be anxious, longing for – bunba-y-marra-nha I spent all my days fishing, I wasn’t wading out to get a good catch, I was always looking for Jedda. We never said to each other what we were doing, not when Elsie extended the garden, looking, not when she’d spend all her days walking through the bush, looking. We were filled with bunba-y-marra-nha only to wrap her and have to rest on ngurambang.
Biyaami’s son – Gurra-gala-gali I asked the ancestors once if there was just one single belief in the world. I asked what about Gurra-galagali, and the story he died for Biyaami, how it sounded like the story of Jesus to me. My great-great-great-grandfather said, ‘This is not a toy, this belief we have.’ He said, ‘Are you experiencing me talking to you?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He told me that Biyaami is the creator, but we don’t worship Him or His son. We worship the things He made, the earth. Of course, the ancestors showed me how true they were in the end. Gurra-gala-gali was just a son, a coincidence.
blood – guwany, guwan, guwaan There’s two bloods running through me: where I come from and where I am. Some things I cannot understand and I am ashamed at what one of my family members has done. It severed a vein, that terrible thing. It is not part of me or our family anymore, my nephew. He has drained from who we are like the guwany leaving the body. In that case water is thicker than blood.
bogong moth – buugang The Gondiwindi used to travel south to feast on bogong moths from the mountains, the alpine mountains, when the country still had seasons. The ancestors took me on a long walk there once. It was in summer and the buugang had travelled from the north to the cool mountains to escape the heat. When we arrived there we collected the buugang and all sat around fires. There were people from all over ngurambang there, about five hundred fires I must have seen! Everyone was there to cook and feast on buugang – which tasted a little like a pork chop, but more nutritious. After that I felt strong walking back to the Boys’ Home.
book, paper – garrandarang My daughter Nicki is going to look after this dictionary, she’ll take the garrandarang to the council, she said. She said she’d do something good with it, protect the resting places on the farm with it.
breast – dhudhu This is the female word for the chest. Now, this is the first word I ever remember my mummy saying to me. That might sound funny, but I only knew her as a small boy, until I was three years old. I knew her as a young man much later. It was the first word I ever heard because dhudhu is also used to say to infants, ‘Here, here, baby’, ‘Here, here, little one, come to the chest, lie against my heart.’
brolga – burral-gang The ancestors came back quickly once the whirly-whirly left. They returned to talk with me just one last time. And then the brolga appeared. They told me that the burral-gang, it was Jedda, that she was safe. That she’ll always be a brolga. They said they didn’t need to come back anymore to see me. They said I was like an initiated man, that I had caught up on all the things I needed to know. My great-great-great-grandfather laughed again and put his arm around me. He said that he wished they could have taught me all these things from when I was a little boy. ‘No matter,’ he said. ‘You are resurrected, a man brought back from extinction! Jedda is resurrected too – burral-gang.’ He said that I would have big challenges ahead of me, but that all I had learnt would show me what to do.
burnt grass – bimbayi My ancestors took me out to show me how they used fire. The women arrived with their branches aflame and one patch at a time in a line about a few hundred yards from the riverbank, they burnt one tussock after another of the grass and then with a shovel they beat the fire out. Eventually they built a long firewall then waited until there was the finest breeze which took fire onto all the wild grass that ran from the river. The fire spread easily and I could feel the heat radiating off the field. Then the fire reached the breakwall and stopped. They went around and beat any stray flames and then they sped up time for me, so I could see the changes. The ash receding into the earth, feeding the soil and quickly the rain fell, the sky cleared, saplings popped up, then buds, then the stems grew longer until the buds broke and yellow blossoms covered the patch they’d burnt. They had grown long tubers, good for roasting and grinding into flour or boiling and adding water and beating into a sort of gruel. Everything was cooked twice and the excess flour they stored in their homes, or possum-skin bags in the earth mounds. The kangaroos came too and one was speared for a feed. Now, in those same places, wherever the Falstaffs’ wheat and cattle haven’t made home, the acacia trees have shot up in abundance. In some places they’ve shot up ten thousand to an acre where edible grasses once were.
THIRTY-FIVE
August and her aunt slept on and off until the sun rose, orange, red, pink over the ocean. The taste of salt filled the car. Seagulls swooped. Surfers in short-legged wetsuits hurried past the car towards the glassy water that peeled hollow off the beach and from the headland right into the yellow shore. They rolled the sleeping bags, locked the rental and walked south along the bike path. All the houses were quiet. Big houses, mansions with moneyed cars parked outside. In the backyards August saw swimming pools fenced in glass, pools five metres from the edge of the ocean. After a kilometre or so people appeared with their leashed dogs, teenagers unstacked identical chairs outside coffee shops and men and women began to run past them with rhythmic breath. At a small cove they rolled their tracksuit pants above their knees and waded into the lapping seawater silently. It was colder than Aunt Missy expected and she fled from the shoreline. They laughed and washed their feet by the bike path tap and on the return to the car, they both looked out to the wide sea.
