A Doctor's Dream

by Buddhi Lokuge

  I returned to the Northern Territory.

  •

  One night I sent an email to Tanya. I had been calling less since my last visit. We had both cocooned ourselves in our own projects, sealed off from each other by a layer of resentment. My email was short and had two photos attached to it.

  Our new house. Ready to move into. 3Br, $850/wk. It’s in the town of Nhulunbuy but I don’t want to wait any longer for something in one of the communities.

  Tanya leaned in to her laptop trying to get an impression from the bare dirt yard and blank exterior of a new park cabin.

  Wow. When do you get the keys?

  She got a response an hour later. In the next couple of days once they’ve done a certificate of occupancy on it.

  Tanya felt an odd disappointment. As long as we didn’t have a house in Arnhem Land her vocal workshops seemed like a good idea. Once the program was paying $850 each week for us to live there the pressure was on.

  She didn’t have long to think about the house because a Canberra radio station called for an interview, then The 7.30 Report on ABC TV and a local newspaper asked to cover one of the vocal workshops Tanya had organised for disadvantaged children. She knew she had reached the tipping point.

  When Tanya picked me up from the airport just two days before Claude was due to arrive, she felt the steady confidence of success. Two of the workshops had sold out.

  ‘You’ve done it, Tan.’ I smiled at her with pride as I gave her a hug. ‘That was a huge effort, with the kids full time, and you did it.’

  Tanya looked up at me. We both knew that the workshops were an unwelcome distraction for me. She was hoping we could get through the next two weeks without an argument because she hadn’t told me yet that at least twelve people were going to be staying with us in our little rented house in Sydney.

  Something seemed to have changed for me, though. I threw myself into the last few days in Sydney with dedication and this time Tanya felt like the cavalry had arrived.

  •

  It was early August, and the house in Nhulunbuy still had no certificate of occupancy.

  To Tanya this had been a welcome reprieve but I was chafing to move up to Nhulunbuy as a family after spending the past six months travelling between Canberra, Sydney and the Northern Territory.

  I had gone along to the first vocal workshop to support Tanya but I ended up staying the whole two weeks. There was some kind of genius in Claude’s work and I scribbled notes all the way through, hoping to learn the secret. Every participant sounded transformed, whether they were seasoned opera divas or novices who couldn’t sing in tune, and what intrigued me most was that every voice, once we reached the raw sound of it, was touching, beautiful and impossible to ignore.

  In the end what seemed to create the magic was Claude’s ability to remain utterly focused and in the present. There were some uncomfortable moments but he simply stayed open.

  Oliver Sinclair, the young environmental health officer I first met in Galiwin’ku, had told me not to jump in too quickly when talking to Yolngu. English was usually at least their third, but it might be their tenth, language, he said, and they just didn’t have the habit of filling every space with conversation. You had to wait quietly if you wanted to hear what they had to say. Now, watching this vocal coach at work, I understood what it meant to really listen.

  After the initial high of the first two workshops things began to sour between Tanya and me.

  ‘Sometimes I think the only secret to marriage is just to stick it out.’ Claude mused one morning as he set up for the day. Tanya looked quickly at me but my thoughts had turned to making our next project require less unpaid energy, time and favours from friends and family.

  Just as Tanya was starting to unwind and enjoy herself after all the stress of the past few months I was looking ahead. I wanted to canvas volunteers and support for the next workshop and I felt Tanya wasn’t doing enough to that end.

  Somehow the disagreement grew even without us speaking to each other. By the time the participants had experienced their epiphanies and Claude had arrived safely back in New York and all our house guests had left, Tanya and I were grinding out every word to each other.

  As soon as the children were in bed and we were finally alone we dropped our reserve.

  ‘I can’t work with you,’ I declared.

  ‘And I can’t live with you,’ Tanya countered. ‘So where does that leave us?’

  ‘Well, it was your idea to do this scabies program!’ I said.

  Normally Tanya would have been baited by my accusation but tonight she just stood up to go to bed and said wearily, ‘Then let’s just get through it.’

