Riding the Black Cockatoo

by John Danalis

© Wiran Aboriginal Corporation

  Jida Gulpilil-Murray and Jason Tamiru preparing the reburial graves. Mary’s black case sits between the two men.

  © Wiran Aboriginal Corporation

  “They came from all over Victoria and NSW.” Traditional Owners and guests place gum leaves upon the Wamba Wamba Ancestral remains.

  © Wiran Aboriginal Corporation

  Clayton Mitchell-Murray, Adam Lampton, Jason Tamiru (sitting) and Jida Gulpilil-Murray welcome and smoke guests to the sacred Menera burial grounds. Mary’s resting place is in the far paddock behind Jida.

  © John Danalis

  Mary’s Billabong

  Mary © Wiran Aboriginal Corporation

  Kumba Nguteyuk kurruk pa yemin-yemin Lie down and sleep Your country and burial ground

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  { 13 OCTOBER 2005 }

  I ding-dinged the little ships bell by my parents’ front door and let myself in. Stepping through the doorway – a doorway I had walked in and out of all my life – I noticed a change that stopped me in my tracks. The air, the energy, something felt different, looser. It was like walking into an empty house after the removalists had been, but everything was just where it had always been – everything except Mary. There was a sense of lightness, of cleanliness, of wellbeing.

  ‘We made the front page,’ I said as I passed Mum the local paper. A photograph covered almost the entire page; it was close-up of Jason and me in an emotional embrace after the handover. Two men hugging; not the sort of thing that usually makes front page news! The funny thing was I couldn’t even remember the hug taking place. We’d made the television news too; my father pressed the Play button on the VCR and made us watch the story three times. It was interesting seeing the ceremony from a different perspective, seeing it condensed down to a one-minute news story, without all the behind-the-scenes uncertainty and fumbling – I was pleased.

  Jason was waiting as I pulled up at the hotel.

  ‘Man, how did you sleep last night?’ he asked as we loaded his gear and Mary back into the car.

  ‘Best sleep I’ve ever had,’ I answered, ‘I just fell back into this black hole and woke up feeling amazing – totally rested.’

  ‘Me too!’ he said. ‘I got home from dinner and just collapsed, wow, what a sleep, I feel brand-new!’

  Jason was a little worried about getting Mary onto the plane. He explained that he’d phoned the airline to make sure he’d be able to take Mary on as hand luggage.

  ‘The airline said they’d need some sort of official papers, but when I asked them who to contact, nobody in the office could tell me.’

  ‘Maybe this will do the trick.’ I reached into the back seat and grabbed the local and state newspapers.

  ‘Hey, front cover! Man, that’s a beautiful picture, I’ve gotta get a copy of this to take home for Gary.’

  ‘It’s yours,’ I said. ‘And check out the Courier Mail, page 11, and a guy from the Australian was there too, so we’ll be in that paper too. Mate, if they give us any trouble at the airport, I’ll just wave these under their noses. Nobody will want to mess with Mary’s return home, this is news.’

  But there would be no trouble. When Jason checked in and explained what was in the camera case the attendant’s eyes lit up. ‘Yes, we heard you were coming. I’ll just let the duty manager know you’ve arrived.’

  The Yorta Yorta songman received the red-carpet treatment; they handled his didgeridoo as if it belonged to the Queen, and when the attendant wished Jason and Mary a safe journey home, she said it with a sincerity that encapsulated the goodwill of every well.wisher that we had encountered over the last couple of days. The manager escorted us to the security counter and then turned to us apologetically. ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I’m afraid that the case will still have to go through the X-ray machine.’

  ‘Hey, not a problem,’ said Jason, placing the case on the little conveyor belt.

  Word of our arrival had preceded us, for more security officers than seemed necessary had gathered behind the X-ray monitor to watch Mary pass through. I couldn’t resist a last glimpse and without a word the security people made room so I could see my old friend one last time. Jason didn’t seem to mind all the interest but was careful to look the other way as Mary disappeared beneath the black rubber drapes and into the bowels of the machine. Mary lay on his side surrounded by the garland of leaves from my garden; the monitor’s picture was all greys and blues, and as he passed through he looked distinctly regal, like the sideways bust of a Roman emperor on an old silver coin.

