The Yield

by Tara June Winch

  It was impressed on me the importance of sustaining a source of consistent supply at the Mission, so of the five hundred acres at my disposal, I set aside fifty close to the riverbank for the experiment of planting a crop. I planted a kitchen garden, the soil dug like ashes. Orchids, lilies and mosses flourished among the strange grain crop that had been growing in some patches here and there by the river. Later, when I enquired, the Natives referred to the grass as gulaa and motioned to their mouths as if it were edible. The straw of the Natives’ grain I threshed and buried in pits, and threw in with it everything that I thought would rot and turn to manure. I dug the lot in with the grass, and having removed the fallen timber to burn it from the ground, I dug in the ashes with it. I then hoed it up, never exceeding more than seven or perhaps eight rods a day. I had merely scratched over ground, but properly done this, I think, was almost equal to ploughing. Then I let it lie as long as I could, exposed to air and sun, and, just before I sowed my seed, turned it all up afresh. Once I had reaped the wheat I hoed it again, and harrowed it fine, then sowed it with turnip seed, which mellowed it and prepared it for the next year. By this process it seemed the silt took on a good colour after the once-over each following year. In that way it was not like my father’s vineyard – which had been horribly dry, and had needed thrice doing. I was able to oblige a local settler to loan me two Blackfellows he had in his possession to assist me. Quite freely they got to work building, fencing, gardening, clearing and assisting me with the new crop. The workers were able to communicate some of their greetings and I dutifully noted them in my journal and endeavoured thereafter to greet them in their own language – which seemed to please them deeply. In the evenings after my work at the Mission or when travelling the Plains, I read my passages by the bark resin light and after retiring thought on all that I had witnessed and thanked God that I had the piece of land in order to build a home of safety for the poor waifs and strays.

  SIXTEEN

  songlines – yarang gudhi-dhuray Means song having line and birrang-dhuray-gudhi means journey having song. These lines are our early map-making. They measure our places, our impossible distances and they are passed down through story songs and dances. The lines are there, but sometimes the gudhi is lost. The Gondiwindi lost the gudhi, only now it’s coming back to us again.

  star constellation the Southern Cross – gibirrgan Sometimes only the women would come and collect me and we’d go and sit by the fire at the riverbank. They taught me how to count up to a thousand by counting the stars. First we’d start at the less bright ones, I’d count along my toes, count with each joint in my legs, then the brighter, those I’d count with arms, elbows, fingers, then the brightest with my face, tap tap tap on my nose, eyes, chin and ear all night. The brightest stars were gibirrgan – the constellation of the Southern Cross, which features on this country’s flag – it is made of five bright stars almost in a cross shape. The woman told me the story of gibirrgan once, and they’d begin the story with ‘When the world was young’: Nguwanda – a great leader of a tribe who had no sons but four beautiful daughters – was getting very old. He’d be leaving soon so he gathered his daughters together and told them he’d be going because he was at the end of his time, but he didn’t want to leave the daughters without protection because they had no brother to look after them. He said, ‘I want you to come live with me in the sky and I’ve talked to a clever and magic man and he is willing to help you all come live in the sky with me.’ When their father died they went to see the clever magic man, who was sitting by a fire braiding a long silver rope, plucked from the wiry silver hairs in his beard. When the daughters found out the only way to reach their father was to climb the rope to the sky they became even more scared. Eventually the silver-bearded man convinced them it would be safe and they reached the top of the rope and stayed with their father, who was the brightest star – Centaurus. The Seven Sisters are there too. The Greeks call them Pleiades and we call them Mulayndynang.

  suicide – balubuningidyilinya We ran the karate here and the mothers’ group that turned into cooking classes; those young ones found something they cared for and that they were good at and could improve at. We tried to do something to keep the young ones busy. All the balubuningidyilinya is the old pain coming through. It breaks my heart.

