Where We Begin

by Christie Nieman

  I climbed out and around the corner and sat on a surprisingly largish strip of corrugated iron with my back to the stone wall. The moon was behind the clouds and the whole landscape was softly illuminated. Three bars on my phone.

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  Basil patted me on the leg then headed back to the window and began to climb back in. I pulled up Nassim’s number on my phone, but after that gutsy gesture I found I could only stare at it. Suddenly I so wanted to tell him everything, absolutely everything, but I had no idea where to start. I really didn’t know how to tell him. And with all the other stuff that had happened too, how could I even begin to form all those words about myself? It had been hard enough at the hospital reception, just saying ‘I’m pregnant’ without explaining anything else. And the last time Nassim and I had communicated . . . well, maybe he wouldn’t want to know after all. Maybe he didn’t want to hear from me. Maybe he never wanted to hear from me ever again.

  Basil paused midway through the window and looked back at me. ‘Do you want me to call him for you?’ he said.

  And weirdly, so weirdly, it was the right thing to do, to get someone else to tell my secrets to Nassim before he had to deal with my feelings on it. To give him a moment to have feelings of his own and to decide whether he wanted to talk to me or not.

  ‘Would you do that?’ I said. ‘Could you do that?’

  ‘Of course, cuz. I’m your family now, I look out for you. Give me your damn phone.’ He came back around the corner, reached for my phone and then brandished it like a weapon. ‘I’m gonna call this absent Romeo of yours and set this whole mess straight.’

  I sat awkwardly on the iron roof as Basil squatted next to me, jigging up and down on his haunches. Without hesitation he pressed the call button I had been staring at, and now he was bouncing up and down while the ring sounded. I watched nervously and gratefully as he, my funny cousin, did this beautiful thing for me.

  I heard Nassim pick up on the other end. I couldn’t hear his words, but I heard the wariness in his voice on receiving a call from my number.

  ‘Hi Nassim,’ said Basil. ‘You don’t know me but I’m a friend of Anna’s – I’m her cousin really, so nothing for you to get jealous about, which is lucky for you because you wouldn’t believe how hot I am.’ Oh my god. Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe this was just a terrible, terrible idea. ‘No, but seriously, Nass – I can call you Nass, can’t I?’

  I could hear Nassim talking, his wariness turning to worry at someone else using my phone, and Basil sat down quickly on the iron next to me and his voice turned soft.

  ‘Yes, she’s fine, mate, she’s fine, don’t panic. She’s here with me, but there are some things that she wanted me to explain to you before she spoke to you, because, well, it’s all a little bit complicated and overwhelming here and she wasn’t sure she could talk properly, but she wants you to know everything.’

  It was weird, but it was like Nassim and I needed to be reintroduced, with Basil as matchmaker. I’d made us strangers to each other. So I sat, listening to one half of the conversation about me, about everything that had happened at Bromley Cairn and then, before that, about the fact that I hadn’t been honest, that breaking up with him wasn’t exactly what I had really wanted, and how, in fact, I’d only put the distance between us because I was a bit freaked out because – ‘you ready for it, Nass?’ Basil said – because I was pregnant and I thought I could come away here and have an abortion all by myself, which obviously, according to Basil, was a really bloody stupid idea.

  By the time Basil handed the phone over and politely climbed back in the window, I was crying, for myself, but also for my mum and for Danny and for Leonie and Bette and also, for poor Basil.

  I got on the phone and couldn’t talk while Nassim said, ‘Oh babe, you didn’t have to deal with this all by yourself. I’m going to help you,’ until finally I managed to sob out the words, ‘Old biryani,’ and Nassim started laughing at me and couldn’t stop, no doubt in a bit of shock himself, and we giggled together and I cried and Nassim came as close to swearing as he ever did – ‘Well this is a darned shock, I must say,’ he said, and my sobs became hysterical laughter. ‘No, really,’ he said. ‘I’m massively in shock.’ And I laughed even harder at the outright gorgeousness of Nassim. ‘But I’m serious, Anna, even if you still want to break up, I’m here for this, okay? I’m here for you.’

