by John Danalis
I kissed Stella and my two daughters; they were going to meet me at the ceremony later. I was worried the girls might freak out from all the noise and whatever it was that the songman had planned. ‘Now, there’s going to be loud didgeridoo music and dancing and smoke, but there’s nothing to be scared of, Grandma and Grandad will be there too.’
‘Will it be a party, Daddy?’ asked Bianca.
Two-year-old Lydia looked up expectantly. ‘Cake!’
I opened my mouth to say no, but nothing came out.
‘Daddy doesn’t know, sweetie,’ Stella answered, ‘it’s going to be an adventure for all of us.’
I placed Mary’s case and the headdress on the front seat, buckled him in, and drove off to get Bob.
Bob’s house was a simple postwar cottage, similar to many others in the street except there was no front fence, just a big mango tree and grass that spilled out to the footpath. I like yards without fences. A friend of mine has an Italian father-in-law who often observes, ‘When I first came to this country, the fences were this big’ (he indicates by putting his hand at waist height) ‘and everybody happy. Now the fences all this big’ (he says, holding his hand over his head) ‘and nobody happy.’
I climbed the few short steps and knocked – the door was open. The front room looked like an office; a tall filing cabinet adorned with Aboriginal pride and activism stickers blocked most of my view. A computer hummed away in the background while piles of folders leaned this way and that. It was the sort of workspace where the in-tray never emptied.
‘See you this afternoon, love,’ Bob called over his shoulder as he came to the door.
I recognised his face instantly from the years of television and newspaper stories on Aboriginal affairs and activism; stories that my father had snorted at, stories that I had ignored. He held out his hand. Bob had a smoky beard the size of Santa’s but without the curly bits. He wore a bushman’s hat, boots and jeans. A screenprint of a fierce Mayan figure stretched across his black T-shirt; underneath, the words read ‘World Congress of Indigenous Peoples’. I guessed that Bob was in his late fifties or early sixties, but the mischievous twinkle in his eye made it hard to tell. I could picture him as a cute ten-year-old getting his plump cheeks squeezed by a gaggle of adoring aunties.
‘Where’s Gary?’ he asked, noticing the empty car.
‘Not coming. Death in the clan,’ I explained. ‘But Jason arrived this morning, we’re meeting him at the radio station.’
Bob stopped mid-step, pausing to digest the information. ‘Okay,’ he said in a tone of total acceptance. ‘Let’s go.’
Mary lay in the front seat.
‘Where would you like to ride?’ I asked.
Bob paused again for a few moments. ‘I’ll ride up front, put him behind me.’
I moved Mary to the rear seat and strapped him back in.
Bob climbed into the front then reached around and very gently patted and rubbed the top of the case. ‘How you going, old man?’ he asked quietly.
We drove off.
‘You would’ve been better off going the other way,’ Bob advised as we headed down his street.
I stopped and crunched the car into reverse. After a couple of hundred metres we had gathered speed and the Mazda’s differential started to protest. Bob asked casually, almost gently so as not to distract my reverse driving concentration, ‘Ever heard of a U-turn?’
‘I was just going to back into that side street back there but I missed it,’ I explained. ‘I’ll get the next one.’
‘That’s good,’ he said, ‘thought you might be reversing all the way into town.’
I continued to reverse. A car approached us from behind, travelling the right way. It began flashing its lights. I reversed into the side street with only a metre or two to spare. Bob slammed his foot into an imaginary brake pedal and began muttering something about the sweet mother of god.
Bee-eeeeeep!!!! The car swept by, its driver waving his fist through the window.
I looked at Bob; he was a lot paler than when he’d first climbed aboard. He adjusted his hat and I apologised. ‘I’m a bit nervous.’
‘So am I!’ he answered.
Although Bob’s foot continued to hit his imaginary brake pedal and I noticed that his fingers had assumed a python-like grip on the armrest, we arrived at the ABC studios without further incident. It wasn’t just my driving, he reassured me, city traffic always made him nervous. Bob disappeared for a nerve-settling smoke while I spoke to the security lady on the gate. She found my name on the visitors list and gave me two nametags.