  rabbit, a wild – wadha-gung The problem was the rabbits, before myxomatosis got them. They were brought over by a grazier who thought he’d breed them for target practice on his station. He started with twelve pairs, and some rabbiters made a good living, but within a couple of years there were thirteen million of the buggers eating the seedlings and the crops and the native plants meant for the kangaroos, the bilbies and wallabies. Then they brought in the foxes to get the rabbits but instead they went for the native animals. They built the rabbit-proof fence from one end of the country to the other to keep the rabbits out of the ‘granary of the Motherland’. Too bloody late they’d built that fence.

  raven, native – waagan, wandyu If you know Massacre Plains then I would bet you know the waagan or the wandyu. Everywhere you walk in this town or in the bush, you can be sure that he’s watching you – waiting for you to become food, maybe. On the farms when the ewes are giving birth you have to keep a close watch and get the lambs off the paddock. The raven will eat them as soon as they’re birthed otherwise. There’s a story I got told about Wahn the waagan when I was time-travelling way, way back then and how he liked to watch the pelican gangs. He sat outside a gang one day and waited and watched. After a while, an old pelican wandered out to ask Wahn what he was doing. Wahn said he was hungry, so the pelican went and talked to the elders of the group and they allowed Wahn to come and sit by their fire, and offered him a bit of food they had. After a while it was time for the pelicans to go and get more food for their babies nesting in the trees. Wahn wanted to eat the eggs of the pelican, but he found they were hatched already, so he put a spell on the tree and sent the branches high into the sky. The young cried out for food and when the pelicans came to feed them they had to climb the trees but couldn’t reach their little pelicans. From then on the pelicans keep their babies low and always keep their distance from Wahn – as do all the other birds. Well, I love the waagan and I think he got bad press in that story. The waagan has a crafty reputation but that doesn’t mean he’s evil. He doesn’t have many bird friends and he likes to be alone most of the time, but they are a faithful bunch. When they mate, they hold each other’s beaks like they are having a long kiss and when they are courting each other they interlock their feet midair. See, the raven he has his mate for life, and I think that’s a good thing – how waagan keeps his family together. That’s important.

  respect – yindyamarra I think I’ve come to realise that with some things, you cannot receive them unless you give them too. Unless you’ve even got the opportunity to give and receive. Only equals can share respect, otherwise it’s a game of masters and slaves – someone always has the upper hand when they are demanding respect. But yindyamarra is another thing too, it’s a way of life – a life of kindness, gentleness and respect at once. That seems like a good thing to share, our yindyamarra.

  rib – dharrar In the Book of Genesis 2:18–22 it says that woman was made from man’s rib. Elsie said, ‘That’s a load of bullshit.’ I laughed. In the end though, I came home to the Bible because it was my friend when I was a boy. Just the goodness in there, and the stories. I think I take the words where I want them to go. My ancestors’ stories and the Bible too. Anytime we argued in our marriage, she’d scream and point to her side, ‘I’m not your dharrar! You want a dharrar, get to the butcher!’ It’s a good insult that one, I hope we taught the girls that – not to be anyone’s rib.

  river – bila Now you know where the word billabong comes from. From us. Everything comes back to the bila – all life, and with it all time. Our songlines originate there, our lives fed from there and it’s where our spirits dwell in the end. Even the Reverend was drawn to the river, there h
e recited Isaiah 44:3, For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my Spirit upon your offspring, and my blessing on your descendants. Can’t imagine how it hurts not to see that water come anymore.

  queen bee, bee – darribun, ngaraang The ngaraang is in danger now, whole colonies are dying and the queen bee darribun is left, like on a chessboard, without any pawns, with all the worker ngaraang dying off. The bee puts off leaving the hive until later in their lives, when they are adults, because with less flowers it means collecting pollen is hard work for the bee, and many die of exhaustion before they make honey – warrul – and never return to the home. If the pesticides from the farms stress the hive or the bees while they are out foraging in a big sweep, they can die. This triggers a very fast, too-early maturation of the next generation of bees, and they leave the hive too early, before they’re ready, and a whole colony collapses. The Gondiwindi have been like that, scattered children without the thing that nourishes them, without a compass to get back home.

