‘But there’s nothing to eat!’
‘Never mind. Your parents will come back with plenty of meat.’
‘We’ll go and get some water, then,’ said Tili.
Tili and Japi went to fetch two coolamons, one bigger than the other, and took them down to the waterhole. Tili filled the bigger one with water, then she glanced around; their grandmother and older sister were out of sight. She looked at little Japi. ‘Come on,’ she told her. ‘We’re going!’
Tili made a circlet of grass and put it on her head as a soft pad. Then she lifted the heavy wooden coolamon of water onto the grass pad and gave the smaller, empty one to Japi to carry.
The two sisters set off together. After a while, they found a shady tree.
‘We’ll leave the water here in the shade,’ said Tili.
The sun was higher now, and hot, and Japi was starting to flag.
The girls had a long drink of water then left the coolamon under the tree and walked on. Japi was soon tired again, so Tili lifted her up and carried her on her back. When they came to a patch of ripe kumpupaja, they stopped and sat down. Together they pulled the kumpupaja off their prickly stems and put them into the small coolamon.
Meanwhile, at the camp, Pali had come back from hunting. She looked around for the younger girls.
‘Jaja,’ she said. ‘Where have my two little sisters gone?’
‘They went down to get water, but they’ve been gone for a long time. You’d better go and look for them.’
Pali went to look near the waterhole but no one was there. She saw the girls’ tracks going away over the sand.
‘No,’ she said, when she came back. ‘They’re not there, they’ve gone off somewhere. Jaja, I’ll follow them. It’s hot now, they might get weak.’
Mana told Pali she’d go with her. The pair followed the tracks of their young sisters. After walking for a while over the hot sand, Pali sat down in the shade to rest. Mana kept going and before long she found the coolamon of water the girls had left under a tree. She drank some of the water and went on. Pali soon caught up with her.
Now they could only see Tili’s tracks. ‘Where’s that little girl?’ Mana asked.
‘Tili must be carrying her,’ said Pali. True enough, Tili’s tracks were sinking deeper into the sand.
When Pali and Mana found their young sisters, the girls had collected a big pile of kumpupaja and were getting ready to walk back to their water in the shade.
‘What have you two been up to?’ Mana asked them. ‘We’ve all been worried about you; it’s a hot day!’
‘No, we’re all right,’ said Tili. ‘We’ve been picking all this fruit.’
‘Come on, we’d better take you two back to camp now,’ said Pali. ‘Jaja will be looking for us.’
They stopped to drink some water, then Pali put the empty coolamon on her head and lifted little Japi onto her back. Mana carried the girls’ dish, full of fruit, and they all made their way slowly back to camp.
‘Jaja,’ Pali said. ‘I’ve brought the two girls back safely; here they are.’
Jaja was crying, she’d been so worried. ‘Why did you take your little sister away with you?’ she asked Tili. ‘She can’t walk so far, she’s too small. Her legs aren’t strong enough yet.’
‘We were hungry,’ said Tili, ‘and there was no fruit here. Look, we’ve brought back all these kumpupaja. I carried Japi when she got tired.’
Later that day, the girls’ parents came back with the animals they’d killed: goanna and cat. They built up the fire, and while they were waiting for the meat, Jaja cooked the kumpupaja and nuts in the coals. Then everyone had a good feed and Tili was forgiven.
TRACKING
In the desert, people followed the tracks of animals when they were hunting, or, as in this story, found missing children by following their tracks. There is more to tracking than following or finding something. People can tell by the depth of tracks if someone is carrying a heavy weight. They can also tell how old tracks are and how long ago an animal passed by. They can read a series of tracks like a story: when the animal was walking or running, when it stopped to rest or caught and ate another animal, whether it was a young or old, male or female and so on.
GOANNAS
Goannas are Varanus lizards of several species. In Jukuna’s country, the most common is the sand goanna (Varanus gouldii). Others are the rough-tailed goanna (Varanus acanthurus) and the black-tailed goanna (Varanus tristis).
