Mum’s stories would always come back to this place, to the lake, where all Wiradjuri would stop to drink. Footprints of your ancestors, she’d say, one day I’ll take you there.
I walked around the dusty imaginary rim, dragging my fingers through the wire net. A fire was being smoked from the western side like smoke rings, halos over hurt. A large plastic banner wrapped over the path of my hand. I stepped back and watched twilight devour its paint.
Forty thousand years is a long time, forty thousand years still on my mind...
Just Dust
The church gave her the name Isabelle. Her mother gave her the name Galing, which means water dreaming. She is an elder, and that means she has a responsibility to protect what belongs to her people. To teach. She’s been living at the place where they make all the white laws for the country, the Parliament House. She said all those years ago they declared an embassy, a part of government that was dedicated to her people. She lives between the embassy and this blockade at the lake where we met. Her mother’s land and my mother’s land.
The mining company want to leach cyanide underneath the saltbush land. Issy says that they make a blockade and stay there for as long as it takes for them company shareholders to back out, for company to leave, take their fences, their electricity, take all their machines and generators and leave. Take themselves and don’t come back.
Issy says they don’t understand that just because you can’t see something, don’t mean it’s not there. She says that under the earth, the land we stand on, under all this there is water. She’s says that our people are born from quartz crystal, hard water. We are powerful people, strong people. Water people, people of the rivers and the lakes.
They look at the land and say there is nothing here.
wiray – no
dhuray – having
We laugh at that, it is our little joke.
Because we’ve got plenty, she says, smiling.
Issy smooths her wiry hair with an open palm, gently. Hair the colour of ash, and under the gaze of flames she seems alight. Her face is a pool of small pulses, bumps and folds, lines taking us which ways. Her eyes are small slivers and they shine like fish scales. They are lucid and kind, but almost feverish as she speaks.
Issy says that the lake works like a heart, pumping its lifeblood from under the skin. She says there are many hearts, and with them, many valves and veins. This, she adds, as smoke dances across her shadowy lips, is all life. murun. Everything is part of the heart, everything is water, and when we listen closely we can hear the shifting beneath us, the gathering above us, and within us a churning.
She says that they want to dig up the hearts, free out the veins, dam up the values so they can live. Hungrily. With gold and steel towers. She says they are building high to get closer to father sky, closer to heaven. It doesn’t work, she grins, and they will always fall. The jewels will go back to the mother eventually.
She takes a saltbush branch from the coals and draws a circle in the dust.
Issy says that everything is sacred, inside the circle and outside the circle; she says that we should look after both areas the same. They are magic, she adds.
She takes the branch again and outlines the circle twice, each circle a little bigger than the other, and then she draws smaller circles from the first circle inwards. She makes another circle the same, next to it and joins the two with a short line. She says that we need to come back. Listen.
What are the other lines, I ask?
She smooths her hair again, pursing her mouth knowingly, and watches the light undo between us.
You want to find the Gibsons, you say? Then you will follow the Lachlan, tomorrow, follow Bila snake to Euabalong.
She gets up to leave.
What about this, I ask. Pointing at the snaking canvas.
That’s just dust isn’t it.
What are the lines?
Just dust too isn’t it.
Cocoon
We’re sitting around the pit in the backyard, the fire burning our shins and toes. Baking taut red skin. Mum pulls in from the beach on the bike, her boney fingers steering up the side of the house and into the orange backlight. Her crazy hair entangled in the branch’s twig arms. As she leans the bike down she trips a little over her sandshoes and gathers the kindling again under her elbow. I notice for maybe the first time that she is so old, my mother, but she’s still so young. A plastic bag stretches with a West Coast Cooler at the side of her thigh.
I loved fire nights. Most nights. We had a permanent fire pit, Billy and me dug out sandstone rocks and put them around the edge for sitting. Mum liked sitting on them, hanging her upper body over her knees, pulling out clumps of grass and melting them against the hot coals. When she’d be telling us stories she’d carve out little lizards and lotus flowers and fish shapes in the rock stools. They were so pretty. I liked sitting on the grass, getting as close as I could to the flame. Billy would crouch at the fire, one leg bent under his bum and the other tucked in, his chin resting on his knee. He’d break the kindling with his hands, or if the branch was too thick he’d flop up and slam his shoe into its diagonal. His hair flinging as he snapped it into halves.