  Somehow that was worse than any argument.

  •

  The certificate of occupancy came through two days later. We flew to Darwin in mid-August and stepped off the plane into the moist night air, shoving our fleecy jumpers deep into our luggage. I glanced over our pile of bags at Tanya while we waited for a taxi. Tanya knew I had decided she wasn’t so bad after all. I always did that flipflop after a particularly gruelling session of blame and as soon as my eyes softened she would feel herself opening back up to me. But it had been taking her longer to let go of the anger and this time she refused to look at me.

  It was past midnight when we arrived at our hotel. I took some lounge cushions and slept on the tile floor while Tanya slept with the children in the bedroom. I slipped out early in the morning for a day of meetings with the Northern School of Medical Research and any other stakeholder I could pin down, and then spent every spare minute preparing for our life in Nhulunbuy. Our Troopy had been sitting in storage since it had arrived months earlier. We packed it with a trampoline, a keyboard and anything else we thought we might have trouble getting in Nhulunbuy and sent it on the barge.

  Three days later we woke at four in the morning to take the spectacular flight to Gove across a long stretch of untouched grey-green wilderness, punctuated near the coast with massive bronze tailings from the bauxite mine and alumina processing plant.

  Sitting at opposite windows with our children between us Tanya and I stared out at the same ancient land, our eyes stinging with tiredness, both lost in our separate worlds.

  Once we found our bags at the airport we stepped outside to the constant shrill of cicadas. Within seconds the children were covered in a layer of fine, red dust and our hair grew damp with sweat.

  We found a taxi and had the bitumen road to Nhulunbuy to ourselves on the way to town. Our son called out from the back seat, disappointed, ‘This isn’t Almond Land; there are no dirt roads.’

  Tanya watched out the window as we entered Nhulunbuy. I wondered what she was thinking. Now that we had finally arrived I wanted her to love it and be happy here. We could forget about the last few stressful months and start fresh. It was the perfect place to move to if you were running away from problems—a town of temporary housing and temporary residents.

  The landscaping was ubiquitous to most tropical Australian towns—palms, hibiscus and frangipani with borders of spindly, variegated red-leaved shrubs.

  And wherever we looked the sprinklers were on in the middle of the day, water streaming off the neatly mown grass and onto the road, running rivers down the gutters. We were not in Canberra anymore.

  Finally the taxi stopped in front of a cream-coloured cabin with small windows, one of three identical cabins shipped up from a Tasmanian caravan park by the Gumatj Corporation, the legal entity that managed the mining royalties on behalf of the Yunupingu people. Gumatj was headed by Galarrwuy Yunupingu, a formidable national leader who had, in his youth, helped draft the famous 1963 Yirrkala bark petition declaring native title after the government granted mining rights on land excised out of the Arnhem Land Aboriginal Reserve. There were mounds of tanbark and some young plants along the fence lines but otherwise the front and back yards were bare dirt.

  Inside the house were our five boxes, a couple of trestle tables and outdoor chairs, an
d a fridge, washing machine and microwave. The house had a new smell and it echoed and shook as the children ran around exploring every corner.

  We unrolled our foam mattresses and collapsed onto them. When we woke we walked into town and passed the hospital: a squat, sprawling network of brick with a banner that read Report domestic violence. BE someone.

  ‘Seeya (grandpa) built that hospital,’ I told the kids proudly.

  ‘Did he?’ Tanya asked.

  I nodded. ‘Yeah, in the seventies when we lived in Darwin.’

  My father had designed the hospital so it would withstand just about anything, which was a good thing—the hospital was where we would have to go in case of a cyclone since our house was not cyclone rated.

  ‘Huh. So we’re locals already,’ Tanya said.

  The afternoon shadows were growing long and the air was heavily scented with frangipani. We pointed out the library to the children—a room inside the high school that served as both the high school library and the public library—then there were two day-care centres and a church. When we passed the town hall and came to a Woolworths Tanya realised that the town was bigger than she had first guessed.

