Heartsick for Country

by Sally Morgan

  Things were not the same for the family after Willy Munget disappeared. The magnetic force that had bound them together, and to others, had suddenly vanished. While some found themselves out on their own, others, however, seemed thrown together even more tightly and closely than before. The measured, certain journey of their lives, the roles they had taken for granted, the contented future they had unconsciously anticipated was gone. Lillian lost her husband and the rock that had anchored her; she had lost her breadwinner and independence in a matter of weeks.

  A few months later, still angry and full of grief, Martha went on her own on the long walk to the creek where the family had last fished with Willy. She walked for half a day in the hot sun. When she arrived, what she was looking for was there, still there, not washed away by rain or king tides yet. In the black mud, high on the creek bed were the ashes of the fire they had made many months ago, littered around with old bleached fish bones and cockleshells, remnants of their great feast. She wished they could have that feast again; she wished she had known it was going to be the last fishing trip with her family intact, not fragmented and despairing like it had become. She would have been nicer to everyone; she would have carried the water and made the tea with joy, not with complaints. The dry summer was at its end and the muddy banks of the creek were dry and flaky. Some way down from the old fireplace, she found the churned mud, hard and dried. This was where Willy had played, pretending to be caught in quicksand, shrieking and calling to the children for help, much to their shouting excitement and horror, with the dogs yelping and jumping, until Lillian had growled at and threatened them all—man, children and dogs—with her stick and made Willy go down to the creek to wash the black mud off.

  Martha remembered how his footprints had been perfect on the walk back from the water. His feet were wet and the mud was just the right consistency to make perfect impressions of his footsteps. They were still there now, even though he was gone; his footprints were there, moulded perfectly in the hard, marbled mud. Martha’s tears turned the grey mud to black, as she looked over each precious footprint, touching it and placing her hand in the hollows all the way to the waterline. Standing there alone, she looked out over the sea that had claimed her father’s life. Then she turned and carefully placed her foot in a footprint of her father’s. One step followed another until she had walked in his footprints all the way up the rise.

  BILL JONAS

  is a Worrimia man from the Karuah River area of New South Wales. He was the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner until 2004 and was also the Acting Race Discrimination Commissioner . (Image 9.1)

  Image 9.1

  Places of Wonder and Fear

  I was raised in the beautiful Karuah River valley, in New South Wales. My story of country is based on two places, Hells Gates, which is part of that river, and a large unnamed lagoon nearby. When I was a child, these were places to wonder about and to fear. As I grew up and learned more about them, they became places of imagination and awe, but my childhood feelings about them remained the same. Now that I am far away in time from my childhood and have learned about tragedies in adjoining country, I find myself thinking about these places with great sadness. Now, my thoughts about country are layered and complex, but my youthful feelings for these places have not changed and, despite what I’ve learned, my love for my part of the river and the valley remains as strong as ever.

  The Karuah River begins in high country north of Newcastle and it flows mostly eastwards to the Pacific coast. Unlike the rivers to the south, such as the Hunter, or to the north, such as the Manning, the Karuah is relatively small and has carved no grand valley, nor has it deposited deep layers of rich soil on extensive flood plains. However, it does have a fairly impressive estuary that extends from its mouth, at Port Stephens, to about twenty kilometres inland. I grew up near the head of the estuary, close to where the tidal salt water is met by the fresh water flowing downstream from the hills. I lived in a tiny village called Allworth. This village was too small to support a school, so each school day we travelled by bus for about an hour each way to and from a larger town in the Hunter Valley.

  Our family was very poor and our little house, with its walls made from hessian sugar bags and its dirt floors, did not provide much room for playing indoors. This, too, was the time long before television and computer games. Indeed, it was not until I was about ten years old that electricity reached Allworth. Consequently, we spent most of our non-school time out of doors. I have to say that this was just wonderful for us young people, both boys and girls. We played seemingly endless bouts of sports like rounders and cricket on any piece of flat land that we could find. There were wooded and cleared hills to be explored, creeks and the river to be swum in and fished, the narrow river flats to be searched for mushrooms and blackberries, and any number of bush hideouts and trails where we could play whatever games our imaginations allowed. We used to get very excited when the river was in flood, not only because of the spectacle of the water racing through this narrow valley, but also because the late summer floods would often bring down melons and pumpkins from upstream farms and this produce would be left in trees and on banks when the floodwaters subsided. We knew our country very well.

  In the estuary opposite Allworth, there is a very large, long island. We often rowed across to the island where there was a dairy farm, and we would share our time between helping the farmer milk his cows and fishing from the island banks or from our boat. One of the places in my story was connected with this island.