‘I’ve got you down as three visitors, possibly four?’
‘No, just the one more,’ I explained. ‘Keep an eye out for a lost-looking Aboriginal guy with a didgeridoo.’
Moments later a yellow taxi glided up to the gate; the driver and the passenger sat for a while, winding up a conversation as the motor idled. Eventually the cab door opened and laughter poured out, followed by Jason Tamiru, the hippest, strongest, friendliest-looking Aboriginal man I had ever seen.
‘He doesn’t look lost to me!’ cooed the woman from the security booth, her appreciative eyes running up and down Jason’s impressive frame.
The cab driver helped Jason get his didgeridoo and bags from the back of the station wagon. In fact he was the most helpful and pleasant cabbie I think I’ve ever seen. He seemed smitten with Jason and looked as though he wanted to come to the interview with us!
The interview was to be pre-recorded and would go to air later that day. Bob, Jason and I sat on one side of the booth and the interviewer sat on the other. After a really nice introduction the announcer went straight for the freak-show angle.
‘So, John, tell us, what’s it like growing up with a skull in the family living room?’
A little wave of anger swept up my spine. This was my family we were talking about in public. I took a deep breath and explained my father’s eclectic collection and pointed out that Mary was not a trophy. I surprised myself by how clearly and purposefully I spoke. Thankfully the rest of the interview centred on the true spirit of the story: Mary’s journey home. Bob was an old hand when it came to working the media. He spoke clearly and precisely, explaining how human remains had been plundered from burial sites through the 1800s and 1900s and shipped by the crateload to local and overseas institutions for scientific study. He explained that while many colleges, universities and museums were starting to return remains from their collections, about 10 000 were still held by Australian institutions and 5000 by their British counterparts. However, these figures represented only the numbers that repatriation experts had been able to accurately confirm.
‘Even today,’ Bob explained, ‘collectors and antique dealers are quietly trading the remains of our ancestors on the internet. But the overwhelming majority sit in cardboard boxes and plastic bags in museum basements and dungeons all around the world.’
The interviewer asked the question my father had asked. ‘Bob, a lot of people will be listening, thinking, what’s the big deal? You don’t know who it is, it’s possibly thousands of years old, why worry about it?’
‘The dead have rights,’ replied Bob firmly. ‘They have the right to be placed in their final resting place, in their own country, so that they can enter the spirit world and become one with their mother, the Earth.’
But the interview wasn’t all serious and sombre. It ended with the story about my father’s reluctance to attend the ceremony until he learned that Gary’s son played for his beloved Essendon Football Club. Everyone fell about the booth in hysterics when I mentioned Dad’s Essendon garden gnome, attired in the black-and-red jersey with a little football tucked under his arm. There was lots of laughter and ribbing – it was a nice way to finish up.
Out in the carpark, we handed in our security passes. The security officer was still all eyes for Jason – this guy had magnetism! Ten o’clock; we had just over an hour to get to the ceremony. The University was only a ten-minute driv
e away, so we had plenty of time.
‘Nice headdress,’ said Jason as he climbed into the back seat beside Mary. His nose twitched, following the scent of citrus to the parcel shelf behind him. ‘Hey, I love this stuff!’ He ran his hand through the bushy arrangement and put his fingers to his nose. ‘Makes wicked tea, and you can cook with it too, it’s great for smoking fish.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Bob from the front, half twisting to see what Jason was talking about but keeping one eye firmly on the road.
‘All this lemon myrtle back here, what’s its botanical name, Citra-something?’
‘Backhousia citriodora,’ I said, hoping I wasn’t sounding like a know-all.
Bob nodded his approval and got back to the important business of scrutinising my driving.
Jason and Bob hadn’t had a chance to say much to each other prior to the interview; now they fired off the names of family and acquaintances, teasing out shared connections and the corresponding root notes of their personal and tribal songlines. As each common relationship was established, they relaxed – quite visibly – into each other’s company. I felt privileged to listen in as the two men exchanged news and gossip that, quite literally, traversed the continent. As it turned out, Jason wasn’t from Wamba Wamba country at all, he was a Yorta Yorta man. However, as the clans were close neighbours and as Jason was a nephew of Gary’s, he possessed both the knowledge and the connections required to receive Mary and to escort him back to country.
