by Lorna Hendry
At the end of July, Oscar went back to Melbourne with five other boys from the Lombadina school. The teachers put together bags of warm second-hand clothes for the boys: socks, jumpers, jeans, shoes – all items that they had never needed before. Some of the kids hadn’t been further from home than Broome. They had never seen highrise buildings, trains or even traffic lights. They had spent their lives in a community where they were related in some way to just about everyone they knew.
The boys were billeted in pairs with families from a private school in the eastern suburbs. Some of them stayed in homes with indoor swimming pools and tennis courts in the garden. One of the boys told his parents later that he had lived in a castle. With its basketball courts, science labs and expansive grounds, the school was a huge culture shock as well.
They rode trams, went to a football match at the MCG and met the players afterwards, and went to Mount Buller. It was the first time any of the Lombadina boys had seen snow. In the photos of their first moments on the mountain they looked miserable. Rugged up in beanies, scarves, jumpers and long pants, they struggled to walk in the heavy ski boots. All the boys were used to being barefoot. At Lombadina, to their coach’s frustration, they had refused to wear the football boots that were donated to the local team by sporting charities. He told them that if they wanted to have a chance at attending the Clontarf Academy in Broome, which aimed to engage young Indigenous men in school through football, they had to get used to the boots. It didn’t work. The donated footy boots were always left in the box, still tied together in pairs by their laces. But by the end of their short ski lesson, they all had wide grins as they slid down the mountain, legs and arms held wide. When they got home, they said it was the best part of the trip.
In September, the Melbourne school sent up a group of students to visit Lombadina in return. I asked one of the teachers if they would like us to billet some of the visitors. She looked at me a little strangely, and said no, they would be staying in the tourist accommodation.
The boys from Melbourne did all the things the tourists did: mud-crabbing, kayaking, searching for oysters on the rocks, swimming and spear fishing. On their last night, we joined them for a barbecue at Cape Leveque. I got into conversation with a teacher who was praising one of the Djarindjin boys for how much he had matured since their visit the year before.
‘He’s a great kid’, he said.
‘Do you think any of them will end up at your school?’ I asked. The school promoted itself as providing scholarships and opportunities for Indigenous children from remote areas. They were ‘building relationships’ with this community.
‘Well,’ he said carefully, ‘there are basic academic standards that we have to consider. There’d be no point putting these kids in a situation where they would be completely out of their depth.’
‘So you wouldn’t take any of them?’
‘No, I don’t really think so.’
‘Who does get the scholarships then?’
He thought for a moment. ‘I think there’s a young boy from Arnhem Land. We’re doing some testing on him. We’ll see how that goes.’
I looked around at the boys. They were climbing over rocks to get to the beach, jumping from boulders that were glowing in the light of the setting sun and landing with a thud on the soft, yellow sand. For most of them, their futures were mapped out already. The white kids, including our boys, would definitely finish secondary school, probably move on to university, get jobs of one kind or another, earn money, stay fairly healthy throughout their lives and make their own choices about how to live their lives.
Many of the others might never finish school, remain semi-literate, have limited access to further education or training and live their lives hamstrung by poverty, illness and perhaps incarceration by the time they were in their twenties.
‘It doesn’t seem fair, does it?’ I said.
He shrugged and turned away.
This year, the dry season seemed to fly past too quickly. By early September, the clouds were gathering, the humidity was rising and the tourists disappeared. Some days no-one came into the store for hours. I had planned to do a big spring clean when things quietened down but the heat and humidity drained all my energy and it was as much as I could do to sweep the cobwebs from the corners and mop the floors. Audrey and I spent hours sitting outside the shop, trying to catch a breeze. I would look at the clouds gathering above us and ask her if she thought it would rain soon.
‘No, rain long time yet.’
The sea was off-limits because of stingers but the water table rose and a freshwater lagoon formed behind the first line of sand dunes. For a week or two it was lovely to sit in at the end of the day, despite the fact that it was very warm. After a while the water became stagnant and Janice told us to make sure not to put our heads under.
‘I call it Conjunctivitis Lake’, she said.
I had taken to jogging along the beach in the morning. I had to go well before sunrise because as soon as the sun peeked over the dunes it became too hot to do anything much at all. One morning Robert came into the shop and asked if I’d been running that day.
‘Did you see the crocodile tracks?’ he asked.
I shook my head. ‘Stop teasing me.’
This time he was serious. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t see them. I reckon it must have been about twelve foot long. Go have a look.’
James and I drove to the beach at lunchtime. We found the first tracks right near the top of a dune – the crocodile had slid into the lagoon at about the spot where we had been swimming just a few weeks before. Either it had come out of the sea at high tide or the tracks it had made had been swept away by the sea. About half a kilometre along the beach, the tracks emerged from the skanky water, crossed the sand and disappeared back into the ocean.
My morning footprints crossed the line of deep claw marks. I couldn’t believe I had missed them either.
‘Unless’, said James, ‘the tracks weren’t there when you were running.’
After that I stopped going for my early morning runs. It was getting too hot anyway.