No water
When Mana was small, she heard the story of her other grandmother, her father’s mother, whom she had never met. The events had all happened long before Mana was born.
It was hot-weather time, and people were travelling and burning the grass as they went, to clear the ground for walking and hunting. They had run out of water and everyone was getting thirsty, so they started hurrying on to the next waterhole. The old lady tried to keep up with the others, but the heat nearly overcame her.
‘Keep going just till we get to the next jumu,’ the others encouraged her. They helped her along to the waterhole, only to find it dry.
‘There’s no water,’ her son said, looking worried. ‘It hasn’t rained here for a long time. We’ll have to keep going.’
‘I can’t go any further,’ his mother told the other people. ‘You go and find water and bring some back to me.’
The old woman sank to the ground under a small tree, but it was the middle of the day and there wasn’t a lot of shade. She waited there for a long time; her throat was parched.
The others kept going until at last they reached the next jila and drank all the water they could. After a short rest, Mana’s mother filled her wooden coolamon and lifted it onto her head. Then she carried it all the way back to where they’d left her mother-in-law. The old woman was still lying there in the same position under the same spindly tree, but the shadow would have moved away from her during the afternoon, leaving her in the full sun. By now, it was evening.
When Mana’s mother saw that the old woman hadn’t moved, she called out her mother-in-law’s name. There was no answer. As she drew close, Mana’s mother saw that the old woman was no longer breathing. She had died of thirst.
WATERHOLES
In the desert, where the heat can be intense and waterholes are often far apart, people had to think about water whenever they left camp. We have seen that they often carried water with them, in wooden coolamons, while they were hunting or travelling.
Desert people had to plan longer journeys according to where they would find water. The jila were always reliable, but the jumu eventually ran dry between one rainy season and another. In the dry season, travellers sometimes had to take an educated guess as to whether a particular jumu would still have water in it or not. They knew the ones that usually lasted longer than others, and they took note of rain, even distant thunderstorms, and could tell which waterholes were likely to be replenished.
Occasionally, someone would make a mistake; the water they were carrying would run out before they had got close to the next waterhole, and there would be a long and thirsty walk. By resting in the shade during the hottest part of the day and walking in the cooler evenings and mornings, people usually made it to safety. The danger was greater for old or sick people who could not keep up with the younger ones, and the desert showed no mercy to those left behind.
Uncle Yinti
Yinti was the same age as Mana and his younger brother, Kana, was about the same age as Tili. Mana and Tili called the boys ‘uncle’. Their two families often travelled around and camped together, and the children knew each other well.
The girls liked having Yinti around because he was so much fun, but he was always getting into trouble.
One afternoon, when most of the adults had gone hunting, Jaja stayed behind at the waterhole with all the kids. Jaja told them to go and gather food.
‘Go and collect some jurnta, children, then we’ll cook them,’ Jaja said.
But Mana didn�
�t feel like gathering jurnta.
‘No,’ she said. ‘We can get some later.’
She stayed back, but all the other kids, girls and boys, ran down to the flat. They sat on the ground, digging by hand for the tasty little bulbs. When they had collected a big pile, they took them back to Jaja.
‘Now you can cook them,’ said Jaja.
Mana was still in a contrary mood. ‘No, you cook them for us, Jaja,’ she said.
‘Alright,’ said Jaja. ‘You all go and play now, down on the flat.’
The children didn’t need telling twice. They all ran off, leaving Jaja in the shade, cooking jurnta.
Mana played in the flat with Tili and their cousin Kayi, Lilil’s daughter. Yinti, Kana and the other boys were throwing boomerangs nearby. They were light ones they’d made themselves out of bark.
Tili and Kayi kept running up and down in the middle of the flat. Mana told them not to run around like that in case they got hit by a boomerang, but the younger girls took no notice.