  ‘I don’t want that, Nassim,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t want what?’

  ‘I don’t want to break up.’

  ‘Oh thank god,’ he said. ‘Ow, ow, my heart, Anna. Just ow.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Because you’re a right idiot, and this has been pretty full-on, but this situation is me as much as it is you and I miss you and I love you and I want us to deal with this together.’

  We hadn’t said it yet. Not out loud. Only on my stupid hurtful text message. I scrubbed that from my mind and considered this to be the first time. ‘I love you, too,’ I said. The word hung in the silence of the phone line between us, that word, hanging there, both of us taking it in, drawing strength from it until it was almost unbearable.

  36

  Basil and I boiled the kettle in the corner of my study room and sat on our camping mats feasting on powdered soup and dry bread, taking turns with my cup and staring into the fire. I felt warm, and happy, and grateful – for Nassim, for Basil, for Leonie. I was going to miss them, Basil and Leonie. And then I suddenly remembered something. ‘Leonie was going to tell me something before I left. Some story. I don’t suppose she’ll have a chance now.’

  ‘Which story?’ said Basil, chewing a crust.

  ‘Something about the gully.’

  ‘I know that story,’ Basil said warily.

  ‘Yeah?’

  Basil, usually so eager to be in possession of any knowledge that might interest me, or to say something to entertain me, seemed strangely reluctant. ‘I can tell it to you. It’s your story too, actually.’

  ‘So tell me.’

  ‘I’d like to. I really would,’ he said. ‘But I’m trying to decide if you’re ready to hear it.’

  ‘Aw, look, it’s Serious Basil,’ I said, aiming to lighten the mood again, but Basil wasn’t having it.

  ‘No, Anna. I’m not playing. If I tell this story to you, you have to keep it. You have to listen properly. You have to carry it. Like we do. And it’s heavy.’

  I regarded him, his serious face, his deep feeling.

  It was making me uncomfortable. And all of a sudden I realised that was my own fault. I had treated him like a clownish sidekick. Like a fun pastime for myself. I had entered into the levity he presented, gratefully, as a way to avoid considering anyone’s gravity but my own. I hadn’t wanted the responsibility of someone else’s experience. Someone else’s world.

  Basil was serious. He needed me to hear him. ‘Because we’re tangled, Anna,’ he said. ‘You and me and all of us. We’re tangled and tied in the history of this place, and if you can’t listen properly, then you will never truly be here. And I want you to be here. I really do. You should be here. Here is your place, too. But you need to know what this place really is, before you can even hope to belong to it.’

  I nodded. But I didn’t say anything. I kept my mouth shut. The silence drew out, it became uncomfortable, but I held my tongue until Basil took a deep breath in, and began to speak into the space I had finally left.

  37

  The story Basil told me, told to him by his mother, told to her by her mother, was a summer story. The gully was different back then, nearly two hundred years ago. It was full of river red gums, evergreen trees, lending their dappled shade, their long leafy tendril-like branches reaching down to trace shapes on the water’s surface with every warm subtle breath of wind. It was a place along a trade route that ran all the way between Gariwerd in Djab Wurrung Country and Wilimee Moorring in Woiwurrung Country. Permanent water in this part of t
he world was the exception, so wherever it was found it was valued and used and followed. The gully was a good place to camp.

  There were already homesteads dotted around the countryside. Sheep runs allocated by white men who stepped out onto the land, pointed their fingers at what they desired, saying, ‘This is mine, and this is mine, and this and this,’ and putting up fences to underline the point. Bromley Cairn was there, built by my and Basil’s great-great-great-great grandfather, as was the other homestead Basil had shown me – the homestead with the leaning palms and decorated silo, the homestead that had overlaid itself on the brolga’s breeding grounds.

  The homesteads were built, the grasslands fenced. And the settlers ran sheep.