  ‘What a journey you’ve had,’ I whispered as the case emerged out the other side. As we made our way up to the departure lounge I asked Jason if he’d opened the case. ‘You know, for a peek.’

  He turned to me with a horrified look. ‘Of course not! That’s not my business, that’s for the old ones.’ I still hadn’t learnt to think before opening my trap.

  We found the gate and sat in a quiet spot.

  ‘I’ll send the case back after the burial, is that okay?’ Jason asked.

  ‘No, keep it, as a thank-you, use it for your work. Anyway, how did you get into repatriation?’

  Jason told his story, of how he’d been awarded an internship at the Melbourne Museum. He had loved the job and was proud to be a part of the museum’s Indigenous unit and program.

  ‘It was all about keeping our culture alive. Anyway, I was keen, curious – I wanted to learn, to get more knowledge so I could pass it back to our people. I used to poke around in the storerooms, but my boss used to try and distract me, to divert my attention elsewhere, and soon I found out why.’

  Jason’s eyes darkened. ‘One day I tripped over this box, literally tripped over it. I opened it up, and inside were the remains of my people. Can you imagine that? They tried to keep it a secret from the dumb young blackfella. The more I looked, the more I found. Well, I started making noise, asking questions: “Why do you need all these old ones, what use are they, why can’t they go back to country?’’ ’ Jason sat silently.

  ‘Well, what did they say?’ I asked.

  ‘Research, they said, we need them for research.’ He spat the words out like pieces of rotten food.

  ‘ “Well, show me,” I said, “show me the research.” And you know what, they couldn’t show me one bit, not one paper. And after all these years – decades, man! – that my people have been jammed in boxes with little metal tags attached to them as if they weren’t even human beings.’

  I sat there, not knowing what to say. I couldn’t even imagine how it would feel to suddenly discover that your ancestors, your family, had been stashed away in boxes, drawers and bags all around your workplace – the place where you spent a sizeable proportion of your time, a place that helps define who you are.

  ‘They wanted me to be quiet, but how could I, how could I, these are my people, my great-grandfather could have been in one of those boxes. In the end they said I was disruptive, I had to go, I had to leave the job I loved.’

  Jason explained that that’s how he got involved with his Uncle Gary in the repatriation struggle, not just for the return of remains, but for access to and for custodianship of all their cultural heritage.

  ‘I’m working on the other side now. These institutions have to pretend that they’re working with us, you know, so they look good in public, but they don’t respect us. They don’t understand what these things mean to us, they don’t have a clue.’

  The departure lounge had begun to fill up. Businessmen and women feigned interest in newspaper articles and laptop screens, but from their straining ears and furtive peeps I knew they were being drawn into Jason’s story as much as I was.

  ‘Did you know about the barks that came out from England, did Gary ever you tell you about those?’

  My mind went back two weeks, to the photo I’d found on the internet of Gary wrapped in the cloak holding what looked like a shield.

  ‘Yeah, I do remember reading about tho
se. You took the British and Melbourne museums to court to try to keep them here, in Australia.’

  ‘That’s it.’ Jason was delighted that I knew what he was talking about. ‘Well, I tell you, they came out on loan from the British Museum, went on display here and it was like – whoa! – we didn’t even know this kind of wood carving was part of our heritage. After they cleared all us Kooris from the land, they cut down all the big old trees, including all the ones that were carved. These barks are the only ones left in the world. None of us knew we made these things, it was lost knowledge. Well, suddenly all the young fellas are studying these barks real close, trying to read the symbols, trying to work out what kind of tools they used, and the next thing you know we’re all carving barks like crazy, we had an exhibition, we were reconnecting!’

  I looked at Jason and saw that the brightness had returned to his eyes. We sat quietly for a few minutes; sometimes you can say more with your mouth shut.