  quiet place with many pretty flowers – girra-wiiny Keep your eyes peeled for wildflowers on country, like wild flax and yellow wattle bloom, and the orchids and lilies – that’s edible, they’re called dirramaay. They aren’t just for food and medicine, but their stems and leaves can be used for weaving baskets too. The flowers also tell us when other things are happening – like when the ngawang, the happy wanderer plant, flowers in purple then we know it’s a time when the fat guya can be caught in the rivers and the lakes.

  pair, two – bula I was buried by scripture, but buoyed by hope, and so when we got our second spring, having two little daughters again in Jedda and August, we opened up Prosperous for all the people. The bula and I would go for long walks up to Kengal Rock. I’d explain how the old people walked up there through those same pastures, used their stone axe before white men brought their own metal axe, where lovers met and they left marks on the trees, or long round scars where they would chop into the bark of the tree, gently break it away and have a long, rounded dish for carrying baby. Or if the wood was strong enough, for digging roots and tubers of the plants. I’d lead them to the river to see where the old people fished and the rocks arranged on the bare river flat where irrigation was first made, and where the old people had fish traps. That’s what the old people ate – fish from Murrumby, mussels from Murrumby, crayfish and yingaa too. And they ate kangaroo grass from the plains – they ground up the seed and made their own bread and cake in the oven of the earth. They made bread and cake long before the wise Egyptians did. Bula would look up at me at those times, eyes wide, all the wonder in the world bustling in their minds. They are my fondest memories, showing bula what great people they come from long ago.

  parent, to be like the parent – buwubarra Elsie and I got to buwubarra to those sweet bula.

  SEVENTEEN

  August walked along the driveway and up to Southerly. Around the perimeter of Southerly House was a bandage of green grass. There were no native plants in the Falstaff garden, only hedges, tulips, half-century-old rose bushes and the fruit grove. The house was painted pumpkin with a grey trim, but it used to change every few years: Dulux blue gum, Dulux crème, Dulux terracotta. August had paid very close attention to the Falstaff house. She was always hiding in the bushes or trying to get in the door one way or another.

  There had been bigger differences from Prosperous than little – but the little had been on the outer walls – the gable ends had ornate patterns, the woodwork carved with intricate grooves, trim was polished, there were two fountains, solar garden lights and a two-toned, diamond-shaped pebble path that ran to their verandah, and they had a yellow hose rolled neatly on a special hose-holder by the house. They’d always had a Welcome brush mat at their front door that looked as if it had never been used. There was no mat anymore, Southerly was different, that bandage of grass had grown out but Eddie hadn’t bothered to attend to it. The whipper snipper was for sale now. It lay on the altar of the ute’s flatbed like a crucifix. There was no point cutting grass when it’d be rubble soon. Eddie saw August approaching and wrapped his arms around his chest, pausing for her. He’d paused his whole life for her.

  ‘Saw ya nan – she seems alright?’

  August walked up to the foot of Southerly. ‘Think that’s how she copes, keeping busy.’

  ‘How’d you cope …’ he stretched his arms aside his body, that had filled out since he was a teenager, ‘for the last ten years?’ He looked at her watching him pull a collared shirt on and his face blushed, his face that August noticed was a fully grown man’s and no longer a boy’s.

  August heard a pulse in her ear, looked away and sat on the step. ‘With what?’

  ‘Everything … you know …’ Eddie trailed off, sat beside her. ‘Did you ever hear from your mum?’

  She hadn’t, and had stopped trying years before. She figured her mother was ashamed, and buried by it, that she’d crossed a line between sad and mad.

  ‘Nah.’ She reached into her pocket, lit a cigarette.

  Eddie nudged her, ‘Go on.’ And she passed him the packet and a sleeve of matches.