He’d show us how to feed the fire, making sure it never went out. My brother was so good with the fire, a delicate drop or nudge of each stick. He’d blow and talk to the coals, mumble at them, building a high tepee. Fussing over it, prodding and poking and caressing its belly. He’d sit back on his ankles and bend his elbows onto a sandstone rock, laying his body out across the side of the fire. Sometimes Mum would have a West Coast Cooler, I’d watch the white fizzing sneeze hiss and disappear in the warm air. Take a sip, ahhhhhh. Better.
The flames would lap at Billy dangling his fingertips over the fire. Mum warning. The night always stealing us, into twirling smoke and constellations. Waiting for Mum to forget that it’s a school night and be able to rave on about the days under the sun. We’d try to distract her all night, so she’d forget, ask her to tell us more stories, on and on until she’d start to doze off in the warm womb of the fire.
They were the best times, the three of us at the fire, laughing and talking over the top of the things we never talked about. Like that sad in her eyes or Billy’s or mine. It was kind of funny, making everything seem more important than our hearts. But I suppose it was then. We were only kids anyway, nothing had affected us yet. It seemed like the only time Billy would talk, lots anyway.
I remember him being so excited about the canoe that he’d found in someone’s footpath garbage collection once. He told us about dragging it across the lawns and having to lift the thing on his back when he came to a crossing. Him being so careful not to shatter the fibreglass shell. Billy talked about sanding it down and making a trailer for it out of our old bike wheels, so he could tow it to the beach and I remember him telling Mum about how he could go canoeing in the ocean and catch snapper for dinner. He talked all that night about the canoe, and every night for weeks about how the trailer was coming along, and then eventually about his trips off the shore, how scary it was, but fun. All the awesome creatures he met below.
I remember he came back one afternoon, just past twilight, when the waves start to grey and blur. Mum had just got the firewood together when Billy cruised through the side gates, big grin on his face and a big fish in his fist, holding it by the tail. Mum was so proud, I remember, patting Billy on the back and shy laughing.
We cooked the snapper on the fire that night, fried on a skillet. It was the best night, just before Mum left us. Billy telling us about the brush with the big fish, how he saw humpbacks heading up the coast, sending the fish toward the canoe, about netting it up real easy. About the ocean, about the gifts, how happy he was. How happy he was. And I knew it too, he was. We were.
Bila Snake
The river sleeps, nascent of limpid green, tree bones of spirit people, arms stretched out and screaming. And at their fingertips claws of blue bonnets, sulphur-crested cockatoos an
d the erratic dips and weaves of wild galahs, grapefruit pink and ghost grey splash the sky. And as the salt subsides, the green trickles over the riverbank from tree limbs, spilling colour into day’s light, upside down. The water moves in tiptoes, and you could almost mistake it for a painting, staining only the top edge of the bank with its stirring: red orange ochre to cherry blood. This dust, this bleeding ash, is everywhere.
One of her arms rests at the small of her back, the other hangs at her empty hip. It waits until something moves, or for a word to jump at her finger. Issy points, budyaan ... muraany ... budyabudya. Bird ... cockatoo ... butterfly. She laughs, eyes wide. Bila, river.
She tells me to follow for four days the left side of the river, only cross once at the cuundabullen – where the water shallows. I should cross to get onto the road, walk for a few hundred metres to get food, and then walk back to the river. I ask her how I will know that I’m there. She says there is a tourist sign, big blue and yellow one, of a knife and a plate and a fork, to show me. We laugh. She says I might die from starvation, but probably not. ‘Plenty of fish if you can catch em,’ she adds. ‘You’ll be all right, cook up a feed with those ciggies you got, make a little fire.’
She waves her hands together to create a pile of cigarettes in our talking. Here at the water, away from the blockade and the sad fire, she is light and spilling laughter at my foolishness. But under all the giggling we meet somewhere between my blazing stomach and the stars, and she looks into me with a gravity. I think of it as a shared stubbornness or some nature of knowing. It leaks from her, that once she too was lost.