We had now been away for more than two and a half years and we were ready to go home. Oscar was about to finish Grade 5 and we wanted him to spend his last year of primary school catching up on anything he might have missed out on, so he wouldn’t be behind when he started secondary school. We had used up all of our savings, and I was worried about being out of the workforce any longer.
On our last day at Lombadina we spent the morning mud-crabbing with Robert, and then boiled up the crabs and ate them as we watched the AFL Grand Final on the verandah of the yellow house.
Audrey came over for a beer and a crab sandwich, as did the new shopkeeper and maintenance man and their two young daughters. Like us, they had been travelling for a while and were eager to stop and experience life in an Indigenous community. They had asked us for advice, but we hadn’t been able to think of much to say. They’d work it out for themselves.
When the woman had come into the shop a few days before to learn how to run the store, she had bombarded me with questions. I couldn’t answer her properly because she constantly interrupted me. She was overflowing with comments and ideas and suggestions. She would ask a question and then begin to answer it herself, as if every thought that ran through her head also came out of her mouth. It was like walking into a wall of noise. She finally left, announcing that she was even more confused now than she had been before our handover.
I had plonked down beside Audrey, who had retreated outside long before. The woman had exhausted me with all her questions and chatter.
‘White people talk a lot, don’t they?’ I said.
Audrey barely glanced at me, but I had learned to read a lot into those small movements of hers, and I was horrified.
‘No! Do I still talk too much, too? Do I, Audrey?’
She looked away, not wanting to offend. ‘Sometimes.’
But now, as we all sat together on the verand
ah, Audrey had a suggestion for them. ‘You bring me fish’, she said, waving her stubby at them. ‘James, he bring me fish all the time. Lots of fish. Big beautiful fish. He’s a good man. And Lorna! Lorna, I miss you!’
It was the longest speech I had heard her give all year.
‘You always said you’d take us fishing’, I said.
She looked at me with a sharp glint in her eye. She might have had a few beers but she wasn’t going to let that one through. ‘Ah, but you on my country here. When you go fishing I say to the spirits, you welcome them. And James, he gets big fish. Beautiful fish! My country …’
We left the Kimberley by driving out along the Gibb River Road past Imintji. On our final night, we sat at the lookout with Nev and watched a thunderstorm brewing around us. Lightning cracked and lit up the sky in all directions. The air felt charged and alive and I knew this wouldn’t be the last time I would stand here and look down across the country. Outside Kununurra, we stopped at the last boab tree and collected a box-load of fallen nuts. We had no real plans for them but I couldn’t bear to leave the Kimberley without taking a little piece of it home. We kicked the footy over the border and left Western Australia behind. Now we really were tourists again.
Chapter Twenty
This time we drove from Kununurra to Katherine in a single day. At Nitmiluk National Park campground there was a landscaped swimming pool, bar and restaurant, but the spots for caravans and tents looked like a shopping centre car park. White lines marked the edges of each site and power poles sat between each one like parking meters. As the sun set, a middle-aged couple in purple polyester jumpsuits set up a keyboard and amplifier and treated the campers to live lounge music by the pool. We played canasta and sang along to ‘The girl from Ipanema’. It was the most bizarre evening we had ever spent in a national park.
That night the temperature didn’t drop below 32°C. We got up early and spent the day canoeing along the cool, wide river that flowed between the high sandstone cliffs of Katherine Gorge. We took our time, stopping and swimming at the sandy beaches at the base of the cliffs. When it got too hot to be outside, we hid in the Interpretive Centre and did some half-hearted schoolwork. By this point, school consisted of a couple of pages out of an old maths book for Dylan, some random maths problems that I made up for Oscar and a quiz that James created from information in the centre’s displays.
Kakadu was next. We had met lots of travellers who dismissed Kakadu as overrated and didn’t go there. I couldn’t work out why – it was stunning and, surprisingly, still free to visit. The heat and humidity of the build-up was oppressive, though, and made everything difficult. Sleeping was hard and it was even exhausting to walk the short circuit of the rock art galleries at Ubirr. We stumbled along the sandy path and huddled in the shade of overhanging rocks, wondering about the artists who had seen and drawn those early European ships on the northern coast of Australia. We stayed in Kakadu as long as we could before the heat got to us and we had to slink back to Darwin and recover in Nannette’s air-conditioned flat.
Travelling south again, we stopped for a swim at Mataranka, 107 kilometres south of Katherine, where I had met up with James and the boys two years earlier after my short trip back to Melbourne to work. The flying foxes had arrived too. Estimates put the population at this time of year at a quarter of a million. A warm, musky smell hung unpleasantly in the air when we got out of the car and grew stronger as we walked along the boardwalk to the hot springs. Dylan jumped straight into the water but Oscar hung back. He was fussing around, finding a dry spot to put his towel and playing with his goggles, but I knew he was just reluctant to get in. The smell was getting to him. I was feeling a little nauseous too but I slid in. The water was too warm to be refreshing and it felt sticky on my skin.
James and I were huddling at the edge of the springs when the English girl we were chatting to said, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea, they’ve put the sprinklers on.’
We looked up and saw a steady stream of drops falling from the trees above.