  Being an estuary, the river here is tidal and the tide flows in and out around the island. When the tide is going out and the water level is dropping, one section of the river, on the upstream side of the island, becomes like a boiling cauldron of torrent and foam. The water swirls around large rocks and through narrow channels and it is very difficult to steer a rowboat through it without hitting the boulders or the equally rocky shore. This section of the river is called, perhaps poetically, Hells Gates. If we were fishing from a boat and found that we had to navigate this section, we always felt a mixture of apprehension, even fear, and certainly excitement. If we concentrated on steering and were quick to make adjustments, we were probably never in any real danger, but certainly all of our attention and strength were needed at that point.

  My Uncle Dick used to take me fishing and sometimes he would tell me stories about the places we were going to. I remember one of the earliest stories I heard was about Hells Gates. It seems that one of the first white people in that area was navigating his craft through those wild waters and his hands were fully occupied in this task when he saw an Aboriginal man with a spear on the shore. The boatman had a gun, and for whatever reason, reached for it to shoot the Aborigine. He lost control of his boat, his aim was very much off course, and he was in turn speared by the Aboriginal man. Every time I went through Hells Gates, no matter how wild the water and how daunting the task, I always had an image of the missed shot being fired and the spear being accurately thrown.

  On the western banks of the river, across from Hells Gates, there is a strip of flat land that becomes inundated in times of flood. This narrow flood plain contains a lagoon, which is permanently filled with water. It is clearly a former channel of the river and the river reverts to it when it overflows. At most other times it is covered with water-loving plants like reeds and rushes; there are lots of water-dwelling birds; and though they are too muddy for pleasant eating, there are plenty of fish as well. On the inland side of the lagoon, the land rises steeply for about fifty metres and then it levels out again. This flat land is far, far too high above the river ever to flood, but it contains several lagoons like the one down on the flood plain. One of these is a small but deep waterhole that, many years ago, my grandmother used for washing clothes. A narrow strip of swamp joins this waterhole to another large curved body of water that looks just like a bend in the river but certainly not at the level of the river as we know it today. This lagoon
is the second place of my story.

  The big lagoon seems to hang suspended in the air. Water plants do not grow on it like they do closer to the river, and I cannot recall ever having seen birds swimming on it or swirls or ripples on it that were evidence of fish. On the few occasions I dared to get close to it, I remember its water being reasonably clear near the surface but a brooding dark brown in colour which became almost black in the very deep parts. I say ‘on the few occasions’ and ‘dared’ because we were warned specifically not to go near it. No reasons were ever given for this, but the message that it was completely out of bounds was continuing and strong. We certainly would have lived in fear of a great thrashing if we had ever gone swimming there. This in itself was strange, because we were good swimmers and any other body of water was fair game: the river, even though sharks were sometimes sighted and the depths in part were great; the creeks with their stretches of muddy mangroves, their stingrays and their crabs; and the freshwater farm dams with their murky, opaque water and often bone-chilling temperatures. But never the big lagoon. That lagoon and Hells Gates were childhood places of wonderment and fear.

  At high school, one of my favourite subjects was geography. This was not surprising, perhaps, because my Uncle Dick knew our country very well and on fishing and walking trips he taught me to read it. Understanding and being able to describe our own landscapes came easily to me and I was able to extend this to describing the lands in other parts of the world. Then, in my two final years of school, when I was actually studying with the old Correspondence School at Blackfriars in Sydney, I had a wonderful teacher, Miss Robertson, who taught me to add another dimension to my geographical studies.

  Miss Robertson had been one of the first women to graduate in philosophy from Sydney University and she brought an intellectual rigour to bear on the subject of geography that I had not previously experienced and which I immediately warmed to. I did not meet her until my school years were over, but in those two final years of teaching me by mail, often in her own distinctive handwriting (no email back in those days), she instilled in me the need to be constantly asking questions about my environment, what was written and what was said. She taught me to seek answers to those questions and somehow the theoretical side of the subject began to make as much sense as the practical side of Uncle Dick’s teaching.

  Looking around at the world I grew up in and loved and knew well, I began asking myself questions about how things might have come into being. How, I wondered, did those swirling rapids at Hells Gates come about and why were they located precisely at that part of the river? Why was the seemingly flat stretch of the river turned almost into a mini-waterfall? How did that big lagoon get formed so high above the present river? Surely the river couldn’t have flowed up there in the past. Or could it have done just that? But how, then, did it get to carve its present channels so much lower down? And if the flat land containing the lagoon was formed as a flood plain of a river, how big must the flood have been to have formed a plain so high? These questions, I thought, were reasonable for someone who loved his country and was also learning more about how it had been formed. These were the questions of a schoolboy geographer who was incredibly happy in his country but who still had so, so much more to learn. (Image 9.2)

  Image 9.2: Looking upstream towards Hells Gates Courtesy R and S Filson

  Some of this learning took place when I left Allworth and my schooldays behind me and went off to study at university. My studies there enabled me to gain more understanding about some of the things I had been told and the places I had come to know as a child. Both Hells Gates and the big lagoon took on some new meanings for me as I began to learn how they might have been formed. I continued to study geography at university, and though the approach to it was far different from that of school, the subject was to provide new perspectives on my early experiences.