  The sheep were precious to the settlers, Basil told me. To mine and Basil’s settler ancestors. The sheep were fenced and fed and watered. They were protected and defended. The waterholes were claimed for the sheep; fenced and controlled. The river banks became pockmarked and compacted with trampling hooves, and the water fouled with droppings. The native grasses that had clothed the waterhole, that held the edges of it firm, were all cut up by the hooves, and the banks began to collapse. Rainbow-feathered bee-eaters could no longer burrow there. Water rats lost their homes.

  But the Dja Dja Wurrung people, still using their old route, kept using the place, and the water. It was their place, their water.

  But it got worse and worse. And up on what had been the grasslands, now the paddocks, the sheep had eaten out all of the native grasses that those Djaara people had been tending for millennia. There was no longer any food for the native animals there, and so the kangaroos and wallabies and bandicoots and bettongs all disappeared. There was no good water anymore. There was no good meat. The native plant foods that the Djaara people had worked hard to ensure could always be found in the grasslands and swamps were replaced with European pasture grasses. These were grounds that had always been managed with the idea of reciprocity, for sharing with family, with trading partners, with animals, with the land itself.

  So that was the situation that Basil’s ancestors were faced with. They were hungry. Their children were hungry. The sheep were driving out all of their food. On the other hand, the sheep were food. And they were just strolling around grazing on the Djaara’s hunting grounds. So the people took the sheep – they removed them from the land they were damaging, they hunted them, and ate them. It was a logical solution.

  But as far as the settlers were concerned, it was theft. So all across this area of Victoria men and women and children were hunted and killed for eating those sheep.

  After a while, though, the settlers figured out that hunting and killing men and women and children in retribution wouldn’t actually bring the sheep back, so they began to provide the people with rations, hoping they would eat those instead of the sheep. They gave them flour, and sugar, and tea as a reward for abandoning the hunt and slaving on the farms instead.

  Flour and sugar and tea. A recipe for illness and malnutrition.

  For small rations, their lives changed from inhabiting the land and everything it offered them, to working on it, for someone else.

  The master of that homestead with the tall palms hired some of the Dja Dja Wurrung people to help on his station. But when he decided it was time for them to move on, the cook mixed plaster of Paris in with their flour.

  ‘Do you know what happens when you ingest plaster of Paris?’ Basil asked me. I shook my head, and so he told me how plaster of Paris is moisture activated. How, at first, when it hits the moisture in your intestinal tract, it heats up. It can reach 60 degrees Celsius. ‘You can slow-roast a piece of pork at that temperature.’ And then the plaster of Paris sets hard. Luckily for them, those Djaara men were alert to the fact that the flour was tainted – they were luckier than many other families who were given flour mixed with arsenic. Men, and women, and children, who died in pain, who never got to face their murderers. Who became simply a ‘problem solved’. Who never took another sheep.

  ‘Mixing plaster of Paris with flour was used a lot as rat poison at the time,’ Basil said. ‘It still is, but it was more common then, a great way to get rid of pests – never mind how cruel it was. And those men, our ancestors, Anna, treated my people, my family, like pests.’

  Basil told me how those few Djaara men set aside their poisoned flour and went back up to the homestead with the tall palms and went into the kitchen in the outbuilding. The cook was there, preparing a slaughtered sheep for the master of the house and his family. He must have been surprised to see them. He must have been imagining them somewhere else, doubled over in pain, knocking on heaven’s door.

  So they speared him and took the lamb.

  They brought it to the gully. To their place by the water. The place they had always come. Where they had always cooked, and eaten. And they cooked it and ate it.

  Hearing the story of these places I knew, I saw myself on their continuum: part of the place, part of the story, part of the passage through time. I saw the group of men, working for the white men of the homestead. I saw them collect their rationed flour – their adulterated flour – I imagined them realising the trick with horror and fear. I saw them cooking their lamb in the gully, the gully where I had sat bleeding. I feared for them. I feared where this story was going. Basil continued.

  The gully was the one bit of permanent water in the landscape. It was a sunken pool, a chain-of-ponds river that sometimes flowed after high rainfall, but when it stopped it left deep, basalt-lined pools of cool green water. And even then, in the height of summer, there was water – the birds used it, cormorants and herons wheeling up from messy reeds and rushes.