‘Mob here must’ve ate plenty of fish,’ Missy said, nodding to the calm expanse of water, the slope to the rock pools, perfect for netting.
August hummed in response. They returned to the car and a few blocks from the beach, bought vegie sausage rolls at the first Vietnamese bakery they spotted. They followed directions for twenty minutes on Missy’s phone until they found the closest car park to the Historic Museum Australia. August took the handful of submission cards and slid them into her coat pocket.
A strong southerly wind blew through the grey, angular city. ‘They won’t just give them back, will they?’ August asked, as they crossed against the traffic lights.
‘Let’s see what’s there first. Maybe they’ll get us to fill out paperwork or something. I’m sure this happens all the time.’
‘Repatriation?’ August had seen it in a newspaper; shrunken skulls returned to Indigenous people two hundred years later. Or they’d wanted them returned. She couldn’t remember.
‘Where they give your family’s artefacts back?’ she asked.
‘Yep.’
‘Yeah, I’m sure with the evidence we’ve got – they won’t just keep them.’
They stood outside fifteen minutes before opening, and looked up at the building. It wasn’t Buckingham Palace huge, but it was a decent size. Six tall squared sandstone pillars tapered into careful angles, and then held up a great triangle of sandstone. In the flat rock beneath the triangle the word ‘MUSEUM’ sat lonesome. August figured when it was built they didn’t know exactly which type of museum it would eventually be. The building was as grand to Australian buildings as Southerly House had been to Prosperous. It was spectacular.
‘Looking at it won’t make it smaller,’ Missy said, one arm bracing her cardigan and handbag against her body while the other swept broadly towards the building, the arm saying let’s go.
August dug her hands into her pockets and together they crossed the park. They were the first people in line. Inside the air was pleasant, neither too warm nor too cool. It smelt of paper. Missy smoothed her grey untameable mane so August did the same to her own thick hair. They purchased two adult tickets and Missy checked her handbag and slid her telephone into August’s parka pocket, patted the sides of her cardigan where there were no pockets. Missy took her hand and squeezed it hard, looked at her with excited nervousness. They walked single file through the metal-detector door
frame.
The entrance was white and as wide as a petrol station. Arrows pointed in the direction they were supposed to follow. As they entered the first room they craned and looked at the entire ceiling hung with gum-tree cuttings, the sound of didgeridoo played from hidden speakers. They looked at tall carved and painted totem poles, bark canoes suspended over exhibit shelves, headdresses stitched with shells and wide colourful dot paintings. They approached each item both searching for the title of ‘Falstaff Collection’. August saw a piece of bark, smoothed and painted in a watery charcoal, then painted with a big fish that looked like a Murrumby cod, the colours were white and ochre. The section of the stomach was hatched, the fins were painted with the dominant spines only, as if the painting explained the way it moved. The parts of the fish that Poppy had taught them to eat were all painted white, and the bone structure was all exact. It was an X-ray of the fish, and reminded August of when Jedda had disappeared and how she began to see people and things the same way. Opposite there were tens of dillybags arranged horizontally, encased in glass. A massive scroll hung on the wall above, a painting on white parchment. It was of a blood-red crocodile with a snake body angled vertical to the sky and people seemed to be tumbling down the insides of the animal, some swimming towards the mouth, trying to escape. Six figures were painted on the outside of the animal, their hands near their faces as if telling the people trapped inside what to do. It made August tearful.
At the entrance to one room a sign read: Warning to Aboriginaland Torres Strait visitors, this room contains images of deceased persons. A group of schoolkids hustled past them into the room without glancing at the notice.
‘Do you want to go in?’ August whispered to her aunt.
They both leant forward and took a tiny peek into the room. August saw a huge picture of Aboriginal men in a black-and-white photograph, with chains tied around their necks, staring into the unseen lens. They leant out, upright.
‘Nah,’ Missy answered, shaking off a little shiver. August thought about the Reverend for the umpteenth time, imagining him in a black-and-white image on their field. Was he good? she thought.
They returned to following the main arrows. There were touchscreens and plastercast caves to sit inside. August watched a video filmed in the 1960s of a group of women sitting cross-legged making a bark painting. These were real Aborigines – not like Aunty and her, she thought.
They walked so slowly, even when groups of schoolchildren bustled about them and hustled through the rooms saying cool and weird every few steps. ‘Weekday,’ August whispered to Aunty, but she didn’t take any notice. Hanging across a wall was a beautifully stitched possum-skin cloak about two metres wide and tall. On the skin side it had been intricately painted with people dancing, and birds’ necks stretching upwards, kangaroos whose bodies looked curved, as if they were still in the womb.
