Two Sisters

by Ngarta Jinny Brent

  In 1983, Ngarta and her sister Jukuna, with their husbands Munangu (Hughie) and Pijaji (more commonly known by his nickname, Kurrapakuta), made their first journey south along the seismic lines to see where they led and to select a site for an outstation they wanted to set up for their families. On that occasion they were accompanied by social workers and by linguists Eirlys Richards and Joyce Hudson, who were keen to assist and see the country they had heard so much about. Later, they pooled funds and bought their own four-wheel-drive vehicle. With minimal financial help, they occupied a site near a bore left by a mining company, attached a hand pump to the bore, and erected a couple of bough shades and a canvas shelter. Over the next few months they took out some metal bed frames and a few cooking pots, and set up camp. The outstation, which later moved to a site with better water several kilometres away, was named Kurlku. Although Kurlku was on the edge of the desert, just beyond the most southerly pastoral lease and a long way north of Jukuna and Ngarta’s home country, it was Walmajarri land, and the families stayed there with the blessing of the old Walmajarri people who were the local traditional owners.

  From their base at Kurlku the exiles were for the first time able to travel deeper into the desert, towards their childhood homelands. They did so tentatively at first. They were no longer young. They had to test their secondhand vehicles and the directions of the seismic lines. They knew, better than anyone, the dangers of breaking down a long way from water. They also had to familiarise themselves again with country they had not visited since their youth.

  Ngarta and Jukuna made many journeys back into the desert with their families, reclaiming the waterholes of their childhood. Following the Mabo decision of 1992, they became active Walmajarri Native Title claimants, and were amongst the many artists who collaborated on the well-known Ngurrara painting, by means of which Walmajarri people presented their claim to the Native Title Tribunal. Both women also exhibited their own work in Australia and overseas. Ngarta died in 2002. Jukuna continued to paint and to write stories in Walmajarri until her own death from kidney failure in 2011.

  PAT LOWE

  THE WORLD OF THE TWO SISTERS

  People who lived in the Great Sandy Desert led a distinctive way of life with their own beliefs and customs. In telling their stories, Jukuna and Ngarta took such aspects of their experience for granted, seldom seeing the need to explain what to them was the obvious. Because Ngarta’s story is written in the third person, it has been possible to interweave additional information helpful to readers who don’t know the desert or its people. Jukuna, however, told her story in her own words and, while Eirlys Richards has provided a free translation that tries to clarify those things that a word-by-word translation would leave obscure, she has endeavoured to remain faithful to the intention of Jukuna’s original. For most readers there will remain a number of questions arising from both stories, not all of which can be answered with certainty.

  Desert people did not keep track of their ages in years, but as stages of life. Children were described as newborn, crawling, toddling and so on. As they got older, they demonstrated their growing capabilities by the type of game animals they could catch. All children practised catching small lizards when they were very young, graduating to the more important reptiles such as goannas and pythons, and then to the more difficult mammals, including cats, foxes and dingoes. When talking about the time her relations left her behind in the desert, Ngarta mentions her hunting abilities as a measure of her age: ‘They left us when I was a little girl: I couldn’t kill anything — pussycat or goanna — I only killed lizards and that mountain devil.’ The first time Ngarta killed a cat or a fox was a landmark event.

  A girl was considered ready for marriage when her body showed the signs of physical maturation: menstruation along with breast development and pubic hair. She might have been betrothed from birth and presented as a baby to her promised husband, but she did not cohabit with him until she was considered mature enough. A young girl might be sent to her husband’s camp before this, to get used to him and to learn her role from an older wife, just as Ngarta first accompanied Jukuna when she got married, but the husband was not allowed to have marital relations with her until the right time. The presence of other wives and the lack of real privacy seem to have ensured that such restrictions were observed. No particular ceremony was associated with the move into one’s husband’s camp, but the man had a lifelong obligation to provide his parents-in-law with meat and otherwise ensure their wellbeing.

  A boy’s physical development usually determined his readiness for going through stages of law while, conversely, his progress through the law determined his rank among men, as well as his marriageability.

  As with ages, so the passing of time is given much less attention by desert people than by people of European descent. Desert people tell stories that may span many years, and non-Aboriginal people always like to know how long a period elapsed between one episode and another. Since years were not counted, it is seldom possible to know. Eirlys and Pat often put questions of elapsing time to Jukuna and Ngarta. We do know that, when Jukuna left the desert as a young bride her sister had not yet reached puberty, and that by the time Ngarta arrived at Christmas Creek in 1961 she was of marriageable age, and Jukuna already had two children. However, where there are no such milestones, we have often had to accept that some things are unknowable.