  One strand of university geography was about the shape of the land and rivers and the conditions and processes that result in the forms or shapes that these can take. My lecturer for that subject, a great man who had come from Holland, was a world authority on past sea level changes and the ways in which these changes in the past affect the land and its rivers today. He taught us how, over millions of years, the oceans had risen and fallen relative to the land: sometimes the seas had fallen, sometimes the land had risen, sometimes both had occurred together. This meant that, in the past, the sea level had sometimes been higher and sometimes lower than it is today. When the sea level rose, some of the land became submerged. When the sea level fell, some previously submerged land was now visible above the sea and some previously formed features became located high above where the sea was now. These changes rarely happened suddenly (like with a tsunami). It could take hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years for it to occur and for the various processes to be completed.

  When the sea level falls, a river may begin to erode headwards from the river mouth. Depending on where this upward moving erosion has reached, there will be what is called a ‘nickpoint’. Some of the features of nickpoints can be waterfalls, rapids and swirling waters and quick changes in the river depth, in fact, all of the things that were to be experienced at Hells Gates. This stretch of the river then seemed to me to be a classic example of a nickpoint. As I then saw it, this was where the river was making a big adjustment as a result of a past change in sea level. This was where the erosion, which was moving headwards, had so far reached.

  Interestingly, the same process of a falling sea level also can result in the existence of those high or ‘perched’ lagoons.

  I now saw those lagoons as having once been part of a river that had formerly flowed much higher up, at a height that was related to the old, higher sea level. This former river had its own flood plain, which was the flat land that now contained the lagoons, and it too was formed before the sea level fell. When the sea level fell, and the river had to carve a new and much lower course, the old flood plain got left behind, as did the old meander. This, at least to me, explained why both the big lagoon and its surrounding flat land formed by a river, were now much higher than the course of the Karuah River today.

  When I was at university, and for some years afterwards, I used to return to Allworth and, just as I had when I was a child, I used to go fishing. But with my new knowledge about rising and falling sea levels, I now had a different perspective on Hells Gates and the lagoons. It took little imagination on my part to picture the river flowing along its old course, much higher than the present one. I could then envisage the sea falling and, like in slow motion scenes from a film, imagine the river eroding its way headwards. I could also envisage the lagoons being left behind, perched above the new and lower course that the river was carving. But this new and different perspective did not alter how I felt about things. I had new and more information. And I had worked out in my head a ‘scientific’ explanation for the way in which these features had been formed. Though the word ‘awesome’ has been overused and devalued in recent years, I did think of these past processes with a great deal of awe. But in my mind I also still saw the shooting and the spearing at Hells Gates and I still feared that powerfully brooding lagoon.

  They have the same effect on me today. I haven’t been fishing from a boat in the river there for years. I have no relatives living at Allworth anymore, and I certainly would not feel confident of having the strength or skills to manage the rapids on my own. However, I can picture Hells Gates as clearly as if I were there and, yes, I understand the geographical processes but I can also see the results of that early colonial encounter. As I did when I was younger, I can still imagine that the Aboriginal man had such an intimate knowledge and understanding of his environment that he knew exactly where to stand and just how and when to launch his spear.

  I also recently telephoned the owner of the property where the lagoons are located to see if my memories of them are correct. She assured me that they were as I remembered them and the large one certainly seems to be a meande
r of the former river which now flows much lower down. Again in my mind I can see the sea falling and the river making the necessary adjustments, which include leaving the old course abandoned and high. But, again, the childhood fear comes back and though the owner kindly offered to arrange an inspection of the property and a ride around the lagoon in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, I declined her offer.

  Now, though I left university with some understanding of how parts of the present-day valley might have been formed, I must say that I knew very little about its more recent human history. I did study some history, but in those days the courses were about the European Renaissance and constitutional conflicts in seventeenth-century England. I did not have the opportunity to learn about Australian history in general, or anything specifically about my part of the world. And even when we were growing up, we were told very little of the history of the valley in which we lived. This may explain, in part, why I was never a very good history student (though I must confess it would not account for my appalling inability to remember dates). Whatever the reason, some years went by before I began focusing on the human past of the valley.