  The master of the homestead was unhappy to have his cook speared. He gathered his men. They rode over to Bromley Cairn, and they knocked on the door – ‘on that door right there, Anna,’ said Basil, pointing, ‘and our great-great-great-great grandfather Master Bromley opened that door to them, and he went outside and saddled up his horse, and he rode with them. As a gang, a posse, they travelled over the paddock and down to the gully, and when they reached that spot, the exact same spot we were sitting today, they raised their guns, and my ancestors leapt into the water to hide.

  ‘Imagine hiding there, beneath the surface, the ripples above you making the muzzles of the rifles pointed at you seem to waver but never disappear. And your lungs burning, bursting, clamouring for air.’

  When the first man finally broke the surface to breathe, the master shot him.

  ‘Imagine that water there before your eyes turning red with your own brother’s blood, and knowing that soon you will have to break the surface too, to breathe, and to die. To die, Anna. Because you refused to be poisoned, eradicated like vermin. Because you tried to live as you and everyone you knew had always lived. Because you had a right to live.’

  My face was streaming with tears.

  ‘Eight people were shot there, in that waterhole where we sat today. Eight of my ancestors. Each one as he came up for air. Shot by another of my ancestors. And yours, Anna. Yours too. So that this place, this house, all of these houses could be handed down through families, through your family; our family.

  ‘And what was there then for my ancestors to hand down? Everything changed. Everything was taken, and everything changed. And it could have been that the only legacy left to us, to me and to Mum, was pain and loss and want. But we’re better than that. We’re still here. And we laugh and sing and keep what we can and give what we can.’

  I looked around the room with new eyes. The cosy room with the fire in the hearth, safe and secure, was also a fortress against all that was outside – designed specifically to protect someone like me. Designed specifically to keep someone like Basil out. And from the outside – the decrepit blank stare across the stripped landscape – the house still, in my mind, seemed beautifully gothic, but now its blankness seemed appropriate too, almost wilful: like the house actively chose to be blind to the altered landscape in which it stood; as if, i
n order to even continue to exist, it mustn’t see what it itself had been a party to.

  But I wasn’t blind anymore. I would never again wilfully ignore the evidence before my eyes.

  ‘Thank you for telling me,’ I said.

  ‘It’s your story too. Keep telling it.’

  ‘I will,’ I said. ‘I will.’

  I lay down and put my head on the pillow and pulled up my sleeping bag and stared into the fire in the hearth.

  ‘You’re a really great storyteller, Basil,’ I said. And when he didn’t answer I looked over to see his green eyes staring into the fire too. I reached out my hand and took his. ‘You’re going to be an amazing actor one day. You’re going to change the world.’

  Briefly he gripped my hand and said, ‘Yeah, I know, I’ve got mad skills,’ and then, still holding hands, we both closed our eyes until the crackle of the fire took all our thoughts and thinking and talking like smoke and swept it up and out of the old chimney and away to join the clouds.

  38

  Leonie’s car pulled up in the morning with Mum in the passenger seat. Basil and I stepped out blinking into the bright white of the morning to meet them. The minute Mum got out of the car, she folded me into a hug. She pressed her face into my neck, and then she stood back and looked at me and the others.

  ‘What do you say we all go get some breakfast?’ she said. ‘My shout.’

  Mum unlocked the silver hire car where it was still parked by the gate and threw her bag into the back seat. Basil and I opened the back of Leonie’s car and loaded our rolled-up mats and sleeping bags into the boot.

  But then, as we were standing around between the two cars, discussing where we would go and which cafe had the best coffee, the call came through.

  Bette had put Mum down as one of the next of kin at the hospital in Melbourne, so her mobile number was the first they tried. She answered and we watched her face, trying to read the words she might be hearing there. She listened. Her face froze. And then she put on her ‘Cathy Krause’ professional voice. ‘Thank you very much. Yes. Thank you. Someone will come straight away. Okay. Bye.’