  Because polygamy was normal practice, maintained by the early marriage of girls and the later marriage of men, children usually grew up with more than one woman in the role of mother. In addition, one’s mothers’ sisters and half-sisters were, and still are, classified as mothers, while one’s father’s brothers and half-brothers are also called ‘father’. The children of these ‘fathers’ and ‘mothers’ are one’s ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’. Besides these close relationships and those that stem from them, including a proliferation of grandparents, uncles, aunties and cousins, the complex ‘skin’ system places everyone else, close and distant, within the relationship matrix, and is the main determinant of eligibility for marriage. Even non-indigenous people may be allocated to one of the four desert or eight riverside ‘skin groups’, so that their relationship to all members of a given community can be known and the appropriate behaviours and obligations observed.

  A well-known custom among desert and other Aboriginal people is to drop from their vocabulary the names of recently deceased people. To hear such a name is disturbing, reminding the listener of someone who has gone, and therefore other people bearing the same or a similar name will change theirs temporarily, if not for good. This taboo applies not only to personal names, but also to the same or similar words in the general vocabulary. As a result, various words in everyday use are replaced with new ones. The closer the relationship, the longer the taboo on the use of a name is likely to be maintained. This custom is not as inconvenient as it may sound, because proper names are not often used, even in everyday life. Instead, people usually address and speak of one another by relationship terms, a practice that causes much tearing of hair amongst non-indigenous people trying to follow narratives and identify the actors.

  In her story, Jukuna tends to omit names, particularly those of deceased relatives, and occasionally these have been supplied to avoid too much confusion, but for the most part we have tried to remain true to her own preferences.

  Desert dwellers people their country with a myriad of supernatural beings, some benign, others dangerous or threatening. In the jila, the permanent waterholes or wells, live the kalpurtu or ‘snakes’, bringers of rain. They are friendly towards familiar visitors but churlish towards strangers and, if angered, are likely to bring destructive storms. In certain hollows in the sandhills, wurruwurru — spirit children — live. They are waiting to enter an embryo in the body of a woman, to be born later as a human child. Their identity is already determined, even before they take on human form. Jukuna tells the story of a spirit brother of hers with a bad attitude, who was held responsible fo
r injuring her grandmother.

  In the two stories it soon becomes clear that people’s main, though by no means only, occupation was getting food. Although men and women had different roles, men doing more hunting than gathering, and women more gathering than hunting, it is also evident that everyone did some of each. The main weapons people used to kill game were the hunting stick — a carved, tapered length of wood, which could be thrown as well as wielded as a club — and the spear, of which there were several kinds. Women usually carried a digging stick and a hunting stick, but some used certain types of spear as well. The long spear thrown with the aid of a woomera was reserved for men. Children used smaller versions of such weapons. If rocks were at hand, they might serve as missiles to dislodge game from a tree or to stun it. Hunting methods varied only according to the prey animal’s habits. Goannas and snakes, as well as burrowing mammals, were usually tracked to their burrow, dug out and killed with a hunting stick. Cats were followed on foot until they went to earth or climbed a tree, at which point a hunting stick was used to finish them off. A kangaroo, fox or dingo was more often killed with a spear. Cats and foxes colonised the desert so long ago that they have become normal prey for desert people.

  There are a few apparent discrepancies between the accounts of the two sisters, as might be expected in the retelling of oral narratives many years after the events. One that puzzled the editors at first was the contradiction between the description in Ngarta’s story of the woman coated in mud after losing her husband, who so terrified Kurnti, and Jukuna’s assertion that widows in the desert did not cover themselves with mud. Jukuna was later able to enlighten us: she confirmed the incident with Kurnti, but said that was the only occasion she knew of when a widow had used mud; in the desert, both men and women coloured their skin with red ochre when mourning a spouse, whereas riverside widows applied mud.

  Jukuna’s brief recounting of Ngarta’s experiences also varies slightly from her sister’s account. She is, of course, recalling a story she was told some forty years ago, and it is not surprising if she gets some details wrong. On the other hand, she adds something important missing from her sister’s story: how it was that Ngarta’s life was spared by the ‘two guilty men’.

  PAT LOWE

  WORKING WITH NGARTA

  I first met Ngarta in 1986 in Fitzroy Crossing, where she had been living for many years. Like many Walmajarri people of the Great Sandy Desert, she left her country in the early 1960s to live on cattle stations in the Kimberley. As I got to know Ngarta, she and other members of her family told me bits and pieces about how she came to make that journey. It was an extraordinary story, which I felt should be recorded. Ngarta agreed, and when we got the chance, she and I sat down together while she retold her story more fully. Sometimes I wrote down her words, as accurately as I could, in a notebook. On other occasions I made recordings and transcribed them later. Because the Walmajarri way of telling a story is very different from what I am used to, I asked many questions to fill what I perceived to be gaps in the narrative, so that I could write a chronological sequence of events.

  The first version of Ngarta’s story, in a translation of Ngarta’s own words, was published in Westerly magazine in 1991. Friends of mine who read the piece complained that it was too obscure and hard for most English-speaking readers to follow, and advised me to retell it in a freer form, filling in background that Ngarta had not considered necessary to supply. For example, when Ngarta describes her journeys as a child, she names the places she visited without mentioning that they are waterholes, because she takes such knowledge for granted. Similarly, she talks about her own experience as a member of one of the last groups of people to leave the desert, without telling us the reasons for the depopulation of her country.

