Riding the Black Cockatoo

by John Danalis

  Ten minutes later the phone rang. This was the head of news and he had exactly the sort of media voice I’d been trying to affect.

  ‘John, I wanted to let you know personally that our people are pulling the picture as we speak, it’ll be gone in a minute, so no harm done, eh.’

  I blabbered a few protestations – ‘You’re supposed to be professionals, a first-year journalism student wouldn’t make this mistake.’

  ‘Look, the editor on this one was a Kiwi, so we can’t expect too much from him, can we?’ he laughed.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘They’re supposed to be more switched on about cultural matters than we are!’

  He bounced back with a smarmy chuckle; this guy was like one of those blow-up punching clowns. ‘Lo-o-ok, no harm done, eh?’ His voice reached down the phone line and patted me on the shoulder.

  My skin crawled. I could almost hear the rattle of his chunky gold bracelet. ‘Well, there was, actually . . .’ But I was out of fight; at least Mary, Jason and the smoke would soon be out of the greasy grasp of the tabloid media. ‘But thanks for sorting things out.’

  Five minutes later, when I hit the Refresh button on the computer, the picture was gone.

  Jason phoned later in the day. ‘Hey, I got your message, something about my photo, you sounded upset.’

  I explained what had happened, and that I was thinking about making a formal complaint.

  ‘Welcome to our world,’ Jason laughed.

  I was silent, stunned by my friend’s lack of indignation.

  ‘Look, thanks for getting them to take it down,’ he said, ‘but just let it go now, save your energy for the big fights.’

  ‘Let it go? But it was your photo they misused!’

  ‘Hey, do you think this is a one-off?’ he said, ‘This happens one hundred times a day to us; ever notice that whenever they show a negative story on the news about Aboriginal people they nearly always run it with pictures of blackfellas sitting under a tree, as if that’s all we do. And most of the time the pictures they use don’t even relate to the people in the story, could be some mob from the other side of the country. I used to get angry, but if I got upset every time it happened it would kill me. It’s better to laugh and stay strong.’

  After the call I thought about what Jason had said. He was right, but I’d never understood enough, or cared enough to notice. I’d just spent almost three weeks getting to know quite a few Aboriginal people, and not once did I see one sitting under a tree. Not that sitting about under a tree is a bad thing; there should be more of it. In fact, take a walk through any city park at lunchtime or on the weekend and you’ll see scores of Westerners, Asians, Middle Easterners, Africans, South Americans and Laplanders sitting under trees. Why doesn’t the media represent those groups as ‘under-tree sitters’? But how often do we see photos of Aboriginal people doing ‘normal’ everyday activities? Like walking the kids to school, reading a book, or enjoying a Thai curry!

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  { NOVEMBER – DECEMBER 2005 }

  I had a lot of catching up to do. I was behind on all my assignments and exams were fast approaching, but somehow I muddled though. Occasionally I would wander through the courtyard where Mary’s handover had taken place. With every visit the ceremonial ashes and burnt stick ends became harder and harder to find. After a few weeks there was no trace left. At the end of semester, when most of the students raced back to their lives, part-time jobs and holidays, I stayed on. The library had an extensive Indigenous Studies collection: textbooks, art books, essays, maps, literature, films and music. As I waded into this secluded cultural waterhole, the bottom fell away beneath my feet into a sheer 60 000-year-old drop.

  I returned to the shore each night with new material drawn from the shelves at random. By day I read and by night I watched movies and documentaries. The weathered face of actor and dancer David Gulpilil, as timeless and familiar as Uluru, became a regular presence on our television screen. Didgeridoo and clapstick song filled our lounge room and drifted like smoke through the wooden louvres and out into our street. I marvelled at the effect these rhythms, chants and beats had on Bianca and Lydia; they would move about unconsciously with fingers splayed, as if they’d already been taught these brolga dance steps. They knew how to move to this music, it was as if the rhythms simply reached in and awoke something that was lying dormant, the way a bee pollinates a flower.