Yinti threw a boomerang just as Kayi was running out, and the boomerang flew round and caught her, crack! right on the bridge of her nose. Kayi fell to the ground, blood pouring. Yinti and the other boys took off running and Jaja, who had seen what had happened, tried to chase them. She shook her walking stick at their fleeing backs.
‘Come here! Come back here! Don’t run away — when I get hold of you lot I’m going to hit you with my stick!’
But the boys kept going. The girls were all crying; Kayi was crying because she’d been hurt and was bleeding, and Tili and Mana were crying for Kayi.
Later that day, Kayi’s father and mother, and Yinti’s two mothers, Mala and Parta, came in from hunting. Mana and Tili told them what had happened and they saw that Kayi’s nose was bleeding and sore.
When it was starting to get dark and the boys came creeping back to camp, Kayi’s father Kaj gave them a good growling.
‘We didn’t mean to hit her,’ said Yinti. ‘She ran out just when I was throwing a boomerang.’ Mana wasn’t so sure. She had a feeling Yinti had thrown the boomerang on purpose.
By then, Kayi’s nose had stopped bleeding but her face had swollen up. She soon got better, but she carried a scar on her nose for the rest of her life — a reminder of Yinti.
JURNTA
Jurnta is another desert food, a type of grass that grows on salty ground. People gathered and ate the small greyish-white bulbs, which they dug up by hand from the base of their stems. Jurnta can be eaten raw or lightly cooked in the coals.
BOOMERANGS
Boomerangs are curved weapons made from hard wood, carefully cut and smoothed. Throwing boomerangs are used for killing prey, such as kangaroos, and others for ceremonies and for fighting. A heavy boomerang thrown at a human being could cause serious, even lethal injury.
Children made toy weapons from lighter materials such as the bark of trees, and practised throwing or mock-fighting with them. Even so, a bark boomerang thrown with some force could do damage.
The cutting
When Mana was a girl, people used to cut one another across their chests and sometimes on their upper arms, to decorate themselves with scars.
One day, when all the kids were playing in the sandhills, away from the camp, Yinti came along, holding a sharp flake of stone in his hand.
‘Line up, all you girls!’ Yinti told Mana and her companions, Tili and Kayi. He made them sit on the ground in a line, then he said, ‘I’m going to cut you. It will be good for you.’
Tili and Kayi were frightened. ‘No, don’t cut us!’ they begged him. ‘It will hurt!’
‘Yes, I’ll cut you, it’s good for you. If you don’t let me cut you, the bad kukurr spirit might get you — he’ll bite you! But if he sees you’ve got a scar, he’ll leave you alone.’
Yinti told the boys to stand on one side and wait. He sat down on the ground in front of the girls and gave each of them a nick on the arm with his stone knife. Then he made a bigger cut across their chests.
‘Pain, pain! That hurts!’ the girls cried, but Yinti took no notice. Soon, blood was running down their bodies and all the girls were in tears.
When he had finished with the girls, Yinti made the boys stand up and started doing the same to them. He cut Riji and Karli and even his own little brother Kana. The boys were soon crying too.
‘You mustn’t cry,’ Yinti told them. ‘You should laugh! You have to be brave and strong!’
When Yinti had finished cutting them, the kids all ran back to camp, their tears mingling with the blood pouring down their arms and chests.
Jaja saw them first.
‘Warawu!’ she cried out. ‘Whatever happened to you all, girls and boys?’ They told her what Yinti had done to them. He sat down on the sand a little way off, smirking to himself, pretending not to be listening.
Jaja was furious. ‘Wait till your mother comes back!’ she told Yinti.
Pali was the first to come back from hunting. When she heard what had happened and saw the state the children were in, she scolded Yinti.
‘What have you done to the little kids? That’s wrong, you shouldn’t have done that!’
When the mothers came home to camp and heard what Yinti had been doing, they picked up their digging sticks and went to hit him, but he was too quick for them. He jumped up and took off, running.
The children, meanwhile, had rubbed themselves with charcoal from the fire to stop the bleeding and dry up the wounds.
