder of days, it felt like life was muffled by some great secret. They just went along with it and made do, would hold out their hands and ask visitors for twenty cents or a piece of gum if they really wanted the girls to go away. They’d collect their loot and run into the small yard; make tents from dishcloths; play dance teacher, Jedda the instructor, August the novice. Inside the house, when August held her tongue out, she could taste cigarette smoke and flyspray in the rooms. She wanted to taste everything, even then, even the acrid air.

  And how they came to leave Sunshine and arrive back in Prosperous House was the confluence of all the shambles of their childhood. How they had to be reminded a million times by the teacher to have their parents bring them to school on time, or to sign this and that, or to pick them up because the school guardian couldn’t wait at the gates for no-one all afternoon. Mostly their parents were more like playmates, their mother usually. Jolene would snuggle with them when she was high and play with them when she was drunk, run around the house below the wet walls that gave them asthma and the mould that grew like a grotty birthmark in the folds of wallpaper and across the ceilings.

  When the sisters were playing like that everything was perfect.

  Sooner or later their mum would leave the room. Then they could hear nothing but the Rolling Stones through the house until Jolene would forget to feed them dinner and they’d go and rouse her. Then it took a long time because their mum was always doing everything from scratch in that state and last-minute and halfway through she’d forget and fall asleep. So Jedda and August would finish cooking while she slept, they’d make their favourite beans on toast, and when she woke they’d have washed their plates, brushed their teeth, and they would be tucked in, Jedda tucked August first and then herself. Hours later Jolene would come in and kiss their foreheads, unravel the hair from across faces. August pretended to be asleep. She loved her the most she ever would at exactly that moment. They were never mean and bad parents, just distracted, too young and too silly, rookies, she used to think.

  Then, one winter an unusual fog cold engulfed the suburb, and it snowed for the first time in decades. Every tiled rooftop was frozen white except for theirs. The police noticed this when they drove by that bitter morning. Inside their house they found ninety-five marijuana plants beyond the manhole, kept vibrant by long fluorescent warming lights. When the police came to the door they knocked loud enough that the girls shook. And their parents were handcuffed and marched off to holding and then gaol, all before breakfast. The following day the house was in the newspaper and the social worker drove them to the emergency foster house. They shook there for days until their nana and poppy drove down and didn’t leave until the girls were safe. While Elsie and Albert were gone spiderwebs strung out into corners, snakes explored inside the empty house, and the whirly-whirly arrived to warn children away. But the duet that left returned as a quartet, singing ‘Wheels on the Bus’ and playing ‘I Spy’ all the way back to Prosperous. From the age of eight and Jedda nine, they lived with their grandparents, Albert and Elsie, back in Massacre’s Prosperous House – the Mission church turned farm workers’ quarters, that had an old coat of lemon paint and an extension built for shearers. Five hundred acres of not being able to shake the past, of where everything had gone wrong, over and over. They’d been returned to their birthplace and it seemed as if their lives had become best-case scenarios.

  August thought nothing could change as much as it did as when she was eight years old.

  She was wrong.

  NINE

  worship, bend low – dulbi-nya I reckon Aboriginal people loved the Lord that the Reverend brought so much because they needed him the most in their lives. I think we always thought that there just had to be something better. Worship came easy – so this news about a fella Jesus from the desert on the other side of the world who had all the instructions for heavenly ascent – well, that was alright with us. Problem is they didn’t let the Aborigine straddle the world he knew best – no more language or hunting, or ceremonies. No more of our lore, only their law was forced. We were meant to be saved but we were still in bondage. We worshipped though, we bent low, dulbi-nya. We’d done it before in front of the giving honeybee, the generous possum, the loving sun, the plentiful waters – our lives were filled up with dulbi-nya long, long before.

  underneath the earth – ngunhadar-guwur What’s down there? Why those mining mob want to rip it all out and then it all belongs to them? I think all those shiny things ngunhadar-guwur shouldn’t belong to anyone, only our mother. I think that currency should return, make a balm from the wound. It’s strange isn’t it? That word, fortunes. I think we don’t have that word at all.

  understand – gulbarra Our whole lives are spent doing that, trying to understand and be understood. When you’re between young and old though, that is the time for deep thinking. The thing I came to understand is that the world didn’t just begin when I was born. It’s a certain moment in life when we realise that – when we can see that divisions were made when we were just some milt in a fish in the chain of life and death. I’m leaving a complicated world soon, a world up in arms, and I see so much fighting. Love thy neighbour that’s a commandment from the Bible, bilingalgirridyu ngaghigu madhugu – that’s our commandment, it translates to: I will care for my enemy. They both mean gulbarra.