  Across a grassy square was the town pool, and we wandered over to it.

  ‘Have you just moved here?’ the pool manager asked. ‘You should get a key. In the build-up to the wet season, the humidity is intense and it’s too hot to do anything so we all just come down here, have a barbecue, have a swim, put the kids into their pyjamas and go home. They have the best sleep. And you can come and swim anytime between four in the morning and ten at night with your key.’

  ‘You mean we can let ourselves in and swim with nobody here?’ Tanya asked, incredulous.

  ‘Yep. It’s great in the early morning.’

  As we crossed the road to the post office Tanya shook her head.

  ‘That must be the only public pool in Australia you can have your own key to. People could get drunk, let themselves into the pool and drown and nobody would find them until the morning.’

  She was quiet for a moment. ‘I love this place!’

  I nodded absently. I was gazing at the 4WDs lining both sides of the street. ‘This is where Toyota should come to make their ads. There’s nothing but Toyotas in this town!’

  We decided to take a taxi back to our house. There were six taxis lined up across from the pool, the drivers standing out in the shade. One of them was negotiating with a Yolngu family. Finally the driver got into the taxi and called out ‘Maritji!’ Come! It was the first Yolngu Matha we had heard so far and the only thing I understood from the drivers.

  When we rode home I asked our taxi driver where he came from and where his family was and what he was doing up here. Yemen, Melbourne and making money, he replied. He lived in a house with all the other taxi drivers in the town and between them they ran the taxi service twenty-four hours a day every day of the week. It was $10 to go anywhere in town.

  As soon as we arrived home we met one of our neighbours, a couple who had moved up fairly recently with their young daughter. We established an easy rapport and the man nodded to the departing taxi.

  ‘Terrible drivers. And rude.’

  I shrugged. ‘Who would want to do that job?’

  The neighbour nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s true. The Aboriginals use them all the time. Costs ’em forty bucks to get out to Yirrkala. No wonder they never have any money.’ He stepped closer to the fence and continued, ‘Hey listen, if you need anything at all while you settle in, just let us know. This is a very strange place. It helps if someone can tell you about the funny little quirks so you don’t have to find out the hard way.’

  •

  While Tanya unpacked boxes, I checked my emails and made a few phone calls. I had opened one of the trestle tables in the front room and slid a plastic chair up to it. That would be my office for the next year.

  That night we joined Oliver—the environmental health officer who helped organise many of the healthy skin days across the region—at the surf club for the regular dry-season Friday night barbecue. The location was exquisite: right on the edge of the ocean with untouched coastline as far as the eye could see. The sun was setting behind us and a tall white fence enclosed the club grounds.

  The surf club was a metaphor for Nhulunbuy—a comfortable place surrounded by a harsh beauty that was off-limits to most. Until Tanya and the kids had a Dhimurru permit they were not allowed to leave the town boundary and even with a permit there were only a few places they could go.

  ‘Wow, great spot,’ I said.

  ‘Yep, it’s beautiful,’ Tanya mumbled, gazing at the distant coastline.

  •

  By the end of our first day in our new home we had discovered a green tree frog in the toilet, mould covering the back door, that the rain came straight in the windows because there were no eaves, and that someone had screwed one of the sliding doors permanently open using too-long screws to fix to the wall a remote for the airconditioning unit.

  ‘Something tells me this brand new Tasmanian park cabin was not designed for this climate,’ Tanya noted.

  ‘Not much of the housing is, around here,’ I pointed out. Nhulunbuy was a town built almost entirely out of relocatable dwellings, and as a result every street was lined with airconditioners as far as the eye could see.

  Tanya moved her thin foam mattress onto the floor in the tiny room right next to the children’s room after they had gone to sleep for the night. We hadn’t packed furniture in our uplift because it would have cost too much to ship. She pulled a thin blanket over her. It was cooler than she had expected.

