by Monica Tan
All the gullal bits were loaded into the ute, leaving behind only the heart and lungs on the beach. The tide was closing in, the strip of visible sand getting skinnier by the minute. Every year at least one photo went viral of some dipstick’s car floating in these seas, and none of us wanted to be this year’s dipstick.
I followed Sophia and Nanna back to our car. Her husband was already in his truck, with Raelyn and Imani in his passenger seats.
‘We gotta go fast, okay?’ said Warren to Sophia through his open window.
She nodded and climbed back into her captain’s seat.
I smelt terrible. A piece of squid bait had squirted horrible brown shit all over me, and I was sure I’d stink of squid, gullal blood and seagrass poo forever.
Sophia grinned at me through the rear-view mirror. ‘Hold on, Monica!’
We were off—leaping and crashing up and down over the lurujarri. Inside the car we pinballed about, and I grasped the armrest. Nanna swore a few times, not enjoying the rough ride. Sophia cranked up a country music mixtape, which yodelled away on the car’s bass-heavy sound system. ‘Ride ’em, cowboy!’ she cried.
Among all the violent bucking, I was amazed to see the family dog, Lady, snoozing without a care in the world on the seat next to me; she was wheezing loudly. The car was littered with empty fizzy-drink cans, and puddles of Sprite and Coke sloshed about in the cup holders.
We quickly fell behind the other car, and Nanna growled.
‘I’m going as fast as I can!’ Sophia cried.
We were still a good hundred metres from dry land when the car suddenly slowed as if a giant foot had dropped from the sky and was crushing it. We sank dangerously low in the sand. Sophia revved, then revved again. The wheels skidded wildly, shooting jets of wet sand into the air.
Just as all felt lost, on the third rev the car shot out from the sucking sand like a champagne cork. I breathed a sigh of relief. The car jounced along gleefully. When we reached the end of the beach and wet sand gave way to compact earth, we all whooped with joy and laughed at one another.
‘The four-wheel-drive gods were looking out for us!’ I said.
We pulled up alongside the other car. Raelyn was in the front seat, Imani in the back, and they both looked at me grinning the same, cute Mona Lisa grin. ‘You get bogged?’ asked Raelyn.
‘Almost!’ said Sophia. She turned to me. ‘How’d you find that, Monica?’
‘Pretty wild,’ I said.
She laughed.
‘Like a rollercoaster ride,’ I said.
Nanna chortled. ‘We’ll have KFT tonight: Kentucky Fried Turtle!’
Back at camp the shell was immediately thrown over hot coals. Minutes later the thin layer of meat still hanging from the shell dripped with its fat, sizzling and darkening. Tay seasoned the meat with salt and pepper.
Many of my fellow walkers squirmed at the sight of the butcher’s mess of gullal organs sitting on the trestle table. Out of politeness to their hosts, they tried to hide their discomfort. But when Sophia spoke of how they were preparing the gullal for dinner—stir-fried and deep-fried, with the tripe marinated in soy sauce and vinegar—one of the walkers replied she was ‘going vegetarian’ that night.
I thought of how the Goolarabooloo people had a more intimate relationship to those gullal than any of us urban walkers had with our store-bought steaks. To me the Lurujarri Trail was an opportunity to physically dissolve into the processes of the land: the gullal eats the seagrass, I eat the gullal, my poo fertilises the plants. Rather than an extractive relationship, it is a cooperative one—links in a complex web; humans as active agents within, not over, the natural world. The trail was our chance to integrate into these natural processes, and the deeper and longer I did that, the more I became a child of this country.
Tay cut a shred of meat off the shell and passed it to me to try. I found it tender and full of flavour, like pork but oilier.
‘Catch anything today?’ he asked me.
‘Came close to catching some of your family members,’ I said, after swallowing a mouthful of gullal.
It was that sublime time of day when the light became coy, disappearing then reappearing from behind dark slats of tree trunks. Some of us walkers were meeting Phil atop a sand dune near camp.
On one side of the dune, the sun was slowly sinking into the ocean to a score of soft booms and crashes from the waves. On the other, the yellow wall of lurujarri abruptly became a shallow pan of soft, red yanijarri flour from which grew thick vegetation—lardik (freshwater mangrove), garnboor (freshwater paperbark), gunuru (white gum) trees, and a vine known as wilga with heart-shaped leaves—across the pancake-flat land to the horizon.