  ‘Can you do me a favour?’ I asked.

  ‘You name it, brother, anything,’ said Jason, looking ahead.

  ‘Mary’s packed in lemon myrtle leaves. When you, or whoever puts Mary back into the ground, can you put a branch or two into the earth with him – if that’s okay?’

  He gently patted the case which rested between us. ‘Consider it done. Tell you what, we’ll put some on the fire too, so some of that good smoke can blow up your way, eh.’

  The call to board the plane came and we wandered over to the queue shuffling towards the gate.

  I asked Jason if there was a girlfriend waiting for him at the other end. He shook his head.

  ‘I tell you what, you turned a few heads yesterday. I reckon you made a few of those Murrie girls go very weak at the knees. Some of them were gorgeous too.’

  ‘No way!’ he said, ‘I didn’t notice any girls, I couldn’t. I was responsible for the business; everything I had went into that.’

  Again, I wished I had kept my trap shut, but Jason didn’t seem annoyed. We approached the gate; he put down the case and opened his arms to embrace me. As we hugged, the Yorta Yorta songman said softly, almost as if to comfort me, ‘Brother, oh my brother.’

  As I watched Jason pull his boarding pass from the back pocket of his baggy jeans, I had that left-behind feeling again, the feeling that the wave was rolling on without me. And then, just as he was about to vanish into the boarding tunnel with Mary, the songman turned and called out, ‘Now you and your family come down and see us any time, you’re one of our mob now.’

  That night the phone rang. It was Gary and Jason. They’d just crossed into Wamba Wamba country and had pulled over the car so they could call and tell me Mary was home; back in country. Gary painted me a sketch. The sun was fat and low, bathing the Riverine plains in pre-dusk gold. I could hear the silence that surrounded them. Then, all of a sudden a choir of frogs – 500 voices strong – started croaking and singing from a damp hollow somewhere near the car. The great noise pealed up the phone line, out of the earpiece and tumbled joyously into my office. It was impossible to talk, and anyway, who were we to interrupt this raucous hymn. Gary just laughed and laughed.

  I phoned my parents with the news that Mary was safely home. My mother began to cry and in between her sobs she told my father. I heard him honk into the man-sized hanky he always carried.

  ‘Those people today – just so beautiful and kind – not one bad word – just kindness.’ Mum could barely get the words out. ‘Your father can’t come to the phone, he’s too emotional to talk now – oh those people – just so beautiful.’

  Tears bathed my cheeks and fell into the little holes of the telephone mouthpiece, disappearing like raindrops into a parched earth. Right then, during that phone call, my parents taught me a lesson; that it’s never too late to learn, that it’s never to late to change. The moment I put the phone down, rain fell like a curtain from the night sky. We needed it too. It hadn’t rained for a long, long time.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  { 14 OCTOBER 2005 }

  The wave of Mary’s return had washed me back onto the shore, but the land I had returned to would never be the same. All morning, friends and acquaintances who had seen or heard the story in the news phoned or emailed, sometimes with just a simple, ‘Well done,’ but often they wanted – needed – to know more. Depending on how I thought each person would react to the more otherworldly aspects to the story, I told either a short version or a long version. The long version took at least fifteen minutes to recount, and if the listener was particularly receptive, could take much longer. After each telling, whether long or short, I put down the phone, physically and emotionally drained – as if I’d been through a reliving of the last two weeks.

  Shortly after lunch, one of the women from the Oodgeroo Unit phoned. She was distraught.

  ‘Have you seen what they’ve done with Jason’s picture?’

  ‘Who has, what?’ I asked, concerned, but equally relieved that I wasn’t the cause of her distress.

  She explained that one of the big media corporations had posted on their website a picture of Jason taken at the handover.

  ‘Wait till you read the story,’ she cried.

  I typed in the address as she read it out and promised to phone back after I’d taken a look. Seconds later the news page materialised, with a close-up photograph of Jason playing the didgeridoo. It was a well-composed picture, and everything was there: the possum-skin cloak, the flag-covered case containing Mary, the fire with its grey-white smoke curling like a spirit ghost. Then I read the headline: Didgeridoo named an offensive weapon.