  Initially it was hard to come to grips with Aboriginal culture and society; its mind-bending timeline; its astonishingly distinct yet interwoven diversities. In many ways it reminded me of the complexity of Europe. Imagine doing a crash course on European peoples, their cultures, languages, cuisine, art, architecture, folktales, myths and belief systems, and then trying to summarise in a few neat paragraphs what it means to be European; it would be an impossible task. And yet that is largely the shallow representation of Aboriginal Australia that was presented to me when I was a young person – a mere caricature, the man on the two-dollar coin.

  There is no single entry point into Aboriginal Australia, no passport office; there are – or were – over 250 language groups, for a start. For me, learning about the traditional owners of this land is like studying a beautiful but maddening jigsaw puzzle in which each piece can often be a jigsaw in itself. In fact this jigsaw is not flat, it’s like a multi-dimensional matrix that co-exists in this moment, in the past 60 000 years, and in the future. Within this jigsaw lives a spiritual philosophy that enables Aboriginal people – at least those ‘in culture’ – to co-inhabit the rational and spiritual realms simultaneously. And similarly, there is embedded a practical resilience that has allowed Indigenous society to absorb and embrace elements of the industrialised world while keeping its cultural centre largely intact.

  Emotionally, too, this puzzle both confounds and surprises Western understanding; a piece may be heavy with despair, but turn it over and there is enough laughter and joy to lift the sky. Some of the pieces are off-limits to outsiders, while great chunks of the puzzle have – particularly in the last 200 years – been obliterated forever. It is a living, evolving jigsaw, with new and exciting pieces being continually rediscovered, re-interpreted, and created afresh. The Aboriginal cultural heritage is a treasure cave, and once you walk inside and awaken to its crystalline insights, truths and tenets, it is impossible to look at the world in the same way again. Perhaps this is why white Australia has forever been perplexed by Aboriginal peoples, because despite our industry, despite our busyness, we’ve always suspected that these people were onto something, that they had mastered the art of living.

  On the afternoon after Mary’s handover, when Bob told me his people preferred to ‘do it on their own', I’d felt abandoned. I had walked with the Wamba Wamba for almost three weeks, and now it was as if I’d woken up in a forest camp to find only the smouldering remains of a fire and everyone gone. On the library shelves and within the pages of books, I searched for footsteps. There were so many trails to follow. Some led to places of abundant beauty where man and Nature were perfectly aligned; others led to places in the landscape cleft open by brutality, places where the stink of death still lingers.

  I pieced together information on the Wamba Wamba from slender textbook chapters, pioneer reflections, old press clippings, and oral histories. I took a 20-year-old Wamba Wamba dictionary – an all-too-rare example of a recorded Indigenous language – from the shelves with trembling hands. It was the only Aboriginal-language dictionary in the library collection and appeared never to have been borrowed or read – a mother tongue so far from country. I leafed through it to the one word I knew, Wiran – black cockatoo. The dictionary joined the growing pile of Indigenous books by my bedside table. Slowly, slowly, I began to catch glimpses of Mary.

  I had seen Mary once before. I was no more than four or five, and had never been told what I could and could not see. I was in the lounge room alone, driving a Matchbox car through the carpet, lost in th
at lazy space between two thoughts. I looked up across the room and there before the window, backlit by the morning light, stood a dark, naked figure. He was short and slender; a teenager or in his early twenties. We stared at one another, both of us equally surprised, almost embarrassed to have intruded into each other’s world. And then he simply took a sideways step behind the floor-length curtains and was gone. After a little while I walked across the room and peeked behind the curtains, but he was no longer there. I looked back across the room to where I had been playing and there on the shelves, looking back at me, sat Mary. The more I tried to remember what the person looked like, the more he faded from my memory; as if the effort of remembering was erasing the very thing it was struggling to hold onto, until eventually he was reduced to a silhouette. In the years that followed, every so often I’d try to catch out my phantom friend. I’d be playing or watching television when I would sense that I was being watched; suddenly I’d spin my head in the direction in which he had first appeared. But he was too clever now, he would forever be one step ahead, until eventually I rarely thought of him. And now, over 30 years later, as I pieced together fragments of understanding, Mary re-formed in my minds eye, not just as a naked silhouette but as a Wamba Wamba man wrapped in culture, wrapped in a possum-skin cloak. And when I closed my Western empirical eyes and looked through the eye of dreaming, this is what I was shown.