Phil pointed out a nearby hill, indistinguishable to me from the other hills. ‘The old fella, Walmadany, who lived and owned this part of the turf, that’s where he’s laying.’ Phil said that his grandfather, Paddy, had buried Walmadany right there: a serene spot at the top of the lurujarri with a postcard-worthy view of the sunset. ‘You see that rock?’ he said, pointing to an oval-shaped piece of sandstone, smooth and flattish. ‘That’s the headstone.’
All up Paddy had buried seventy-eight people in the dunes of the coast. He wasn’t from here but had been left with this duty because the young men and women who belonged to these lands were no longer here. They should have taken over the reins from their elders as the land’s custodians, but colonisation had dealt a heavy blow. They had died in frontier violence or from introduced disease, or white authorities had ripped them from their land, family and culture, imprisoning them in distant missions and forcing them to work on pearling boats or pastoral stations far from their homelands.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Djungun and Ngumbarl elders had nearly all died, and custodial care of their lands had been passed to the most senior elder of the neighbouring Jabirr Jabirr people to the north, Walmadany, and two other elder Jabirr Jabirr Law-keepers, Narbi and Kardilakan. But Walmadany could see the writing on the wall: that the fate of the Djungun and Ngumbarl peoples lay ahead for the Jabirr Jabirr people. Without any young people left in their clans, what would happen to the lands when they, too, died?
Then, in the late 1920s, a young man called Paddy Roe came to Jabirr Jabirr country. Just sixty to a hundred elderly people remained. As Phil told it, ‘My grandfather came—he was a Nyigina man. He came from the other side of Roebuck Plains. And this old fella, because they knew his mother and his family, so they welcomed him to this country and they taught him a lot about this country.’
Paddy came with his partner, Pegalilly. When Pegalilly became pregnant, the Jabirr Jabirr elder Narbi foretold she would give birth to two daughters; their rai (spirits) had been waiting in the paperbark of Bindingankun, hoping to enter Narbi, but as she was too old they had entered Pegalilly instead. It was believed the moment of conception is linked to a physical place, tree or animal, and a person’s spirit returns there after death.
Although they weren’t Jabirr Jabirr by blood, Pegalilly and Paddy Roe were brought into the fold. The passing of custodianship is no simple affair: Paddy was walked through the land multiple times, from beginning to end, and taught via song and storytelling the many names of key features and their significance. Through the singing of these songs and telling of these stories, in the correct order while traversing the land, Bugarregarre was sustained. That duty now fell solely on young Paddy’s shoulders.
I thought about the human remains we’d seen on the trail and was struck by the implication. Perhaps an old man had died heartbroken by years of watching the members of his clan be cast into the wind; or a woman whose children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren had died or been taken away, and all hopes quashed of a reunion before her death. They were the keepers of ancient knowledge, essential to care for the soul of the land and keep apocalyptic imbalances at bay.
Paddy had spent years working in the Kimberley area as a station hand and windmill contractor, before establishing the Goolarabooloo
Millibinyarri Community in Coconut Wells, north of Broome, in 1979. The word Goolarabooloo is derived from several Yawuru words meaning ‘a western coastal people living in or near Yawuru land’.
Before Paddy died in 2001, he passed on custodial duties to three of his grandsons: Richard Hunter and Phil Roe, and Joseph Roe who passed away in 2014.
A few years ago, at the serene and spiritual spot where Walmadany was buried, the Australian oil and gas company Woodside Petroleum had planned to build a $45 billion liquefied natural gas precinct. Had things gone their way, this land would have been imprisoned in concrete and its thicket of endangered monsoon vine cleared for the construction of a monstrous gas plant. I thought of what might have been: a huge building sleeplessly belching noise, light and gas emissions, much like the ones I’d seen devouring Murujuga. To make way for the tankers, up to twenty-one million tonnes of ocean floor would have needed to be dredged, clouding the waters and affecting local populations of whale, fish, turtle, snubfin dolphin and other sea life.
