The Girl from the Great Sandy Desert

by Jukuna Mona Chuguna

  A jila was usually the home of a spirit snake, which kept the water there and could affect the weather, bringing rain or storms. Some such snakes travelled under the ground, rearing their heads in different places, called japi.

  Lantimangu

  Mana got her name from a place called Lantimangu, where the sandhill is smooth, without grass or bushes growing on it. Lantimangu is a japi, where the waterhole snake comes up from under the ground and looks out. It’s also a place where wurruwurru, spirit babies, live.

  Before Mana was born, her mother and father were hunting near Lantimangu when her mother came across a desert nut tree with a lot of nice soft gum oozing from a break in the bark. She ate some of the gum and collected more to share with her family later.

  Around the same time, the couple had a dream. ‘Ah, maybe we’re going to have a baby!’ they said. When the baby was born, they called her Mana, after the tree with that gum. Mana is her jarriny, her spirit.

  When Mana was a baby, her Jaja often looked after her, and when she was hungry, Jaja gave her milk from her breast. The older woman would sit by the fire and hold her breasts in the smoke to help them make milk. She also rubbed them with the milky sap of a small shrub.

  Even when Mana grew bigger, she still loved to go everywhere with her Jaja.

  One day, when Mana was still a little girl, Jaja took her and her elder sister, Pali, to gather food near Lantimangu. They set off walking in the early morning and reached Lantimangu in the afternoon. They sat down in a soft hollow in a sandhill. ‘We can camp here,’ Jaja said.

  While Pali and Mana gathered wood to make a fire, Jaja went off to pick some of the wirtuka they had come for. Wirtuka is the root of a yellow plant that grows along the ground near a waterhole.

  Pali lit the dry grass and wood with her jarra, the firestick she had been carrying, and soon had a good little fire crackling.

  By the time Jaja came back carrying a heap of wirtuka in her coolamon, Mana was hungry. She didn’t want to wait.

  ‘Jaja, you cook some wirtuka for me first, and you two can have some later,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said Jaja. ‘We’re all going to have it later on, for supper.’

  Mana started crying. ‘No, I want some now! Cook it for me, I’m hungry!’

  Jaja sighed. She sat down on the sand near the fire, raked some of the hot coals to one side and cooked some of the wirtuka to satisfy Mana. Later, when the sun had sunk to the horizon and the fire had burnt down to coals, Jaja cooked the rest of the wirtuka for herself and Pali.

  Soon, it was dark and they all went to sleep under the vast sky, in the glow of the red coals.

  That night, Mana had a disturbing dream. She dreamed that her spirit brother at Lantimangu was chasing her with a kurra, a stone axe. He tried to hit her with it, but Mana was too quick for him and got away.

  At dawn, Jaja got up and went down to the waterhole to fill her coolamon. She too had had a bad dream, she told Mana later. A little boy had chased her with a kurra too.

  After filling her coolamon with water and leaving it in the camp, Jaja started gathering more wirtuka from the ground near the waterhole.

  Pali and Mana woke up and had a drink of water from the coolamon. They could see their grandmother working down in the flat, not far away. Suddenly, she gave a cry of pain and fell down, lifeless.

  Pali went running down the side of the sandhill and across the flat to her grandmother, who was lying on the ground, not moving. Mana followed.

  ‘Jaja, what’s wrong? What have you done?’ cried Pali.

  ‘Oh!’ groaned Jaja. ‘That wurruwurru grandson hit me with a kurra. “Why are you stealing my food?” he said. “That’s mine!” Then he knocked me hard on the back. I can’t get up, I’m in too much pain.’

  Pali lifted her grandmother and helped her into the shade. Mana held Jaja in her arms while Pali stripped some bark from a yakapiri bush and tied it around Jaja’s waist, to support her back. Jaja lay still and after a while she went to sleep.

  Pali and Mana waited anxiously beside her, talking quietly.

  When she woke up, the girls asked her, ‘Are you all right now, Jaja?’ Her spine was still very sore, so Pali carried her on her back all the way to the next waterhole, Mantarta.