  At first I glimpsed Mary only from a distance, walking through the trees on the far side of the riverbank, separated by grainy mists and the inexorable flow of time. As my knowledge grew, I crossed the river and began to wander into his camp in the pre-dawn twilight, past the sleeping dogs, like a ghost from the future. I would see his face and he would awaken with eyes startled wide. Suddenly, as if to disrupt the intrusion, an unseen hand would heft a log to the slumbering fire and Mary’s face would disappear into a shower of embers and grey smoke. And then, when the smoke cleared, the clan, their cloak-lined humpies, their braces of spears, their coolamons – everything was gone.

  With each visit I began to learn new things about Mary. When he looked at Nature he saw himself, not as separate, nor superior. He was Nature and she expressed herself through him. I saw him as a baby, lovingly bundled up within the voluptuous folds of his mother’s 31-pelt cloak. On early winter mornings his head would venture out until the chill bit his plump cheeks, forcing him to rebury himself until the sun had sufficiently chased away the frost. His nose soon learnt to recognise the aroma of baked Murray cod and roasted yams, which would draw him out from his furry cocoon into the world and into the life around the campfires. As he grew, he watched the ceremonies and dances from inside his mother’s cloak. For certain dances and songs he would be placed on his father’s cloak as the women of the clan fashioned their cloaks into thundering drums by stretching them tightly over crossed legs.

  I watched from afar, hidden in long grass, as the cloak became a sling that carried Mary royally around while his mother and aunties went about their business of collecting food and resources from the river, forests, plains and marshes. I listened in on their stories, gossip and laughter; not understanding the Wamba language, but still understanding. I saw Mary’s favourite uncle too, who would pretend to sneak up on him and attempt to squeeze his cheek before he could burrow back giggling to the safety of his possum-skin lair.

  As Mary grew older, the winters became cramped under his mother’s cloak. I heard his mother harangue Mary’s father and his ‘no-good-lazy’ uncles that the child needed a cloak of his own and that it was time to gather possum skins. There exists a drawing and notes made by an early European traveller that beautifully describes the process of cloak-making. In the background of the picture, a group of hunters are smoking possums from two trees. Fires are lit in the hollowed-out trunks, while other hunters have scaled the trees and wait between the possum nests and the safety of the higher branches. Once the frightened possums emerge from their dark nooks and sleepy crannies, they are chased earthwards to the waiting clubs of the hunters below.

  The possums were then skinned and the meat placed on the cooking fires while the pelts were cleaned of all fat and sinew with shell and stone scrapers. We know from the early drawings and notes of explorers that possum skins were pegged to sheets of bark and dried out by the fire or simply left in the sun and periodically rubbed with goanna oil and ash. Once the skins were dry they were pulled backwards and forwards – massaged – over the smooth, thick roots of river gums to soften the skin. Then they were ready to be stitched together with long, thin strips of animal sinew.

  As Mary grew, so too did his cloak, with new pieces added as he progressed towards manhood. The soft inner pelts were inscribed with symbols, stories, and representations of significant places in Wamba Wamba landscape. With each oyster-shell incision, knowledge and Law was preserved and passed on. The coat required periodic maintenance also, and each time Mary applied oils and fat to weather-proof his dream-coat, like a blind reader of braille, his fingers retraced and refreshed themselves on the knowledge and wisdom within its scarified lining.

  Mary was never the same age twice during my visits, for in the timeless time there is no chronology. At times he was a proud young father, at others he suckled upon his mother’s breast. But I never saw him beyond the age of 30. On my last visit I saw his clan walk silently from a large camp oven, their backs and shoulders low with sorrow as they disappeared into the forest. I saw the freshly dug earth and knew my friend sat beneath in the traditional burial crouch, arms bound around his pulled-up legs, wrapped in his possum-skin cloak.