  The article was one of those light-hearted ‘Isn’t the world a zany place’-type reports. It was a British story about a young man from Sussex who had smashed a window and threatened a couple of policemen with an ‘Aboriginal musical instrument’. The bobbies arrested the man and charged him with possession of an offensive weapon. When the story came into the Australian newsroom, the editor must have grabbed the first photograph of a didgeridoo player he could lay his lazy hands on, and Jason’s would have been wired to the newspapers the night before. I pictured a spotty kid in a three-sizes-too-large Tottenham Hotspurs shell-suit running amok with a dodgy souvenir brought home from an Australian backpacking holiday; then I looked at the picture of Jason – a songman, a custodian of culture, a future elder. Anger surged up my spine like molten lava. ‘That’s my friend! That’s our smoke! That’s Mary! Bastards!’ There they were again, pulling the rug out from under something beautiful, something empowering, something that had touched so many people.

  ‘Utter, utter bastards, I can’t believe this!’ I spat over and over as I stomped around the house spraying spittles of rage in my wake. I showed the picture to Stella; she groaned in disappointment and sadness.

  Jason’s mobile phone was out of range; I left what must have been the world’s most incoherent messages. I returned to the computer and looked for a phone number for the website’s editorial department. Typically, there were plenty of numbers available for people wanting advertising rates, but there was no way in, no way to challenge or call into question the veracity or integrity of the news stories which oozed from the teats of this media bovine. After ten minutes of excavating my way through the site, I reached for the phone book and found the number for the organisation's television studio in Brisbane. I asked the receptionist to put me through to the head of the newsroom. From my kitchen window I could see Mount Coot-tha, just fifteen minutes bike ride away. Four spindly television towers rose from the ridgeline. As I listened to the on-hold music, I looked to the southernmost tower and imagined the conversation in the studio offices that stood near its base. ‘Where did he say he was from?’ ‘He didn’t.’ ‘How many times do I need to tell you, find out where they are from, and find out what they want; your job is to weed out the nut-jobs. Ohhhh, put him on.’

  A gruff voice terminated the digitised Vivaldi. ‘Newsroom.’

  Usually, I handle confrontations bad
ly. I never seem to find the correct path, I’m either mealy-mouthed or my emotions run away with me and I end up saying things I regret. But right then I rewrote the textbook on assertiveness; I wanted Mary’s smoke back. After listening to my story the newsroom manager said a few choice words about his interstate colleagues and happily looked up the number for the news desk for Sydney.

  I’d learnt many lessons over the last two weeks, and one lesson was this; hesitate and you’ll lose your nerve.

  I punched in the number. Another young, smooth-voiced receptionist answered, but before she’d finished her sentence I rolled straight over her.

  ‘John Danalis, head of news please.’

  My tone was low, forceful yet restrained; it was my impression of a media-savvy voice.

  Without saying another word she put me through to a slightly older female voice.

  ‘John Danalis, head of news, please.’

  The way I said my name worked a treat, as if she – indeed everybody – should know who I was.

  ‘Ohh, yes, one moment.’

  I rolled through one office after another until I came to a stop at the desk of a senior editor; I wasn’t rolling any further until I explained myself. My voice had run out of bluff and my meagre assertiveness reserves were almost depleted. I had nothing left but honesty.

  ‘Your website is displaying an image that is causing a great deal of upset to the Indigenous communities in two separate states, to a university, and to me. It’s only been up for a few hours, but if it stays up it’s going to cause an almighty stink.’ I explained that yesterday’s ceremony was the spiritual and cultural culmination of a journey that had touched many people.

  ‘That smoke is sacred and it has no business next to a story about some moron in Britain. You have no idea how much offence this is causing.’ But from the way my voice wavered – pulled apart between anger and sorrow – I’m sure she understood.

  She took down all my details and promised to get back to me within half an hour and gave me her direct number and name just to reassure me.