  Later in the afternoon, the rest of the family came back to Mantarta with the animals and nuts they had got. The girls’ father could see there was something wrong.

  ‘What’s the matter with your grandmother?’ he asked them. He couldn’t speak to the old woman directly because she was his mother-in-law. The girls told him what had happened.

  Jaja kept the yakapiri tied around her waist for three days. When she felt better she took it off. It was the second time she had hurt her back; the first time, she had fallen out of a tree, but she was only sore for a while. After that attack at Lantimangu, she always suffered from a bad back.

  The family never went back to Lantimangu after that because they knew that Mana’s bad-tempered spirit brother was there, waiting in a cave. He was never born as a human being, as the girls had been. He just stayed there at Lantimangu, a grumpy spirit.

  SPIRIT CHILDREN

  Most of the named places in the desert are waterholes, but Lantimangu is a japi. It is a smooth sandhill, known to be a place where spirit babies live.

  Every baby born in the desert has a spirit, which enters it at the time the mother first realises she is pregnant. Around that time she or her husband usually has a vivid dream, often about an animal but sometimes a plant, which they take to represent the jarriny, or spirit of the coming child. They may recently have killed the same kind of animal as in the dream, or gathered the same plants, releasing the baby’s spirit. Sometimes, a child is given the name of its jarriny, as Mana was.

  Spirit babies live in certain places, each waiting for a human mother, but not all of them find one. Jukuna’s ‘spirit brother’ in the same story never became a human child. The family knew he was living at Lantimangu because of what happened to Jukuna’s grandmother.

  MAKING MILK

  In some cultures, women share the breastfeeding of babies. Other women who have recently had a baby of their own may feed another one, and sometimes, older women are able to produce milk as well. Jukuna’s Jaja fed her granddaughter and she used bush medicine to keep her breasts full of milk. Smoke was used to heal wounds and treat ailments as well as to strengthen babies and, as in this case, to stimulate the production of milk. Often people who were sick simply sat or lay near a fire and allowed the smoke to blow towards them, but sometimes people burnt branches from medicinal trees and ‘smoked’ themselves or others with them.

  DESERT PLANTS

  One staple food in the desert was the nut from the Turtujarti tree (Desert Walnut, Owenia reticulata), whose bark, when cut or damaged, yields a soft, edible gum that crystallises over time into a crunchy substance, which becomes sticky when chewed. Turtujarti nuts can lie under a tree in their hard shells for a long time before they go rotten, and could therefore be relied upon when other food was scarce.

  Yakapiri (Bird-flower Bush, Crotalaria cunninghamii) is a shrub that grows in sandy country. It has a soft bark that can be torn off in strips and plaited to make sandals to protect the feet from hot sand, or used as a cord or tie, as in this story.

  What are kartiya like?

  One day, Mana was gathering flowers for nectar with her grandmother when the old woman started telling her a story:

  A long time ago, we were camping at the jila, Kulyayi. One morning, we women all went off together to gather food and honey. When we got back to the jila in the afternoon, we found two kartiya there, with their camels. They had two camels, one for riding, one for carrying things. They had canvas too.

  The men came back from hunting around the same time.

  “Hey,” we said to one another. “Who’s that at the waterhole? We can’t go down there!” We were frightened. The kartiya had killed a big snake and put it in the sun.

  “Ah, what are we
going to do? Where can we get water?”

  “We’ll have to go somewhere else; these kartiya might grab us!”

  “No, we don’t want to go a long way, to another place.” When the kartiya had finished drinking, we went down to the jila to look for water. Nothing! Those kartiya and their camels had taken it all! There was only a little drop left. They’d killed the jila snake too, so no more water was coming up.

  The kartiya cooked the snake and offered it to us. “You lot want snake?”

  “No, we can’t eat that snake.” We felt sorry for that snake and about losing our precious water.

  Then the kartiya wanted more water.

  “No, we’ve got no water here,” we told them. The kartiya had taken it all.