‘No’, James said. ‘That’s bat piss.’ We dried off quickly and left. It was half an hour before any of us could face eating lunch.
Fifty kilometres out of Tennant Creek and 1500 kilometres from the east coast, with the temperature outside hovering at around 40°C, the car’s air conditioning belt finally snapped. We wound down the windows and dust blasted our faces and hot air swirled around us as we drove. Just when we couldn’t feel any sorrier for ourselves, we saw something shimmering on the bitumen in front of us. A man was walking along the highway with two camels towing a broken-down car that had an Imintji Store sticker on its back window. We stopped and shared our cans of cold lemonade with him, gave him our last bottle of iced water and drove on with a better attitude.
In Richmond, back on the Queensland dinosaur trail, we went to a local country race meeting on Melbourne Cup Day. The next day we drove through Muttaburra. It was a strange little town, tiny and seemingly completely deserted except for the dark green plaster statue of the muttaburrasaurus dinosaur it was named for. At Barcaldine we stood beneath the new architectural structure that protects the now-dead Tree of Knowledge. I tried to explain to the kids about the 1891 shearers’ strike and the formation of the Australian Labor Party but they weren’t listening. In Rubyvale we spent an hour fossicking for sapphires using a bag of bought dirt that had been laced with small gems, before deciding it wasn’t really for us.
It was around about then that it occurred to me that our extended journey of discovery and adventure might have killed off the boys’ curiosity.
‘Hey, let’s go look for dinosaur fossils!’
‘No.’
‘How about we hire a canoe, paddle out on the dam and catch some fish?’
‘Nuh.’
‘What if we find some natural ochre and paint our faces with it? Pan for gold? Make damper?’
‘You go. We’re reading our books.’
I found myself having one-sided conversations with them as they gazed blankly into space or read, for the fifth or sixth time, a torn and stained novel they had found on the floor of the car.
Forty-four days after leaving Lombadina we made it to the ocean. At a caravan park on Coolum Beach on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, we wedged our camper trailer into the tiny east-coast-sized space and tried not to spread past over the painted border onto the neighbouring site. James celebrated his birthday by doing his first skydive. He was the only person jumping: Friday the thirteenth wasn’t the most popular day to attach yourself to a stranger and fall out of a very small plane at 10,000 feet.
On the Gold Coast, we visited Tim and Sue again. When I rang to let them know we were passing through their neighbourhood again, Sue had warned me that Tim had not been well. He had recently been diagnosed with a particularly nasty form of cancer, which he was actively fighting with both mainstream treatments and alternative therapies that he had researched thoroughly himself.
Despite that, Tim had lost none of his energy or enthusiasm for the surf. He gave Oscar and Dylan their first surfing lesson at the local beach and Oscar reciprocated by teaching Tim and Kirralee how to ride a ripstick. We spent a day on their boat, cruising the canals behind the Gold Coast. Kirralee showed the boys how to catch worms, sucking them up from the mud with a homemade pump and grabbing the wriggling creatures before they could bury themselves again. Oscar and Dylan were reluctant to handle the worms, but were more than happy to squirt mud over her and themselves.
Kirralee also showed us a school project she had done, documenting Dylan’s trip on the Royal Flying Doctor plane from Lombadina when he broke his arm. She had used it to demonstrate the vast distances in Australia and explain how different it was to the city, where hospitals were conveniently nearby.
We left them armed with advice about camping spots further down the coast and headed to Byron Bay. After the obligatory visit to the most easterly point of the mainland, the lighthouse at Cape Byron, we drove on through Byron to the carava
n park at Broken Head. It was a quiet and pretty spot, nestled between the rainforest and the beach, and unusually hilly for a camping ground.
Tim and Sue had told us that earlier in the year they had been greeted there by a man who, noticing the pushbikes on their camper, had said, ‘You’re not taking those off, are you? No bikes allowed here.’
It may have been the same man who said to Oscar, three minutes after we arrived, ‘No riding your ripstick here. That’s an absolute no-no.’ He pointed to a mark on the wall of the amenities block. ‘That was a kid on a skateboard made that.’
Oscar and I examined what was obviously a bicycle tyre mark but we put his ripstick away anyway. Ten minutes later, as the boys were sitting, dangling their legs in the low limbs of a very sturdy tree, the office door flew open.
‘GET OFF THAT TREE!’
They climbed down and wandered over to the grassy lawn next to our site and started wrestling. A woman walking past glared at them.
‘Do you have to do that?’
None of us took any offence: we just chalked it up to being back on the east coast and surrounded by uptight city folk. I did stop Dylan from chasing the bush turkeys with a stick, though. I had to make sure we were complying with the laminated signs in the laundry, which explained that their incessant scavenging for chocolate biscuits and chips was part of the bird’s natural foraging behaviour that we should learn to live with. Another camper confessed to me that her father, enraged at the loss of a brand-new box of breakfast cereal, had flung a tent peg at one of the turkeys. To the horror of his entire family, he not only hit the bird but killed it stone dead. They hid the body in the scrub and dragged it up the hill later that night to conceal the crime.
