Heartsick for Country

by Sally Morgan

  It was a bad year. Everyone had loved Willy so much, and there was shock and grief enough at this loss. Now they had to cope with his daughter’s apparent madness.

  Jurud let Martha beat the ground, all the while sitting calmly, chewing her tobacco. She had important work to do: she was getting ready for the ceremony to send William’s spirit away in the old way, and Martha needed to take part in this, never mind all that Jesus talk. Martha was craving for the mourning ceremonies, because to her, they didn’t mean her father was really dead, or that she had made him finished because she believed he was gone. She would wail with the others, and strike her head with the special stones, and make blood come. The pain of the striking might reflect and ease the unbearable anguish of her heart, to take away some of the grief that was drowning her. If she really thought he was gone, she, too, would be in an underwater world of despair, like Lillian; she would be lost there. Acts of denial can save your sanity sometimes.

  I thought about my grandmother, Martha, and how she had never spoken about her father’s death, and how desperately she must have missed him. In writing this story, I discussed what had happened with my mother, Willy’s grand-daughter, Christine, and we talked about the kind of man her ynummi (grandfather) would have been. We were certain he would have been handsome, dark, tall, and hardworking, with a caring heart and generosity of spirit. My mother’s ynummi had disappeared long before she was born; her mother, Martha, had been only thirteen years old when that tragedy took place. It was a tragedy, not only because he died but also because it left the family vulnerable. A couple of years after that, Lillian, his widow and his daughters, including Martha, started being named in the Native Welfare records. But that is another story, one about Aboriginal women trying to live a free life under state surveillance and control...

  We decided Willy Munget must have been handsome because he had married Lillian. She had been taken into the mission from Gija country in 1911. Apparently, a priest and some helpers had undertaken a journey around the Kimberley rounding up any part-Aboriginal children so they could be bought up as civilised people. Lillian was nine years old when she arrived at the mission. My mother’s memory of her mimmi (grandmother) is of an old, small, pale-skinned, greyeyed woman. Her pale skin and light eyes would have been valued back then because they made her look more like a white girl. In their minds, this would have made her more ‘civilisable’ and, therefore, more human. She would have been a favoured child and eagerly sought as a marriage partner. She would have chosen only the very best man, or more likely the missionaries would have chosen him for her. Willy Munget would have been the best man, despite his dark skin. Their children were dark, and so he had to have been very dark. Despite the racist myths, Aboriginal people do not ‘throw back’. So I asked Mum what type of man would have been a good catch for Lillian. He would have been someone the missionaries held in high regard: hardworking, easygoing in character, kind—especially kind, because Lillian was small and soft natured. My grandmother, Martha, was a tall, straight-backed, handsome woman with skin the colour of rich dark chocolate. So we surmised that Willy would have been tall and also handsome, because we think men from the Kimberley are mostly good looking. (Image 8.2)

  Image 8.2: Pat’s mother, Christine Grimm, Darwin, 1975 Courtesy Pat Dudgeon

  Willy must have been responsible and trustworthy as well. Why else would he have been on the Enid going to Fremantle, with a family back in Broome? Being an Aboriginal man as well? White crew members would have appreciated the paid or even unpaid trip down south, back to the populated civilised centre that they missed so badly living out in the frontier. We don’t know if this was Willy’s very first trip or one of several, but the skipper trusted him and chose him and one other to go on the trip. The crew must have been paid because Willy had a family back in Broome to support. I thought at first that the family might have been living in Beagle Bay Mission at the time, but Mum felt they lived in Broome so the family would have got Willy’s salary. Indigenous people did not get equal pay then, and whatever they did earn usually went straight to the government. So, if they were living at Beagle Bay, perhaps Willy’s wages would have gone straight to the mission without his ever seeing a cent, or a penny, as it would have been then. But if they lived in Broome, the situation might have been different, and he might have kept his wages. So we decided that they probably lived in Broome for a couple of years around that time. Willy may have wanted independence and success for his family, and moved away from the mission into town in hope they would have better resources and life chances. Perhaps they lived in a shack on the fringes of town, in the coloured camp called Indian Territory, where no white people went. My grandmother was there years later, when my mother left the mission and lived with her. From my conversations with my mother, about the implications of Willy’s place on the ill-fated Enid and the reasons behind his marriage to Lillian, Willy soon emerged as a full person in my mind’s eye; the ghost of an unknown skeleton became clad in the flesh of an intelligent, hardworking, responsible, kind, loving father.(Image 8.3)

  Image 8.3: Martha Hughes Courtesy Roger Garwood

  William was a happy man. He seemed to be everywhere at once. He would work for the community, fixing up houses and any machinery when it broke down. He knew all the cattle and livestock on the mission, helped with the sick animals and even the slaughter when it was time. He was the one person Father took to Broome when they sold the vegetables and other produce from the mission, returning with provisions for everyone. In pearling season he would go out with the pearling boats. They would not see him for weeks on end, though sometimes he would talk the skipper into docking at Beagle Bay for fresh water and wood. Then there would be precious hours, with him swooping into the school to carry off the children, Lillian tucked under his arm, peering out, like a bright-eyed possum as he strode about, laughingly greeting everyone, missionaries and community people alike. Then, like magic, he would be gone. Lillian would cry and go to bed. Martha would wonder about these magical appearances: one moment, seemingly out of thin air, the boat and her father were there, and then, just as quickly, the boat and he were gone. Was he ever there at all? Sometimes, when she was sad or lonely, she would go to where the boat would dock and sit there conjuring him to appear. But he never came.