  ‘What are kartiya like?’ Mana asked her granny. ‘What do kartiya look like?’

  ‘Kartiya?’ said Jaja. ‘Kartiya are red, you know. They are big red people.’

  ‘What sort of red?’ Mana asked her. ‘Red like blood?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Are they like animals?’ Mana wanted to know.

  ‘No,’ said her grandmother. ‘They are like people. They have a face, like a person. They’ve got two eyes, everything.’

  Mana thought about this. She tried to imagine what a kartiya might look like. She pictured them as giants.

  ‘Are they big, like someone from the Dreamtime?’ Mana asked again.

  ‘No, they’re not from the Dreamtime. They are real people, like us, only different. Different colour.’

  KARTIYA

  ‘Kartiya’ is a name widely used across the Kimberley for people of European origin (‘white’ people). Very few had ventured into Walmajarri country, but those explorers who did so usually rode camels, which were more suited to the sandy country than horses. Jukuna’s grandmother and members of her family had this strange encounter with a couple of men with camels. They had never seen kartiya or camels before and didn’t know what to make of them.

  Two brothers

  Mana had an aunty, Lilil, who was around when Mana was small, with Lilil’s younger brothers, Yinti and Kana. When Lilil was old enough, she married a man named Kaj, and left the desert with him to work on a cattle station. Kaj later took a second wife, Miwa. In the wet season, during holiday time on the station, Kaj sometimes brought Lilil and Miwa and their young children back to the desert to visit their families.

  While Kaj and his wives were back living in the desert, Mana sometimes went hunting or gathering food with Miwa. One time, Miwa took Pali and Mana to gather kumpupaja, leaving Miwa’s two little sons, Riji and Karli, with their other mother, Lilil.

  ‘Can we come?’ the boys asked.

  ‘No,’ Miwa told them. ‘It’s too far for you and we don’t want to carry you when you get tired.’

  After their mother had gone with the two girls, the little boys decided to follow them but they didn’t tell anyone they were going.

  When Lilil noticed the boys were missing, she thought, ‘Maybe they are playing near the waterhole. I’ll go and look for them.’ She walked down the sandhill to the waterhole, where the boys had been playing earlier, but they weren’t there. She started to follow their tracks.

  ‘Ah, the two boys went that way, after the others,’ she thought.

  Lilil went back and filled up a small coolamon with water and set off to follow the two boys. It was a hot day and she was worried about them. She didn’t think they would be able to catch up with the girls and she knew they had no water with them.

  After walking for a good way, Lilil spotted Riji standing up under a little bush. When she got closer, she saw that little Karli was lying down, resting. She hurried up to them.

  ‘Get up now,’ Lilil told Karli. ‘Come and drink some water.’

  The boys were hot and thirsty from their walk and both drank eagerly from the coolamon. Then Lilil took them back to camp, stopping in the shade several times to let them rest. When they all got back, Lilil took the boys over to the waterhole, made them sit down and sprinkled water on them to cool them down.

  ‘Why did you two go running off?’ she asked them.

  ‘We were following Mummy,’ said Riji. ‘She went with the girls to get kumpupaja and left us behind.’

  When Kaj came back from hunting, the boys were still weak and the women told him what had happened. He was angry with his wives.

  ‘Why did you let the boys wander away on their own?’ he wanted to know. ‘They could have died of thirst!’

  ‘Don’t blame me!’ Lilil told him. ‘I’m the one who went looking for them. I kept them alive and brought them back!’

  Kaj got angry with Miwa then. ‘You shouldn’t have left them behind!’ He raised his hunting stick and gave her a whack across her back, making her cry. Lilil stood between her husband and Miwa and told him to stop hitting his young wife. He walked off, grumbling.

  Karli was sick, vomiting all night. But by the next morning, he was better. By then, the grown-ups had got over their bad feelings.

  STATION PEOPLE

  When Mana was growing up, many desert people were leaving the sandhills and moving to cattle stations. Sometimes, relations came back to the desert, bringing presents, and took up the old life for a while, as Kaj and Lilil did.