She enfolds her lined hands again and places one palm on her chest and the other on her waistband. ‘Listen.’ The word overflows the bird noise and echoing doubt. ‘Nganhali ngalangganha bubay bargan.’ She smiles and knots her hands again behind her. She shuffles her skinny legs toward the road. Turns back to me. ‘Bargan is boomerang,’ she smiles again. ‘You’ll be back.’
I close my eyes. When I open them she is gone.
And I begin. One foot in front of another and so on.
I remember what my mum had said to me once about worries. She said when we worry, when something is pulling us down, we should take a walk. A good walk, she said, a long walk. Rhythm tangles behind you, scurries up ahead, and somehow in between, something makes sense. One foot is your heart and one foot is your mind. Together, they can make your worries easy, clearer. ‘Just walk,’ she’d say, ‘just gotta walk.’
I suppose in the end she couldn’t find her feet.
And with the crying inside me, that I could not make out, of words or voice, I began to walk.
Listen, Issy had said.
I listened. And the voices would come out, emerging from button grasses, bark shavings and water. Mother. Brother. Anger. Fear. All soaked in sorrow. Intricate words like Joyce’s photo tree of faces. Day doused them yellow, but night crawled the dark moons, hiding light. And answers.
Each day I asked the voices, why I’m here? What I’m doing?
They did not answer. But I kept asking anyway, to make sure that it was ok. Still they did not tell.
Hours edged by like the river reeds, drifting and poisonous. I caught an old slow carp with my jumper, tied at its end, swimming like an air balloon in the eddy. It was a crazy plan, but I was lucky. I longed for the beach where in the shallows we would always find pipis. I burnt the stupid fish and swore at the river that second night. I was so mad, not at the fish or the river or the lonely path I was prodding, but at that bickering in my head. The noisy silence, it itched my skin.
The next morning, dodging pipes that drank from the river to sprinklers, was the big tourist sign on the side of the bridge. There was the table setting, yellow on blue. CONDOBOLIN – THE LACHLAN VALLEY WAY.
I followed the edge of the empty highway to the little town and bought a hamburger, eating the last of the money with the hope of a family dinner. I knew my mother’s mob would give me a feed, when I got there – to Euabalong – when I found them anyway. I dribbled beetroot and lettuce water down my forearms and onto the footpath, imagining these people. I imagined my mum would be there too, they’d all be there, around a fire, cooking goanna. I imagined them whispering the stories my mum had whispered years ago, singing with the firelight licking their head-dresses, matching my odd looking eyes with theirs. Peeling back my skin, my blood against theirs. Family. My people. My mob.
Yamakarra, I would say. I practised it as I walked the rest of the river.
Yamakarra, they would say.
Mission
The buckles of the seat belts stabbed into my hips from either side. We rocked against each other’s hot brown skin, arms and shoulders colliding as the car bulleted through road ditches. The heat slashed open the tar, burning and thrashing at the Commodore’s yellow bonnet, sending daggers of white light into our eyes. Choking, dirty ciggie smoke and ash swelled the back seat, where we rode. It carved out a queasy feeling in my hunger stomach. My feet scrambled atop, sliding empties on the floor that exhaled their stale beer smell.
‘Thanks for the ride,’ I said as I stepped out onto the red dirt.
‘No worries.’
The mission is the outpost between two towns, Euabalong, where I’d come from and Lake Cargelligo, where they were going. When I got from the river to Euabalong I asked at the general store where I’d find family. Go to the mission, they said, where the highway crossed. They’d know where your family is, they said.
From the side of the highway the land seemed lathed bare. I couldn’t imagine anyone living there. I spun around a few times and dizzied over the starkness, a tiny arrow-shaped sign blinked in the distance, black on white. ‘Mission’, it read.