  teacher – yalmambildhaany At the Boys’ Home is where I got my education, so they tell me that’s what it was. I learnt to write and read there, but not like I know it now – learning the Queen’s English came later. Back then we only wrote little maxims in learning cursive on our boards: I love to sit in the sun. God made the sun. Our yalmambildhaany name was Ma’am Sally-Anna Mathews, and she had the disposition of someone to match such a beautiful name. Ma’am Mathews had the iodine and boiled candy in her purse for all our punishments from the manager, for whom there would be no dew nor rain, except through him. She would even hug us! What a thing it was for us children without parents around to be hugged. I think my sister Mary never got a hug at the Girls’ Home because in a warm embrace she froze. I’m sorry for my sister that she didn’t have one little hope like Ma’am Mathews – a good-natured, but wrongly instructed nonetheless, yalmambildhaany.

  time, a long time ago – nguwanda It’s not always a good thing, looking all the way back. Nguwanda was a time of peace, they tell me. In other people’s stories nguwanda was peaceful too, they’ve been told. Things change for good in many ways, so looking back to nguwanda is important – but it’s just for understanding, not to stop moving forward, not to return completely.

  to return – birrabuwuwanha I wasn’t a very good father. I was distracted or I was working out on the field. When the Station was eventually closed down and the property went out to ballot for a Homestead Farm Lease, Bernard Falstaff, good man, let the Gondiwindi stay on in the sheds and work the field and run the c
attle in exchange for a sort of ownership of Prosperous. Word got to me that they were looking for a manager for the seasonal workers. I rode out to Prosperous for the first time since I was taken away. The ancestors were with me and talking to me when I rode out there. They said I was going birrabuwuwanha and some were worried, and some were happy. I spoke to old man Falstaff, who was a science man who later taught me to play chess and was not keen on farming. He asked if I was married yet, I told him I wasn’t but I hoped to be one day. He hired me to oversee the workers and to manage the old church. Not five years later I met Elsie and there we settled into our own corner. Even if I wasn’t an attentive daddy, I think the girls had a good life where we lived. Mr Falstaff let me plant the trees and treat that corner as our very own. So that’s how we got to come home, to stay on country, thanks to Mr Falstaff we all got birrabuwuwanha. How the ancestors loved it there too, we didn’t even have to go out into the secret bush, we could stay right there and they’d show me everything I needed to find.

  saltbush – bulaguy, miranggul There’s the old-man saltbush, cottony saltbush, creeping saltbush, thorny saltbush and the ruby saltbush. They are good bush food: the leaves of old-man can be used to flavour meat and the ruby saltbush stems and leaves can be boiled and eaten like vegetables; the berries are big and red and sweet. The ancestors used all of the saltbush in different ways. The plant also takes the salt out of the soil, it can heal the ground while growing. That’s something.

  sap of trees – dhalbu The dhalbu of the bloodwood tree saved some of the Gondiwindi. When we were being gathered up to be taken away and taught the Bible and be trained as labourers and domestic servants, my great-aunties were frightened and ran. Tried to hide their light-skinned babies in the bush. Some did get away and were never seen again. And some couldn’t leave in time and disguised their babies as full-blood by painting them dark with the dhalbu. Some of them were later captured. They wander around the river that appears when I travel with the ancestors, blood and sap soaked, hiding in plain sight now but still frightened.

  say, speak, tell – yarra I asked Doctor Shah to yarra – tell me all the bad news. He obliged. ‘No worries,’ I said to him when he offered the place in Broken hospice. ‘I’ll be leaving the world the same way I came – out by the river.’ He didn’t much argue with me, just a few minutes, I think because he may have had to, but that fella has known me a long time, so we settled it like men and shook hands and he let me go on my way. Elsie’s been crying since we got back to Prosperous, so I took her beautiful face in my hands softly and I said, ‘Aren’t you glad you met a fine bloke like me?’ She nodded, even if she was crying and laughing at the nerve of me. ‘I would’ve died happy the day I met you, Elsie, and now we have all this other time together. Aren’t we lucky?’ I said. And then we kissed and hugged and kissed and hugged until she came around to the fact that we’re still alive now and still in each other’s arms. When she was peaceful again, I came outside to finish my work.

  scale a fish – ginhirmarra The ancestors taught me all the things I wasn’t taught at the Boys’ Home: they taught me men’s business; they taught me where to find food, the names and uses of all the plants and animals. My favourite was eating the freshwater eel and the Murrumby cod. You can put the eel or fish – guya whole, just as it is on the hot coals and break into the skin when it’s done. You can put it on as it is or you can scale and gut it with a sharp knife first. You take the back of the knife and scrape the scales towards the head, wash it and then leave the head on. From under the tail to the top of the stomach, cut along and then remove the insides, wash it again. The skin will just come away when its cooked. If you eat the fish, it’s important to know how to treat it after it’s died for you.