  Suddenly she sat up. An air-raid siren sounded. She waited, her heart beating noisily in the silent house. I was already asleep in the makeshift office up the other end of the hall. An air-raid siren wouldn’t wake me: I had slept through earthquakes and intruders.

  Our house had come with no light bulbs, curtain rods or window dressings, so when she stood up Tanya could look through the dark windows and see neighbouring houses on both sides as well as across the street and there were no lights on, there was no movement anywhere. The dogs up and down the street were barking but nobody seemed to take any notice and eventually she lay back to go to sleep.

  The flat red-dirt landscape of this remote land was covered in sparse eucalypt and shrubs and was home to several of the world’s most poisonous snakes, while the waterways were filled with crocodiles and killer stingers. This was not her home, she thought, as she turned over to face the blank wall.

  •

  Within a week Tanya was beginning to feel as though we had volunteered to live on the set of The Truman Show. One morning she watched the Rio workers board the Rio bus in their Rio-issued uniform and wondered: if you lock yourself into a jail, voluntarily, and decorate it with a barbecue and a 4WD and a big boat and you go fishing and camping every weekend instead of taking daily exercise in a prison yard, is it still a jail?

  She took the kids to the library and to Woolworths and to the pool.

  ‘Why aren’t there any abriginils at the pool, mum?’ our oldest, now six, asked as Tanya was drying her off after a swim. ‘There are lots outside the fence, how come they don’t come in?’

  Tanya couldn’t answer her. There was nothing to exclude them and judging by the glee with which the Yolngu kids jumped into the pool when they came on school excursions it wasn’t a distaste for swimming that kept them out, and she didn’t think it was the money. So perhaps it was the high fence with barbed wire all around the top. Maybe they just felt like they weren’t welcome there, and maybe they didn’t want to risk finding out, the same way that Tanya didn’t want to risk going to one of the communities uninvited.

  There didn’t seem to be much interaction at all between the Yolngu and the balanda. Mostly the Yolngu drifted about the grassy town square, sitting in small groups in the shade or standing as though they were waiting. Sometimes they would buy something, handing over their green Basics cards without a word, with
out looking up. If there wasn’t enough money left on the card they would silently remove one thing from their shopping bags and hand it back, and the checkout operator would swipe the card again, repeating the process until the money on the card covered the groceries in the bags. And when the transaction was complete they would drift back out of the shop.

  At playgroup one morning, Tanya was sitting with a group of mothers.

  ‘Have you checked for snakes?’ A woman who had moved up almost a year ago pointed over to the corner where a small group of kids was playing with a plastic oven.

  ‘Last week we found a big black snake curled up in the corner right there.’ A woman who had arrived two months ago nodded to where the first woman had pointed.

  ‘I’d rather find a black snake curled up in the corner than a black fella!’ snorted a woman who had grown up in Nhulunbuy.

  There was a sudden silence at the table.

  ‘We had to put a fence all around the centre here because they used to sleep up under the roof and they’d shit and piss there and the whole place stunk,’ she explained.

  Tanya wandered over to the kids while the conversation recovered behind her. It was possible, living in Nhulunbuy, to only ever come across Yolngu with nowhere to go and nothing to do. The quiet majority of Yolngu busy with homes, jobs and family lived in orbits hidden from the view of most balandas in town, the majority of whom had grown up down south where speaking about Aboriginals, at all, was a risk not worth taking in public. Few could see a way to bridge the divide and within months of arriving in the mining town most had lost any motivation to do so. It was a rare balanda that crossed the invisible border.

  12

  RUKULA AND YINARRI

  A common saying in remote communities is that outsiders who work there fall into one of three categories: missionaries, mercenaries or misfits. And then there was Oliver. Short, stocky and able to devour a meal for three at the Arnhem Club with barely a pause in a continuous commentary on how things could be done better, Oliver Sinclair could not be easily categorised. At the age of 21 he had moved to the Northern Territory as a science graduate and had worked to improve environmental health and hygiene for the past eight years. While his colleagues came and went Oliver made Nhulunbuy his home, doing what he could with no hint of cynicism.