  An important part of the background to Ngarta’s story is that of the ‘two guilty men’, who played such a momentous role in her early life, and that of her family. I pieced this together over time from information given to me by a number of people. The different versions do not coincide in every detail, as retold tales seldom do, but they agree in all essentials, and an account is provided as a prologue to Ngarta’s story.

  Between 1986 and 1989 I accompanied Ngarta and her relatives on some of their early journeys back to their country. I had the privilege of being with her the first time she revisited Tapu, the main jila for her family. After cutting down and uprooting the wattles now choking the silted-up waterhole, the men set to with a shovel, taking it in turns to dig out the sand. It was hot work and took them several hours.

  While the men were digging, the women had scattered and were sitting here and there on the ground nearby, dark heads above the low shrubs. They too were busy, breaking up the ground and collecting jurnta, the small bulbs of a coarse grass that favours salty ground.

  Ngarta came up to me and quietly beckoned me to follow her. Underneath a clump of low bushes lay a wide, flat stone. I recognised it as a grinding stone, used by women to grind wattle and grass seed into flour. Ngarta knelt down, lifted one end of the heavy stone and rested it against her lap. The stone had belonged to her grandmother, she told me, caressing the grooves worn deeply into the rock by years of grinding. The stone still showed traces of red ochre, perhaps the last thing Ngarta’s grandmother had ground on it.

  PAT LOWE

  WORKING WITH JUKUNA

  I first met Jukuna, a young mother of three, at the Races in Fitzroy Crossing in 1968. My good friend Jirrpangali, her sister-in-law, introduced us. I had been in Fitzroy Crossing for about twelve months, working on the daunting task of learning to speak Walmajarri and documenting it in preparation for Bible translation and literacy work. Jukuna and her family were working on Cherrabun Station and had come in to the Races along with the rest of the workers from the station.

  A few years later Jukuna and her family came to live in Fitzroy Crossing. Her husband, Pijaji, came to our men’s Walmajarri reading class and learned to read and write the language. When the women’s class started, Jukuna was there with her youngest child, who was barely a toddler. By 1980 she was a fluent reader, one of a small number of people who could read and write the language. Walmajarri literature at that time consisted of a collection of booklets of personal experiences, and translations from the Bible. Jukuna mostly liked reading the Bible, which she helped translate. Her skill in writing did not develop as quickly as her reading did, probably because there was little reason for her to write.

  By the late 1990s I was no longer living at Fitzroy Crossing, but my work often took me through the town. On one of those occasions, when I was visiting Jukuna at her home in Bayulu, just outside the town, she reached into her bag saying she had written something and wanted to show it to me. To my surprise, she produced a writing pad with three or four pages filled with her Walmajarri writing. ‘I have written a story about myself,’ she said. ‘Will you read it?’ I sat there and read an account of a young woman leaving her family in the desert to walk with her husband to the unknown country of the white people. I wondered if this might be the first autobiography written by a Walmajarri person in her language.

  Some time later the Kimberley Language Resource Centre offered its support for Jukuna to expand the story for possible publication. She was enthusiastic and I was employed to work with her. Our sessions together produced a wealth of information about the desert and the life Jukuna lived there, then the reunion with relations and discovery of many new things as she entered the river country. Wangki Ngajukura Jiljingajangka is the result. At her request, I translated the story into English. Pat Lowe, with input from Jukuna and me, edited the English to bring it to its present form.

  EIRLYS RICHARDS

  WALMAJARRI PRONUNCIATION GUIDE

  Some Walmajarri terms used in Two Sisters have no exact English equivalents and have been left untranslated in the English texts. Japingka and Japirnka are alternative pronunciations of the name of a particular waterhole.

  Walmajarri has 23 different sounds, some of which are
not found in English.

  VOWELS

  a like the a in about and the u in cup, e.g. yakapiri (green birdflower bush).

  aa like the a in path, e.g. kaajuwal (camel).

  i like the i in kid, e.g. jila (underground spring).

  ii like the ee in meet, e.g. tiimarnana (aching).

  u like the u in put and the oo in book, e.g. jumu (soak).

  uu like the oo in choose, e.g. muupinya (looked for).

  CONSONANTS

  j like the j in jump and the dg in bludger, e.g. jilji (sandhill).

  k like the k in skip and the gg in lugger, e.g. kartiya (white person) luka (mud).

  l like the l in lick, e.g. lamparn (small).

  ly has no English equivalent. It is similar to the lli sound in stallion but not like the ly in only, e.g. walyarra (river sand), walypa (wind).

  m like m in mud, e.g. mayaru (building).

  n like n in nest, e.g. naji (cave).

  ng like the ng in singer and long, e.g. manga (girl). It comes at the beginning of many Walmajarri words, for example: ngapa (water).

  ny has no English equivalent. It is similar to the ni sound in onion but not like the ny in many, e.g. nyanarti (that), parnany (old woman), manyan (sleep).