‘Here, take a photo of that,’ Missy whispered. She stood beside it. ‘Just get my hand, I’ll tell you when the coast is clear … now.’
August looked at the screen as she tapped the camera icon. Missy’s raised fist was barely in the frame.
‘It’s okay?’ August asked, and showed her the photo she’d taken.
‘Yeah.’ She pushed August’s hand down to hide the phone.
There were documents under glass cases. Large books, the first signatures of something, in calligraphy. August couldn’t read a thing.
There was a painted map of where the rivers were from. Missy arranged August to stand right ahead of it while again she stood beside it. August raised the phone.
‘Miss, no photos in here.’ The security guard held his hand out and stormed towards Aunty’s phone in August’s hands.
‘This is a painting of our country and I’m her elder, so I’m giving her cultural permission to take a photo – okay, Mister?’ Missy was rude without meaning to be and up until that point August’d thought she understood city museum manners.
‘That’s your warning, no photos,’ he repeated, and flexed his neck as if it were more threatening than his face.
‘Sorry,’ August offered, and put the phone in her pocket as he continued his staring competition with Missy.
Right away Missy shuffled on, her gait was skittering, jagged. August watched her skip the display of clapping sticks. She strutted past other hip-high displays as if nothing could impress her. August caught up to her and they both looked into a low glass cabinet. There were nardoo stones sitting in the centre of grinding plates. August guessed most people thought they were rocks until they read the descriptions. Missy jabbed her finger at the glass. ‘Can you see through this?’ she asked August sternly.
‘Yes,’ August said tentatively. ‘It’s glass.’
‘Not that.’ She took a step back and now jabbed her finger at the air, pointing down. ‘This.’
‘No. It’s wood,’ August said with a low chuckle, just polite enough for a museum.
‘This is tokenism, man. Liberals trying to feel good.’
‘It’s appreciation for art, Aunty.’ August could see she was getting serious.
‘They should work out how many of us they murdered and have a museum of tanks of blood. There’d be signs that said Bloodshed – 1788 to Yesterday – Stay Tuned! That’s what a museum of “Indigenous Australia” should look like – that’s the one the white people get to visit, and then, okay, we have our own museum …’ her aunty’s argument was losing steam. Not because she wasn’t sincere, but because Poppy’s voice had begun whispering in Missy’s ear instead: You tell ’em, my daughter! Tell ’em when the explorers came looking flash in their coats and drill trousers, and on their big tired horses, they had shiny cherrywood-handled guns and moleskin leather shoes and had already invented wheels, whips and germ warfare.
Daughter, do you hear me?
Daughter, will you tell them?
Missy tried to ignore her dad, tried to find the things they’d come for, but Albert kept talking in her ear as she tried to find her way out of the maze of displays.
Here, in Sydney, the coast was getting crowded with them folks from overseas and they all needed more land to grow food, because they were real hungry folk too.
Missy went to walk past a display of weapons, but her father compelled her to stop.
Look at the boomerang and the woomera, Missy! They shot and shattered our boomerang and our woomera! They didn’t just take our land with guns and bullets; there were other ways just as lethal – look, Missy. Look harder!
Her dad, Albert, was pestering her now, he was seizing the opportunity now that she stood in front of all the evidence.
They gave us blankets, Missy – they took the land that way too – with smallpox-infected blankets! They put arsenic in the flour, Missy! They divided us and ruled! They thought that us ‘Stone Age’ people needed to be exterminated come hell or high water.
Albert wasn’t finished but Missy dismissed him – she was sick to the guts, sick in that place.
‘Where’s our fucking artefacts, I need some fresh air!’ she said in a rush before storming down the remaining corridor, disappearing under an exit sign.
August thought to go after her, but didn’t. Her Aunt Missy needed a moment, to take a breath.
August liked the museum and was relieved to have some time alone. There was something satisfying about losing someone at a music concert or an art gallery, or a museum. She wasn’t obliged to turn to whoever she was with every two minutes and come up with new responses. Amazing. Beautiful. They weren’t the words for what she saw in the museum; the things she was looking at deserved words that, she thought, didn’t exist.
She continued through the exhibit, slowly and gravely. August stood in front of a yellow painting. All she saw was yellow ochre, a pattern that pulsated, as if it were a Magic Eye stereogram poster, and something hidden might suddenly become visible if she blurred her vision. She wanted to cry, she felt as she had at school, dumb at everything, trying three times as hard to problem-solve, trying three
times as hard to make friends. But some things she didn’t know, because she was never taught. Everything hurt her head. It was as if she were walking through a cemetery, tombstones jutted. She’d realised then the purpose of their history class where they’d been mentioned like important footnotes, just like the purpose of the museum, how it felt like a nod – polite and reverent and doused in guilty wonder – of a time that had now passed. Past orpassed she thought as she followed the arrow to the archaeology collections.
The Yield Page 21