It was no small sum that the Goolarabooloo people walked away from: $1.5 billion in benefits to the local Aboriginal communities over the coming thirty years. And by no means was this a universally backed decision. For some, including living members of the Jabirr Jabirr people—descendants of those young people who had been forced off their lands—the plant didn’t necessarily symbolise the destruction of Country. Rather, it represented jobs, financial independence and a stronger community, as well as a possible circuit-breaker on the cycles of alcoholism, violence, depression and suicide that had racked their families for decades. Also between the groups of local Aboriginal people were disputes over the nature of the authority offered to Paddy Roe by Walmadany all those years ago.
I wondered what Walmadany would have done had he known that within a few decades Australian attitudes regarding his people would change and his descendants would return to their lands.
A warm wind swept over the sandhills and over our skin, and the sun was quietly extinguished by night.
I turned to Phil and said I’d seen on a trail sign that Walmadany had been a maban man. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Like a medicine man, witch doctor,’ he said, looking at me meaningfully.
‘Do they have special powers?’ I asked.
‘They can cure you better than when you go to hospital. They can look straight through you; they’ll tell you what’s wrong with you.’
Another walker, a middle-aged dark-haired woman, asked, ‘And was he just born that way or did he learn to be a witch doctor?’
‘Well, most likely his father before him and his ancestors just passed these things onto him.’ Phil paused for dramatic effect. ‘I’m learning the same way as him.’
‘Oh,’ the woman said.
Phil was staring at her hard, not blinking.
‘I’m a bit nervous now,’ she squeaked, and everyone laughed.
I couldn’t resist sliding in a wisecrack. ‘Hey, can you fix blisters and midge bites? Because we got a few of them going on right now.’
As we walked back to camp, I contemplated the fact that for tens of thousands of years custodianship of the land had been passed through the generations and regulated by strong laws, with serious infractions punishable by sickness and even death. Shared Dreaming tracks and extensive kinship webs had kept these laws consistent across clans and nations spread over hundreds of kilometres.
Then came colonialism—a grenade thrown into this time-old system.
The battle over this stretch of coast was symptomatic of one of Australia’s most contentious and challenging questions: who has ultimate authority over the land now? Anywhere in the country, a piece of land might have multiple parties staking a claim: the government, freehold landowners, corporate leaseholders, and sometimes multiple native title claimants. Each party had different rights, depending on how you viewed history, sacred Law and modern law.
The Lurujarri Heritage Trail doesn’t seek to answer that question but instead poses an equally important one: can a sense of land ‘adoption’ not ‘possession’ be cultivated among those who lack the deed given by birthright?
In a cross-cultural four-year campaign to preserve James Price Point—as this region is known in English—Goolarabooloo families had joined forces with non-Goolarabooloo conservationists, scientists, local residents, and activist ferals. The campaign had attracted a few high-profile names. ‘Me and ol’ Bob Brown walked along the beach here,’ said Phil, of the charismatic former leader of the Greens political party. There was also the billionaire entrepreneur Geoffrey Cousins—‘He landed in a chopper’—and Australia’s favourite hippie muso, John Butler—‘He stayed out at Coconut with us. He part of the family. He lived out of Coconut Wells for a long time.’
What I loved about this trail was that the Goolarabooloo people seemed to understand that although I was a stranger, I too could care deeply for this land.
Dusk had melted into an indigo evening, fragrant and lit by the moon. The volunteers served dinner, comprised mainly of fish caught that morning and leftover gullal. After dinner, as the walkers prepared to watch documentaries about the campaign to save James Price Point, Raelyn came looking for me. ‘They want you down at the beach,’ she said, with a smile that reminded me of her mum.
I picked up my fishing gear and followed her barefoot up and over the dunes. We reached a gazebo by the ocean where the Roe family were camped. Everything was glazed in silver moonlight. Tay was fishing by the water’s edge and nodded when he saw me. Sophia smiled at me; her teeth seemed to glow in the dark. She said they had a fridge full of blue bone and mackerel. She told me she’d hooked another big something, but a shark had come along and with one chomp stolen her prize catch.
When she offered to throw another fish onto the coals for me, I said I’d eaten and wasn’t too hungry. It smelt delicious, though. ‘Maybe I could just have a taste of yours?’ I asked.