  The best was when he was back for a long time. In the afternoon, after school and chores, the children would run home and cluster on the benches around the cooking fire, telling their mother and father all the things that had happened during the day. Other children and adults went to the dinner hall for supper, but Willy and Lillian usually liked to have supper with all of them together. Lillian would dish out stew and rice, and hand around cups of tea to the children and the uncles, aunties and other cousins who drifted in. After supper, before the light faded, the children would beg Willy to play monsters.

  ‘Go on then, take off!’ He would wave them off to find hiding spots.

  They ran screaming and all would be quiet as they muffled their excitement. The smaller ones obviously couldn’t stop giggling while they were hiding, but Willy would magnanimously ignore them as he growled and noisily searched for his victims. One by one he would capture them, roaring and throwing them over his shoulders while they shrieked and kicked, until inevitably one of them would start crying and run for Lillian. She would shout at Willy not to upset them or be so rough, taking up a stick or shaking a wooden spoon at him. He would roll onto his back, legs and arms in the air, pretending fear and contrition, and all the children would rush to jump on him and batter the monster until he begged for mercy. Then the little ones would cry for Willy. Lillian would shout at them some more and they would promise not to play the game again. As the evening came on, they would sit and lie on blankets around the fire, talking and calling to others walking by. Sometimes someone might strum a guitar and start a song. Later, Martha and the bigger sisters would walk back to the dormitories, tired, and happily go to sleep.

  The week before the news o
f Willy’s disappearance, Jurud, Lillian and Martha went out for ashes for the last time together. The trips were special outings that involved just the three of them. Jurud liked to take Martha out because it was her way of telling Martha about the country she was born into, and to make Lillian feel a part of the different country she had been taken into. The trips had important objectives, but the most important was to gather bark to make ashes for tobacco.

  The Europeans had introduced tobacco to Aboriginal people. Prior to that, some tobacco-like substances, such as piturari, had been used, but not to the extent that tobacco was consumed. It probably was not available in large quantities. Aboriginal people loved tobacco and it was part of the rations they were given. My mother’s generation smoked tobacco but earlier generations had chewed it. There was a complex protocol about chewing tobacco, which was used with the ashes of certain tree barks. I heard that scientists thought these ashes had medicinal benefits. That might be a myth, but gathering and making the ashes were important. They took people back to country. That Aboriginal people had adapted an introduced product and enhanced it by using the local native flora was impressive. My mother and I discussed this and wondered how the old ones would have known to mix ashes with tobacco, how they would have known which trees were safe and best. I only know of my grandmother and her generation chewing tobacco. Further up north, the old ladies smoked theirs in crab claws that they modified for the purpose. Ashes were called gudgewt.

  Jurud would take Lillian, Martha and the girls out to find gudgewt. She’d order them to tell the missionaries they had to stop work and help her get ashes for her tobacco. They didn’t really mind, because they all chewed tobacco too, and would share the catch. Sometimes the tobacco came in hard twists, but stick or plug tobacco came in small blocks, wrapped in waxed paper. The blocks were in layers, maybe a dozen blocks per layer. Martha loved the smell and sight of the hard, nuggetty, variegated dark brown tobacco, tucked neatly into the waxed paper with hard golden logo pins nailed into each block. One block could last at least a week. The women would bite off pieces starting from one corner, crushing and chewing it, rubbing it in the palm of their hands until it was soft and pliable. The chew was called ngumeree, but was in a raw state and needed to be ‘baked’ in ashes. They kneaded the ngumeree into the ashes, gudgewt, made from the bark and sometimes the leaves of special trees. Jurud’s favourites were the white gum and the jiggil tree, another gum. The bark had to be right; it had to be old bark peeling away from the tree to make room for new bark to come out. This peeling also signified other events, such as the seasons when certain sea animals, like sharks and stingrays, would come in. Bark was good: it could be used to make cradles and carriers. Martha would strip the bark from the white goonerral tree to make small diamondshaped boomerangs that she would spin through the air among the trees.

  The chores were finished quickly, little children left with aunties and Martha slung over her shoulder an old sugar bag of provisions and a tomahawk. They would walk along the tracks and into the bush, Jurud singing up the country as they went.

  One day Martha asked, ‘Mimmi, why are you singing that old blackfella stuff?’

  Jurud looked at her hard, and replied, ‘Eh, when you go into your church; you knee down, you talk ’im up, you don’t barge in any kind, frightening those spirits. Here too, don’t be scaring things, they might get angry!’

  It did not seem quite the same to Martha, but she stayed silent. It frankly scared Lillian, all that blackfella magic. She would murmur Hail Marys under her breath to keep the devil at bay.