Just as we were about to turn left onto the main feeder road that led to the University, Bob called out, ‘Hang a right at the bridge up here, we’ve just got to pick up a coolamon from West End.’
In an instant we were crossing the river and heading in the opposite direction. I looked at my watch; an hour to go, we’d be okay. Every now and then Bob would interrupt the conversation to call out, ‘Right, left, up this way, down here,’ all the while punctuating his directions with involuntary thumps to the floor with his brake-pedal foot. What a sight we must have made: a super-cool hugely Afro’d Yorta Yorta songman, a jittery, bearded Kamilaroi man, a balding white chauffeur, a didgeridoo, a feather headdress, half a forest and a mysterious black case, all crammed into a blue Mazda hatchback.
‘Here it is, whoa, brother, in here!’ called Bob.
I hit the brakes hard; the delivery truck on our tail tooted in protest as Bob muttered a few more choice words about the holy mother.
Loose bitumen crunched under our tyres as we climbed the narrow service road that snaked into Musgrave Park. Apart from the occasional music and cultural festival, Musgrave Park isn’t generally frequented by too many white folk. An Aboriginal meeting and ceremonial place for thousands of years before settlement, and for almost 200 years an epicentre of Indigenous resistance, this was the place where Brisbane blacks drew a line in the sand and said, ‘This is ours.’ I'd always thought of Musgrave Park as a no-go zone, a place where Indigenous locals gathered to obliterate their brain cells with cask wine, solvent fumes and fists. So it was a surprise for me to find a cultural centre tucked away in the park. Three older fellows lounged on the railing of the prim little weatherboard hall; they were snappily dressed in the way that people who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s tend to dress – in high trousers, collared shirts and felt trilby hats. They greeted us all warmly and shot the breeze with Bob for a while. The centre was staffed by a couple of older ladies who greeted us like long-lost friends when we entered. There was something so genuine about these people; they possessed an unhurried generosity of spirit that now seems so rare – so endangered – in twenty-first-century Australia.
Bob asked the ladies if he could borrow a coolamon for the smoking ceremony. The ladies poked about the office, behind boxes, on top of filing cabinets.
‘Sorry, dear, someone must have borrowed it,’ said one with a shrug and a smile.
As Bob and Jason talked over the coolamon situation, one of the ladies approached me. ‘Where are you from, love?’ she asked with a face that radiated pure grandmotherly love.
‘My family’s all from Texas, but we live in Brisbane now,’ I said, and then added quietly, ‘What’s a coolamon?’
‘It’s a wooden bowl,’ she said, elegantly conjuring a long, shallow shape in the air with her hands.
I felt quite privileged to be in that place with those people, even if it was only for a few minutes. Musgrave Park proved the perfect metaphor for my experiences over the last two weeks. Here was this place that from the outside seemed so intimidating, so poisoned by bad press; Mary had forced me to push through the skin of negativity (and what a deceptively thin skin it was!) to the rich and welcoming cultural centre that awaited.
The warm, fuzzy interlude was soon shattered when I heard Bob announce, ‘No worries, I’ll just make one.’
‘Make one!’ I thought, looking at my watch. The ceremony was due to start in 45 minutes.
We drove back down the service road. My two companions were having a chuckle about something when two drunken or drugged Aboriginal men crashed out of the bushes and lurched across the road in front of us. One of the rubber men paused, his unsteady eyes fixed on me for a moment; in them I saw his bewildered spirit entombed in bloodshot madness.
‘Don’t run over the drones,’ said Bob in that samurai-sword voice of his. He shook his head and uttered a few more choice words, but beneath his anger I noticed a hint of embarrassment. For some reason, Bob’s reaction to the drunks surprised me. I suppose I’d naively thought that Aboriginal people were one big club, one big mind united in the struggle. I was fast learning their society was just like any other, with its own hierarchy of politicians and poets, jokers and brooders, winners and wastrels.