  He lit his cigarette and stole a look at her thighs, bare below her shorts.

  ‘You eat much?’ He could see it.

  Her pulse became a thump in her ears, her tone defensive. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You look different.’

  ‘How am I different?’ She knew she was, but didn’t know how. She couldn’t remember what she was to anyone before. It felt as if she’d arrived at the person she was in the last decade without a choice. As if she resembled nothing so much as the face and name she was before. It was as if she couldn’t remember herself the way she was supposed to be.

  ‘You’re still yourself, I didn’t mean it in a bad way. You just look changed.’

  ‘So do you,’ August said, but didn’t say aloud that she thought it was an improvement.

  ‘You got a Pommy bloke, I guess?’

  ‘No.’ There was something stuck between them. The old times that neither of them wanted to be aired. All the unsayable things.

  He went on, ‘Of all the places, I can’t believe you went to England!’ Eddie undid his bootlaces, kicked them off.

  ‘Why?’ she said, thinking as she had thought as a kid, and still at eighteen, that England was where kids were born pure, with teatime and school head teachers, and long socks and boiled sweets and miniature sailboat races along icy rivers. Childhoods like in the old books she’d read.

  ‘I dunno, because it’s not your heritage. ’Cos Australia’s still pink.’

  ‘What’s that mean – Australia is pink?’

  ‘On the world map – pink, isn’t it? You’re a British subject even if you’re a Gondi!’

  He laughed then, but August couldn’t laugh. They’d joked like that when they were kids, but she’d grown out of it. Seeing August’s stone face made Eddie wish he hadn’t said the thing. He began to button his shirt to the throat, trying to hide the provocation in flannel.

  ‘Sorry, it’s just a joke,’ he offered.

  ‘Why did you stay here then?’ August dragged on the cigarette.

  ‘For the view, and who else is gunna do it? No bastard.’

  She blew smoke into the hot air, away from the conversation.

  ‘So you got a fella, or what?’

  ‘What do you care?’

  ‘I care,’ he said, and looked to find her eyes – her eyes that met his. They scanned each other’s faces for a moment. Eddie leant into the small curl of August’s lip as if it suggested an invitation.

  And they kissed, just like that. Just enough that their lips were touching, that their faces were magnified and momentarily blocked the sunlight, a tiny truce.

  She turned away, stubbed the cigarette and stood, ‘I gotta go,’ she began to make her way to Prosperous, ‘and help nan.’

  ‘Alright?’ he said, confused, but she was too far away to hear.

  ‘Can I help?’


  Elsie sat a pot of onions ahead of August. They cooked all afternoon and the heat brought in the wafts of the drying wheat. Elsie let August make the sticky white rice, and only chimed in to spill a dash of coconut milk into the murky bubbling water. She then had August cube the hard carrots and black radish and pick the coriander and green onions. Elsie took over stirring and added the brown sugar, aniseed and ginger and specially ordered red paste, and fish sauce. She dropped the pieces of chicken into the sauce. Her nana was glowing when she was cooking. Then she shook the little orange-and-black tin above the pot and the entire house reeked of Keen’s curry powder.

  The smell of the kitchen reminded August of the kids at school holding their noses as she sat down to eat her hot lunch, the students gawking back from their cut-crusted, soccer-ball ham sandwiches, their packets of Smith’s salt and vinegar, their frozen juice poppers. There were other kids that got the same gawks: Jody, who spent the lunch hour begging other kids for ‘a bite’ or for ‘ten cents for a sausage roll’; Luke, whose mum worked at the local motel and who always had hotel butter pats and a single roll of bread, and would sit in the schoolyard preparing his sandwich. There was also August’s friend Louise, who ate cold noodles with chopsticks from a clear plastic bowl. If she wondered about division at school, they were divided only by being poor and more poor. Valley, or Mission farm, or suburb poor. There is something to food, August thought, no longer ever hungry but forever hungry – it made them different or the same.