‘Make sure you give her a bit with the fat,’ said Raelyn.
Sophia passed me a good-sized piece that had a sliver of orange fat, garnished with a pinch of salt and nothing else. It was so delicious I said maybe I would like more fish after all, but could share it with someone. They individually wrapped a couple more fish in alfoil and stuck them on the hot coals.
The family were fishing differently tonight—from the shore, rather than perched on a reef that jutted out. They had to use thicker lines with heavier sinkers that could be hurled over the wall of pounding surf.
As Sophia told me some of their future plans for the trail, she pulled on her line, letting it loose in a spaghetti pile by her feet. Once enough was loose, she took several steps back. In a short run towards the ocean, she powerfully pitched the line. It was bloody fantastic.
‘Do you know which sport you’d be mad good at?’ I asked her.
‘Javelin?’ she said.
‘Oh my god, exactly.’
Raelyn and I shared the cooked fish, although she kindly let me eat most of it. When I tried to offer her more, she shooed me away. ‘We always eat them up, this fish. It’s all we do, is eat fish.’
Imani finished off the bits I didn’t eat, including the cheek and eyes. ‘We always eat the whole thing. See them eyes?’ She poked her fingers into the head, scooped them out and licked them straight off her fingers. ‘There’s this real hard white bit and then it’s gooey.’
For the next few hours we yarned, fished, and drank from plastic cups.
When we tired, Sophia said to her cousin, teasingly, ‘Tay, let the lady have a seat.’
He quickly got out of his seat and took it over to me. For himself, he overturned a plastic bucket to sit on. I accepted the camp chair, feeling embarrassed.
Sophia was impressed by my road trip and said she’d always wanted to travel but it was too hard with the kids. ‘The furthest I’ve been is Perth,’ she said flatly.
‘If you could, where would you go?’
‘Everywhere,’ she said.
‘Whi
ch country?’
‘Oh, not overseas.’
‘Why not? Don’t say because of terrorism.’ I’d heard that too many times on this trip.
‘No … all those planes being shot down.’
‘I knew it! Terrorism! That’s crazy, you know?’
‘I’d go to Bali, maybe.’
I decided not to mention the 2002 Bali bombings that had killed eighty-eight Australians.
Eventually Sophia headed back up the beach to the fire, around which the rest of her family had gathered in slumber. That left me and Tay on the edge of the black ocean, half-heartedly fishing, with the dirty-yellow half-moon very low on the horizon. I asked him what he did for work between trail walks, and he said, ‘Not much. I was a driving instructor for a while.’ The trail was everything to him. His father, who had passed away a few years ago, had chosen him to carry the mantle of their culture and to look after their country. Now Tay also cared for his mother in their home. He spoke as a man carrying grave responsibilities. ‘I love my Country and I love doing this,’ he said.
My toes were wrinkled from being in the wet sand for so long. Ice-cubes slicked with moonlight swam around in my Coke to the tuneless blowing of the ocean.
‘What’s that?’ Tay said, pointing at something washed ashore. We got out of our seats and crouched over it: a small shark, no longer than the length of my forearm. Tay picked it up with his bare hands, holding it just behind the gills so it couldn’t bite him, and flung it towards the ocean. It spun in the air, womp-womp-womp, and then was swallowed by the frothing mouth of the sea.
Every few minutes, comets were making silvery rips in the sky. Tonight was the first on this trip I’d been up late enough to see the sky in full brilliance.
Many Bugarregarre stories illuminate the creation of the constellations. Like a mnemonic device, Dreaming stories encode knowledge of animals, foods, weather, land features and water sources vital for survival. Where literary cultures store knowledge in libraries, oral cultures use a network of elders carrying in their minds a prodigious body of stories, dances, art motifs and songs. Each time such knowledge is drawn upon and reproduced, it is etched deeper into the memories of other family members. It was commonplace in Aboriginal Australia to have complex systems of checks and balances to ensure that in this transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next, no aspect of the information is corrupted. Western science is continually uncovering consistencies between these stories and empirical evidence of dramatic climatic and geological events that took place tens of thousands of years ago, pointing to the possibility the stories are equally as old.