Bob’s good humour returned when we hit the streets again. ‘What we need is a good paperbark tree; keep your eyes peeled, boys.’
‘Are you sure you’ve got time to make a bowl?’ I said, nervously pointing at the dashboard clock. ‘I could swing by my place and pick something up, would a wok do the trick?’
Bob and Jason rolled about laughing.
‘Relax, brother!’ Jason said, leaning forward to slap me on the shoulder, ‘you’re running on Nunga time now.’
Bob laughed in that little bird way of his. ‘Tee-hee-hee. They can’t really start without us, can they?’
We must have taken the most indirect route possible to the University. We never seemed to travel in a straight line for more than 50 metres. ‘Over there, brother. No, try up this street.’ Every time I looked in the rearview mirror it was filled by Jason’s big, laughing face. No one could have guessed we were on our way to a solemn ceremony.
‘Quick, hang a U-turn, I think I see some paper–barks over there,’ ordered Bob.
I turned the car hard; one of the wheels caught the median strip, lurching the driver’s side of the car into the air. Bob stomped on his imaginary brake pedal as his hat and beard became airborne. After he’d caught his breath he turned to me and said, ‘Geez, you only clipped it, brother, turn around and have another crack at it, you might kill it this time!’
Tears of laughter streamed down my cheeks; Bob made a show of straightening his beard and hat while Jason’s baritone laugh bounced about the cabin.
‘Here we go, stop here! Look, there’s a whole clump of them,’ said Bob, pointing to a dozen or so paperbarks.
We were on a busy six-lane road festooned with CLEARWAY and No STOPPING signs.
‘I can’t stop here!’ I protested as I pulled into the bus-only lane and slowed down.
‘We’ll only be a second – if the law comes, tell ’em we’re on sacred business,’ advised Bob as he leapt from the car.
Bob and Jason laughed like young boys on an emu chase as they sprinted across the park to the trees. The two men studied a few trees and exchanged opinions before Bob pointed to the one he thought was best. I watched in disbelief as he wrapped his arms around the tree and shimmied up the trunk a metre or two like a koala, then pulled until the bark began to c
ome away. He let himself fall to the ground and as he came down a great section of bark came down with him. He and Jason jogged back to the car with a section of paperbark about the size of a small surfboard.
We had our smoking bowl.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
A parking space had been set aside for us at the suburban campus. As the heat from the engine block tick-ticked away, so did the frivolity and humour that had filled the car for the last hour. We must have looked as though we meant business; Jason with his mysterious dufflebag in one hand and his didgeridoo case balanced on his shoulder; Bob with his cowboy hat pulled down low and the enormous slab of paperbark under his arm; and me with the headdress in one hand and my black case in the other. We strode with purpose; we were Mary’s minions now, doing the earthly things required to get his waylaid soul back to the spirit world. We were being reeled in. Our path seemed energised, lit up like a runway that only we could see; the throngs and gaggles of people on everyday university business parted before us.
‘Here they come, here they come.’ A rustling of whispers rose in intensity as we passed through the Oodgeroo Unit courtyard. Somehow we had managed to arrive a few minutes early, but already clusters of people milled around, looking at us while trying not to, eyes scanning each of us before coming to rest on the black case. Inside the Unit offices, the mostly female staff flitted about, trying in vain to look focused, as if it was business as usual, but there was a still, twittery tension, the way a forest feels when stormclouds boil across the hilltops and the tempest is about to hit.
Craig rushed towards us. ‘You’re here! We were starting to worry. This way, Victor’s still away, you can use his room, where’s Gary?’
He ushered us into his boss’s office. Craig and Bob knew each other; I introduced him to Jason and the two made smalltalk before Craig pulled me aside.
‘Mate,’ he whispered, ‘ I’ve got to tell you, some of my staff are really upset.’
‘Why, what’s happened?’ I asked, fearing I’d made another cultural blunder.