  Martha never told Lillian about the night she had camped out in the bush with Jurud and her sister Jundo. They had set out too late and Jurud decided they had to set up camp rather then rush to get to the mission before nightfall. Jurud was pleased to camp out and was glad to instruct Martha about how to gather dead wood, chop branches for a lean-to and pull soft grasses and leaves for a bed, while Jundo wandered around the creek, gathering cockles and small fish. By nightfall, they were snug under their branches with the coals of a small fire cooking their food. Jurud and Jundo told Martha stories in the flickering flames of the fire. Jurud’s eyes twinkled and glared as she played out the roles of people and spirits. Her hands wove the stories: fingers walking for the long walks, fanned out to make the swooping wings of graceful birds, and darting for sharks. They gradually dozed off huddled together warm and tight. Sometime in the night, Martha woke with a start. Jurud, her thin body tense beside her, hissed quietly at Martha, signalling for silence. Martha followed the outline of her grandmother’s stare, her face profiled against the starred sky.

  ‘What, Mimmi?’ she whispered cautiously.

  Jurud drew in a breath and replied, ‘Look there, a little devil-devil is here ... over there across from the fire.’

  Martha moved her head slowly and turned her eyes to where Jurud was looking. ‘Where?’

  ‘Look out, he is over there’, old Jurud whispered, staring at the darkness. ‘When he opens his eyes and turns this way you can see him.’

  Martha looked and looked, her eyes aching from the strain and trying not to blink, and all she could see was the black of the bushes and the dull red glow of the spent fire. And then, suddenly two shining little points of green light appeared:; eyes, looking straight at her.

  ‘What do we do, Mimmi?’

  ‘Nothing; he won’t hurt us, he just checking up on us,’ replied Jurud, and she relaxed back down into the bed of leaves. ‘But you better watch out, in case.’

  Soon her gentle snores joined in harmony with Jundo’s. Martha lay stiff and transfixed by that patch of darkness until dawn finally washed away the shadows. Only the red sand, grey ashes of the fire and scraggly bushes were revealed in the first weak light.

  They would go to all the trees they knew, and sometimes, if the bark was not ready, they would go out farther to find other trees. Finally, when they found the right tree with the right bark, they cleared a space to make a fire and boil the billy for strong, sweet black tea. Cooking the bark came later, back at Jurud’s place where there were sheets of iron.

  Back at home, Jurud stoked up her fire and placed the sheet iron on it while Martha chopped the bark, cleaning and tidying it ready to be laid out on the hot sheet. Lillian and Martha left to do chores and Martha returned later in the afternoon, inspecting the soft powdery ashes, white and smooth like talcum powder with veins of grey tinges. She stirred it with a stick under Jurud’s watchful eye. ‘All cooked, Mimmi, finished now.’

  As Jurud went to get her old Sunshine Powdered Milk tin, Martha carefully removed the sheet from the banked fire and sifted through the ashes with a stick, flicking any lumps away. Jurud returned with her old battered container and a big spoon and carefully scooped the fine powder first into her tin and then into Martha’s, one for her and one for Martha. Finally, when there were no ashes left on the sheet, she whacked down the lid on her tin with satisfaction. ‘Big mob now, last for long, long time. Eh, you gottem fluff?’ she asked Martha.

  Martha shook her head, but said she would find some for her mimmi. Later, Martha went to the mission store and cadged the worker there to let her pull the loose fluff from the hessian bags of flour. Jurud liked to use the fluff to make a little nest for her mooligin, which was the end product of raw chewed tobacco kneaded with ashes. Mimmi said that storing it in fluff kept that mooligin fresh for days. Martha thought Jurud never had her tobacco out of her mouth long enough to let it go stale, but a nest of fluff was better than tucking the ball of tobacco behind her ear, like the other mimmis did, ending up with yellow-stained hair on one side of their heads.

  Jurud took the raw chewed tobacco from her mouth and kneaded it in the fresh gudgewt, and rolled it around in her mouth with satisfaction. Good gudgewt could be stored for years—not that anyone had tested this belief, too many others were always asking for it. Top-quality gudgewt was very important to mooligin; if the bark was too old or wrong, the mooligin had to be baked everyday. This
was a top-quality batch. Mooligins varied from the size of marble size to that of a small plum. Martha started small but progressed to huge mooligins late in her life. She would keep her mooligin in her Log Cabin Tobacco tin. Sometimes it would be eaten by unsuspecting grandchildren or family pets. Unlike Martha, Jurud shared her mooligin with other people; she would just take it right out of her mouth, break it in half, and give it to the other person, who would put it in their mouth straight away. Martha shuddered with disgust at the thought. Jurud and the other women—and later, even Martha—always had mooligins in their mouths. Some kept them tucked under the tongue or behind the bottom lip if it was small, but most had big wads bulging in their cheeks. They only took them out when they were sleeping or showering. Tobacco chewers were always spitting. My mother said that in the old days, there were spittoons everywhere, even in the hospital, for tobacco chewers. When we were discussing how the later generations smoked tobacco, my Aunty Dotty told me that Martha and her generation of women were not messy in their habits, and spat out their tobacco juice in a very ladylike manner. Like many of the changes that had come to Jurud’s country, tobacco was now part of the old people’s lives.