Yinti stayed away from camp for the rest of the day and didn’t come back till it was nearly dark. Then the old people gave him a big telling off.
‘You shouldn’t do that — you shouldn’t cut little boys and girls!’ said Jaja. ‘You’re mad, you hurt them!’ She kept telling him off all night.
‘Are you crazy or what?’ said Mana and Tili’s mother.
‘No,’ said Yinti. ‘Those little kids asked me to cut them, desert way.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Pali. ‘They never asked you to do that.’
Mana’s blind mother chimed in too: ‘Why did you cut the little kids?’
All the kids carried Yinti’s scars on their bodies for the rest of their lives. When they grew up they sometimes showed off their scars and told the story, laughing and laughing, while Yinti smiled sheepishly.
BODY SCARS
Not all societies are afraid of a degree of pain and bleeding, and in many cultures, people decorate their bodies by scarification or cutting. Most desert people had lines cut across their chests, which they rubbed with ash and ochre to raise the scars into ridges. Some added to these chest scars by cutting patterns all over their arms or torsos. Usually, this was done when people were considered old enough and wanted to have themselves cut.
Blacknose
Mana and Tili had a dog named Blacknose. They called her ‘mother’ because she had the same skin name as their mothers. Their mother called the dog ‘sister’. Blacknose was a good hunter.
One day, the two sisters went gathering food. They didn’t take Blacknose because she had already been hunting with their parents and was hot and tired, so she stayed behind at the waterhole.
When they came back to camp in the afternoon, the girls saw their uncle Yinti walking away with his spears. It was unusual for him to be going hunting so late, when everyone else was coming home. His little brother Kana was still there at the camp.
Blacknose didn’t come running to greet the girls, wagging her tail, as she usually did.
‘Where’s Blacknose?’ asked Mana.
Kana seemed excited.
‘Your dog’s over there,’ he said, pointing. ‘Up in that tree. Yinti put her there!’
‘Can’t be!’ Mana and Tili hurried over to look. They found poor Blacknose dead, hanging over a fork in the tree, her tongue lolling. Blood had run from a wound in her body, but now it was dry. She’d been speared.
‘Who killed our dog?’ the girls asked Kana, but they had already guessed. Tili started to cry.
�
��Yinti killed her,’ Kana told them. ‘Your dog was in the waterhole when we came back from hunting. We were thirsty, but she wouldn’t let us get water. She snarled at us when we tried to chase her out. Yinti set fire to some grass and threw it at her, and then she jumped out and ran away.’
‘Well, why did he kill her?’ Mana wanted to know.
‘He was still wild with her,’ Kana said. ‘After we’d had a drink of water and a rest, he followed her tracks and found her under a tree, asleep. That’s when he speared her.’
When it was getting dark, Yinti came back to camp.
‘Who killed our dog?’ the girls asked him. He didn’t say anything, but just grinned guiltily and pointed at Kana. Kana shook his head.
‘No, it was you!’ Mana said. ‘Why did you just hang her up in a tree; why didn’t you cook her and eat her?’ she asked him, sarcastically. She never quite forgave Yinti for killing Blacknose.
DOGS
Dogs were important to desert people for hunting and companionship, just as they are today. They are treated as members of the family and fit into the relationship structure like human beings. These relationships are taken seriously; if a woman has a dog she calls ‘sister’, the woman’s children call the dog ‘mother’, as they would call their mother’s human sister, and the dog’s offspring become the woman’s ‘sons’ and ‘daughters’ and her children’s ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’.
Because desert people valued their dogs highly, it was a serious offence to kill another person’s dog. Only if a dog attacked and bit someone was it considered reasonable for the injured person to kill it, as a dangerous animal. In this story, Mana and Tili don’t consider Yinti to have been justified in killing their dog, even though Blacknose had snarled at him and prevented him from getting water.
Nearly buried alive
One day, Kana and Karli were nearly buried alive.
The Girl from the Great Sandy Desert Page 3