  DANGER

  While children were free to play and run around in the sandhills, if they wandered too far from camp they were in danger of dying of thirst. This was especially true in the hot weather, when the early morning may seem cool, but the sun soon becomes fiercely hot and the ground can burn your feet. In such weather, it doesn’t take long to get very thirsty.

  KUMPUPAJA

  Kumpupaja are the greenish fruit of a small shrub, (Solanum sp.), which ripen in the dry season. They are full of bitter black seeds, which have to be scraped out before the fruit can be eaten.

  Mana’s blind mother

  Mana had two mothers. Her own mother was her father’s first wife, and his second wife was blind. When the family moved from one waterhole to another, someone had to lead the young blind woman, holding one end of a stick while the blind woman followed, holding the other end. Mana often led her.

  The blind woman had once left the desert. She had travelled with her mother north to a cattle station, where she was given to her promised husband, who was working there.

  She was a good-looking girl, with long black hair, and another man saw her and wanted her for himself. Tensions rose and the two men fought over her.

  The girl’s promised husband won the fight and kept his wife, but having a blind wife wasn’t easy. She couldn’t do the sort of work a wife was expected to do, and he had to look after her.

  The blind girl’s husband came back to the desert to visit his relations, bringing his wife with him. When it was time for him to return to his work on the station, he gave his wife to Mana’s father.

  ‘You can have her,’ he said. ‘She’s already been the cause of too much trouble on the station. I don’t want to keep fighting over her.’

  Mana’s father accepted the young blind woman as his wife and Mana’s mother looked after her, helped her and gave her food. When Mana was small, her blind mother would sometimes carry her.

  Mana’s blind mother often stayed behind at the waterhole to look after the children when the other adults went hunting. She couldn’t go hunting herself, but she knew how to cook food and she could always hear where the children were and what they were up to.

  Once, Mana’s father was away from camp and her mother with the good eyes had gone to gather nuts, leaving Mana behind with her blind mother. Mana had been eating a lot of insects, puyurruyurru, and started to feel sick. Her blind mother was sitting nearby and Mana was so weak she fell on top of her.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ her blind mother asked, but Mana couldn’t tell her, she was vomiting so much.

  Her blind mother took Mana into her arms and held her, stroking her head. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling now?’

  B
y evening, Mana was feeling better.

  Over the years, Mana’s blind mother had four babies, three boys and a girl. Sadly, all except one of the boys died while they were still infants. Mana didn’t know why they had died, and she wondered if perhaps her blind mother hadn’t had enough milk to feed them. Everyone loved the last little boy, who was called Parri.

  MARRIAGE

  Girls were usually promised in marriage to an older man, sometimes when they were babies or even before they were born; for instance, a man might promise another man his first daughter. The girls were introduced to their future husbands while they were young, to get to know them. Although most young women did marry their promised husbands, sometimes one of them ran away, or another man might come along and steal her. If either of these things happened, the wronged husband would have the right to punish his wife and the other man, but once that had happened, the runaways often stayed together. More rarely, a man might offer his wife to another man, as in this story, following a dispute over her.

  Two little girls

  One day in the hot-weather time, when the whole family was camping at Mantarta, all the grown-ups and Pali went hunting. Mana, her younger sister Tili and another little ‘sister’ called Japi stayed behind with Jaja, who still had a bad back.

  Mana was helping her grandmother to test some of the nuts she had gathered earlier. Her two young sisters came to watch. Mana used a heavy hunting stick to crack the shells, then broke them open with her hands. If too many of the kernels were stale or rotten, the whole pile would have to be thrown away.

  ‘Can we have some nuts, Jaja?’ asked Tili.

  ‘Not yet, we haven’t tested them. We’re going to cook them later, when everyone comes home from hunting.’

  ‘Well, we’re going to look for fruit, Jaja,’ said Tili.

  ‘No, it’s too hot, you’re not to go wandering off.’