  These are not the fantasies or delusions of a white fellow from the suburbs. I crept into the camps; I felt the dull crunch as dew-damp forest litter yielded to the weight of my twenty-first-century boots. I saw a soft-bearded Mary and the slumbering backs of his family as surely as I see my own when I walk through my house at night. And I saw more besides, but there is no need to give away everything, because in a strange way that would make me a thief. Perhaps I should have turned back then; slipped quietly from the camp, back across the river and into the safety of my own world. If I’d done so, then this story would be at its end. But instead I kept following.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  { DECEMBER 2005 – JUNE 2006 }

  I tracked the Wamba Wamba from two centuries in the future, but I was always behind, we always will be, so much has been obliterated. Like the once-abundant bush tucker that was ripped from the earth by the jaws of sheep that swept north like a foaming king tide. Like the millions of Riverine gum trees that were felled for railway sleepers, or simply ringbarked and left to wither because they were in the way. Like the Murray River herself, blinkered by levees, siphoned and pumped of her wild and bountiful spirit. But sometimes it is possible to catch glimpses of the former landscape, for despite her ravaged surface Mother Earth still hums her gentle cantatas on morning mists, amid the snags and eddies of the river, and within patches of forgotten forest – the longer you sit, the more you see. And so I began to see more, not just of Mary and the Wamba Wamba, but of the other Riverine clans, and clans from far beyond the river too.

  In my mind’s eye, I marvelled at the boating skills of grey-bearded old men as they poled the simplest of bark watercraft through an ever-changing water-world dictated by the Murray’s pulsating moods. I watched with envy the excited processions as whole clans trekked to the lakeside, and highland gatherings that served as festivals, tournaments, marketplaces and feasts. I wandered far from the Riverine plains into large-scale, permanent stone settlements that our history books claimed did not exist. I was astonished by highly developed systems of trading that traversed the entire continent.

  I crept to the margins of ceremonies, eavesdropped at initiations that took Aboriginal men from boyhood to manhood, manhood to elder, and felt the paucity of my own culture so bereft of rites. My soul grew in understanding as I learnt about the Law as gifted to the earth by the supreme creator Biame. I looked around me and for t
he first time saw the earth, water and sky as a living, vibrating cathedral spinning in celestial perfection.

  My father, in his own way, had embarked on his own odyssey, and although his approach was far more relaxed than mine, it was no less profound considering his conditioning. Two days after the handover my parents phoned again; they needed to talk about the experience.

  ‘You know, son,’ said my father, his voice breaking with emotion, ‘I’ve had to rethink sixty years of attitude. Those people, every one of them was such a pleasure to talk to. They were all just so friendly, so well presented, so clean.’ I almost choked as he said the word ‘clean’. I was about to say something, but smiled instead at the realisation of how far my father had journeyed in the last two days; all from just one interaction, one real contact which had lasted less than three hours.

  A week later Dad phoned again. He’d had an idea and he was excited.

  ‘Listen, son, I’ve been thinking, you know that big old grindstone in the back yard?’ He was referring to the wheelbarrow-sized grindstone that he’d dragged from a dry Central Queensland creekbed over 30 years ago. The stone was crisscrossed in deep grooves formed by decades, perhaps centuries, of axe-head and spear sharpening. This stone exudes a steady radiance, as if it has somehow stored within its molecules the ambient energy of all those toolmakers who sat before it. As a child I regularly ran my hands along its deep, cool grooves and channels, my five little fingers like antennae, reconnecting with the patient labours of long ago. And now Dad was proposing that Aboriginal students share the same experience.

  ‘When your mother and I took that trip to London,’ he said, referring to a holiday they’d taken in the early 1990s, ‘I’ll never forget how the stonework there affected me. Seeing all those worn-away steps, entranceways and cobbles – already worn away before the First Fleet even sailed! It made me think about all the people who came before us and will continue to follow; it gave me some sort of perspective, I suppose.’