I wandered over and looked down the rusty track to its petrol-fumed end. I should be used to it by now, walking, but hope was becoming weary. I could think only about food, my shadow stretched out like a rake along the track. When the dirt turned to bitumen houses began to line the emptiness of daylight. Sadness clawed into my skin for no reason I could see. Everything – houses, sealed road, gutter, sports oval – seemed normal. I supposed they rose up like the estate homes, from the flat bare ground, a hasty construction of identical walls, devoid of emotion, shuffled off to the new suburb like secrets in pockets. Not to make too much noise, not to draw too much attention, not to fuss.
So you have to look closer.
Bare red ground sweeps all distance. Little pockets of black-green trees remain still and burning. To the south an offshoot of the Lachlan is almost dried up. There are water tanks instead. Dead land. Crops seem more important than people, than rape. A small church flakes off its old salmon skin, revealing the ashen wood beneath. The windows have no shutters, some doorways have no doors, and every house is exactly the same, like someone’s idea of fancy concentration camps. People spill in and out of their houses, trying to find some kind of un-itchy medium, trying to prise off the boundaries. Kids run the streets, owning them. The sports field looks more like a rodeo pit, the last slip of the green cricket pitch is beginning to brown, like everything else. It feels forgotten here, and if you can forget about a place so forgettable, so unassuming, then I imagine the people who live in it forget too. Forget that there exist places beyond the highway creases, forget that someone might care.
‘Hey! Excuse me! Young lady, get ere.’
He waves me over to his seat on the back porch. The old man is so black, the blackest skin I’d ever seen. He wears a worn-out cowboy shirt and a big Akubra hat, black jeans, bare feet. The line of shade from the rooftop cuts off at his face. He points me over to sit on the other side, in the rest of the shade; a half case of throwdowns sits between us. He twists over so we face each other.
‘I sit half in the shade and half in the sun. That’s because,’ he pauses and raises a long finger to the sky, ‘if ya get too used to the shade ya don’t ever want to get up. And I don’t want to get used to anything, ha!’
He strikes his finger into the air, as
if to burst a bubble and laughs. ‘My name is Graham, but I’m Uncle to ya young fellas.’ We nod together. ‘What ya doin here anyway, young lady, not Christian are ya?’
‘Nah, I’m not Christian, why?’
‘Let us have a few more of these before I start on about all that, ha!’
He tosses his fist of VB in the air; it flips across the lawn, and rests against the fence. He cracks another.
‘So you from lake there or what?’
‘Nah, I just come from Sydney, Uncle.’
‘Oh, the big smoke? True? That’s deadly girl, I like it there, people so wired up, things to do. Not like dis place! What you come ere for then, all the way from city?’
‘For family, trying to find my family.’
‘What they name?’
‘Gibson.’
‘Mmm, I know some Gibsons in Cowra, bit far from here though. Gibson spose to be a big deadly mob, strong people you know! Where they spose to be?’
‘Euabalong, but there’s none there, they said to come here.’
‘True, someone will know, maybe old Betty, but she’s in town, she’ll be back soon, we’ll ask her, ok?’
I nod.
‘See that house there, that where she live, we see her come back, ok?’
I nod again. ‘Ok,’ I say.
‘Betty’s a good lady, she one of the only old ones here that knows what’s what, she got trouble though, all her boys too much on the grog, and her husband too, too much grog and bustin each other up, ya know. It’s no good, this entire place is gone, no spirit left here. Only bad spirits come to wake em up, ya see em at the river there, three very tall dark men, so tall, with red eyes like desert peas. They come to wake people up, but you never look in the eyes, cos when you do, you become them. Bad spirit. Nobody go to the river no more. Got good and got bad, always two sides. Poor old people ere got round up ere from the tank, where lots of our people were killed from them sickness, that’s these people, Wiradjuri and my people – Nygampaa. Back in ’47 government made this place and shifted plenty of station blacks out ere, that’s what they call us, station blacks. Bloody Catholics run the places, bloody run places into the ground. You know some of our people, they been taken into the church and them priests have their way, ya know bad spirit in them, and they took it out on the little fellas. Who’s gunna speak up for em little fellas? Other people don’t understand, when that bad spirit happens to family, it stays in the family, when we born we got all our past people’s pain too. It doesn’t just go away like they think it does.’
Swallow the Air Page 7
