Riding the Black Cockatoo

by John Danalis

  We drove to a gated fenceline and Jida announced our arrival. Passing through the gate I stood before two rows of mounds. Beneath each one lay a Wamba Wamba man, woman or child. Jida walked to one of the mounds and said, ‘I’m pretty sure that this one belongs to Mary. I put him in the ground, I remember because he really stood out.’

  ‘Why, did you get a sense that it was him, did it feel different to the others?’ I asked, expecting a mystical, otherworldly explanation.

  ‘No, it was because he was bright yellow.’

  I burst out laughing and when I explained the coats of lacquer that Dad had applied over the years, Jida laughed too. How was I expected to stay solemn now! Jida left me alone. I tried to feel profoundly moved, appropriately emotional. I removed my boots and socks and wiggled my toes into the red earth, trying to feel something more, some connection with my old friend, but I couldn’t. Mary was back in the ground where he belonged and that was that.

  I walked back to the car and placed my boots on the bonnet. Jida was nearby, scratching about in the faint remnants of a fire. With a stick he overturned old coals, revealing half-melted metal tags. The tags bore serial numbers. ‘This is where we burnt the specimen boxes,’ he explained. ‘Our ancestors were all tagged with numbers; Mary was the only one with a name.’ He pointed to a large patch of bare earth. ‘We set the marquee up over there, that’s where the guests sat. Koories from all over Victoria and New South Wales came to say goodbye. At the end everyone came forward and threw gum leaves into the open graves upon the bones.’

  Jida led me to a large mound behind the burial site which he explained was a camp oven. I imagined it was just like the one my uncle had pulled Mary from, over 40 years ago. Rabbits had burrowed into its sides, displacing century-old clay balls used for cooking. As I gazed upon Wamba Wamba country from the top of that ancient mound, a clay ball in my hand, the feeling I’d had in the bush as a child returned. It felt as if the original occupants had been here only moments before. And in a sense that was true.

  Jida walked towards the nearby billabong, and as I followed I walked into a clump of thistles. Falling to my backside I yanked the painful needles from my tender soles.

  ‘What did you take your boots off for?’ demanded Jida as I sat wincing on the ground.

  ‘Well, don’t you ever like to feel the soil under your feet?’ I shot back.

  ‘Not around here, I don’t; I’m not silly, you know.’

  We both broke up laughing again. I hobbled to the shady bank of the billabong and plonked down besides my friend. With my pocketknife I managed to scrape most of the thistles from my feet.

  A couple of ducks glided by and I asked Jida if they were good to eat.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘You mean you’ve never had roast duck?’

  ‘So how would you get them, with a spear or a shotgun?’ I asked, thinking I’d covered all bases.

  ‘Too hard with a spear, too messy with a shotgun. What I’d do is get into the water and gather up a whole bunch of reeds and sticks. Then with my face just sticking out of the water I’d gently, gently, float close by. Then when a duck swims by I’d just grab him by the legs and pull him under. No noise, no mess – easy! His duck brothers wouldn’t even know what had happened to him.’

  I nodded. ‘That does sound like a good way to catch duck.’

  We sat for a long time in silence, soaking in the spirit of the billabong.

  ‘You know,’ said Jida eventually, ‘Mary’s journey home is a story about love. I think I’ll write a song about it.’

  I didn’t answer; the breeze that rippled across the water did that for me. And while I sat there with Jida under that clean Wamba Wamba sky, lazily watching those ducks that would live to swim another day, I can’t say I felt healed. I just felt good. As though I belonged. As though I had come home.

  AFTERWORD

  I met John Danalis once in 2005, after he contacted me to ask if he could use a black cockatoo feather headdress he had seen on display during one of my talks at the Brisbane Writers Festival.

  I will never forget the impact of those words, ‘a skull on our mantelpiece’; he might as well have kicked me through my gut with the heel of his foot. But I immediately thought that if this whitefella was bold enough to first call me about the headdress, and then make an effort to turn up at my doorstep in pursuit of it, I should at least listen to what he had to say, and I mean really listen.

  I knew it wasn’t a decision that I had the right to make; my spirit belly knew that the decision had already been made by the Spirits, our old people. This was business that did not need my reaction, but my contribution.

  I remember clearly and quite simply saying to Johnny, ‘He or she needs to go home’, and this story confirms to me over and over again that John Danalis got the message. We need to go home. To Country. At any point throughout time . . . we need to go home.

  This story is the first yarn I know of told by a whitefella who appears to have entered into our place. He has begun to connect, to quite simply, get it. The journey is yet to unfold from here on now, but the connection process has begun, Johnny Danalis has begun to see things, this place, this country, the people, through the eyes of The Dreaming.

  I can only imagine how strong the heartbeat and Spirit face of this Country would be if our collective eyes could begin to do the same.

  { FIONA DOYLE OOCHUNYUNG

  CAIRNS, APRIL 2009 }