  scars or marks, little holes left by smallpox – gulgang-gulgang Lots of the ancestors who visited me had this on their bodies, not everyone, but plenty did. ‘What’s that?’ I said, when I was little and hadn’t yet learnt not to ask someone about something different on their face or body. One of my great aunts said it was gulgang-gulgang. Then she drew a picture with the end of a stick from the fire. She drew it up in the sky above her talking, and all the stars beholden to help her draw out her story. She told me sickness came in the wind, with the shepherds and in the wool of their sheep, and it was a cold time then. ‘Every day and every night was chilly cold even with the sun out. Everyone was going through the shivers. They couldn’t speak about it either because their mouths were filled with blisters even though they hadn’t been eating hot things straight from the fire. And some of them couldn’t see because the blisters grew in their eyes too. The smallpox were all over the feet and the hands and the face, but not much everywhere else – so it was hard to walk or touch things, or eat. Impossible to see. Well everyone got sick then, and many people died,’ she said. ‘Forever?’ I asked. And she said, ‘Never forever, but it was still not the right time to go for so many babies, nannies and poppies, the weak ones. The old people, old people with mouths filled still with things they needed to teach.’ ‘That’s sad,’ I said, and Great-aunty said, ‘You’ll tell them I told you and then they’ll never do things like that again.’ I asked her, ‘Who do I tell?’ and she said, ‘Just tell the truth and someone will hear it eventually.’ I guess this is what I’m doing, finally.

  TEN

  To Dr George Cross,

  The British Society of Ethnography

  From Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf, 2nd August 1915

  I

  I felt the great desire to address you, so late in the hour and – as is suddenly apparent – at the late hour of my life. The last time we spoke was many years ago now, in the Banquet Hall of the World’s Fair mirage in that compelling city of Chicago. I think on the evening with a golden warmth hung around it, though I had still been a confused man of the cloth, and of the Empire. We spoke of your wife, and I send my best wishes to her and your family at this turbulent time. I feel compelled to clarify why I refused to bring the measurements of my residents to the New South Wales exhibit, refused to catalogue the minutiae of my brothers’ lives for all to see there against the ebb of Lake Michigan. In looking back, indeed, they are my brothers – we are bound by what we have undergone together all these years. Of course I mentioned none of this at the time, but no man would in those circumstances. Yes – no man would tell all the things I’ve come to know. Perhaps to tell all might be the sure way to ruin the great work we’ve accomplished here. But we live, Dr Cross, in different times now. I admit to striking out some pages in my journal, and at times not having transcribed all events – anodyne nonsense at any rate? Yet I remember all the events more palpable than anything before or after. Only today I thought on it again and wondered briefly if it should be noted before handing over my living body. Perhaps.

  In leaving this world it is my hope it came to something, salvation in some small part, and that the work remaining to do and undo will prosper on and save those wretches from themselves, even if my doubts have remained stronger than hopes.

  You may be my last hope, Dr Cross, I seem to be drawn to expunge the past to you. Alas, the state of affairs awakens truths in the spirit long denied. After many years I have recognised that in times of stress tongues either fold or flap, and having a crisis of the latter I hope you can find forgiveness for such blasphemous indulgence. Perhaps I have reached a place of understanding where I feel I must jeopardise everything so that I might be heard. And so, I have no choice but to write of the things that I have witnessed and known to have occurred on these dark plains since my arrival. Dr Cross, I hope these words might reach someone in your influence who may rectify this situation. Calamity befalls the congregation of Massacre Plains and, furthermore, the decent Natives whom I have lived amongst. You are my last sane chorus.

  Before I was detained I tried to assemble my personal possessions. In doing so I unearthed the Mission’s early records and also my childhood Bible, which was the only thing I came to Australia with besides my father and mother on Th
e Skjold, the final ship to the Colony. The Skjold rode the seas that had little kindness. Aboard in addition was master carpenter Mr Huber, and master miller Mr Schmitt. I remember them both more clearly than my parents or myself – I think perhaps because of how many had died on the journey to the New Land, and because it was always Mr Huber and Mr Schmitt who fashioned the coffins, lowering the Earth’s furniture into the sea. On reflection, I suppose those boxes must have been the least masterful thing they ever made.

  Concealed inside my child’s Bible was a newspaper cutting that had survived the many years lived there in the dust bowl of the interior, clipped from The Gazette on the day of my thirteenth birthday in 1851. There in plain English was the news that physicist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault released his Pendulum from the roof of the Panthéon in Paris, France – proving that the Earth rotated. I have to hark back to my earliest hopes to wonder why I’d kept the one birthday clipping of the many my father saved for me, but I know the reason – how I too had always wanted to prove something. That the Heavens rotated, that they could rotate and light upon any man. Even a man here.

  From the ever-flowing Murrumby River of this country, I had for nearly thirty-four years laboured to ameliorate the condition of the Native tribes. Here, a peculiar place: searing-hot days, cool nights, cattle runs and more cattle than the eye can grasp, and filled with the flora and fauna one would have classified only by the imagination. Other curiosities too, though unimaginable, that comprise of deeds too dark to remark. I’m noting all this in the recent past, since by force of hand, Prosperous Mission has been taken by the Government. I have done my best by The Book – all deeds will stand alone for judgement, eventually.