by Molly Murn
Sorry, Pearl. I just don’t know. I can hardly bear it sometimes, he says, eyes closed. She watches him drift away from her, as he falls asleep. A drowning man—she wishes she could pull him back out of the deep to be with her.
And when he sleeps she cannot. There is the son and the father breathing heavily and her own self, separate from them, taut with wakefulness. There is the moon like a great lamp mooning naughtily at the window. And there is Nell, like an uncharted map. All those tracks she left behind, thinks Pearl. Will I never rest? Will we ever know what to do? She disentangles from Nico, he’s plummeted into black sleep now; she regards him resentfully for a moment, and then crawls along the floorboards to her satchel slung by the door. Stuffed deep inside is the little red book.
When Aunty Hettie and Sol came to petition their case—to petition for me—I’d already been sent away. I was at the place with white wooden cots all in a row and shining linoleum floors. I was at the place with swaddled-up babies in white wooden cots. I was at the place that smelt of disinfectant and talcum and something rank like the smell of sweat when you’re afraid. I was at the place where they give you a different name—a pseudonym—so as not to sully your own name. I was at a place where some girls—the older ones—got to keep their babies, and some handed them over like they were a pat of butter, and others, like me, had them wrenched away, like breaking off a branch from a tree.
I visited Aunty Hettie after our meeting at the post office. Her kitchen was sparse and cool. Flagstone floor, heavy wooden table and an assortment of dining chairs, sideboard, meat safe and a shelf much like a bookshelf, with rows of herbal tinctures in large amber bottles neatly set out. Woven baskets, flattish and long-handled, hung from hooks at various heights on the walls. Sister baskets. A vase of sedge sat in the middle of the sideboard, the grass sweeping gracefully over the lip of the vase. Beside the vase there were sedge rushes wrapped in damp hessian sugar bags. A bitter smell hung in the room and then I realised something was simmering on the gas top, making the lid of the pot rattle. As if to read my thoughts—Dandelion leaves, she said. For cleansing the liver.
I hadn’t really thought about how dark-skinned she was until then. It made her seem younger than her eighty-odd years—her skin tone even and smooth, whereas my own mother’s face, forty years younger, was blooming with sun-spots and already sagging around the edges. I felt mean for the thought but Aunty was more like kin to me than my own mother. I’d always loved watching her small hands and narrow wrists as she wove the sedge grass into mats and baskets, or adjusted her shell necklaces that hung opalescent at her lined throat; she had a girlish way of moving, and she and Sol both had the same mouth—distinct and expressive. She kissed me on both cheeks and then stroked her hand from my forehead all the way over my head and down to the base of the neck, when she greeted me. She left her hand there for a while like I belonged with her. I didn’t want to ever leave.
Aunty ushered me to the kitchen table and began taking some of the amber bottles down from the shelf and placing them on the sideboard. I read their labels. Parsley. Sage. Yarrow. Rosehips. Skullcap. She took the pot from the stove, placed it on a slab of marbled stone beside the sink, and then turned to me, wiping her hands on her apron.
You’ve been through too much.
How did she know? I shifted uncomfortably in the chair.
Don’t look so surprised. You left a girl and came back a mother. Without child.
I liked that she said I was a mother. Even with no child to look after. Even with my breasts wrapped tight in bandages to stop them from leaking.
I watched mesmerised, and reeling slightly, as she poured small amounts of the tincture from each bottle into a glass measuring cylinder.
What’s in those bottles?
Herbs. Tinctures. I’m a herbalist. But I know other things too. From my dark mothers and sisters. More than I can say. I know about yalkari, nganangi, kalari and kinyeri, too. I take things from both worlds and make something new.
Both worlds?
Don’t look so serious, girl. You’re in both worlds too. She laughed, and I noticed some of her teeth were missing. I’ll make us a cuppa.
The dandelion tea had an earthy taste, not what I was used to, but I sipped it slowly, hoping it would calm the shake in my hands. I didn’t know what was wrong with me lately. But my body would quiver and shudder as if I were in a panic, even when I was doing something as simple as folding the sheets, or checking the fences along the boundary. She watched my hands. We’ll add some oats or chamomile to your tonic, she said.
While I sipped the brew from the bitter leaves, Aunty sat across from me, an unfinished weaving before her on the table. She slid it over.
I’ve started it off, she said, it begins in the centre and spirals outwards. Now you do it. Do you remember how?
I looked at her blankly. She picked up another weaving and demonstrated how to stitch the main thread over the bundle of rushes, adding more rounds of the circle. Not too tight, not too loose. You have to keep adding in the rushes—not all at once, she said—like adding to a family. Keep it growing. When you finish you can’t see where it ends because there is no end, like an umbilicus.
A year ago, I’d been adept at it. Now, my fingers felt clumsy, too big for the sinewy reeds, but the more I paid attention, the more soothing, steadying, it became. The rhythm of it seemed to focus my whole self, instead of being this scattered thing. Pieces of me everywhere. Hanging on fences. Nettie’s fingers were articulate with the rushes, over and through, and after a long stretch of quiet she told me this story, for stories and weaving go together, she said.
When Sol and I came to the farm to speak for you—to try to make your folks understand—you’d already been sent away. We didn’t know where.
Sent away—yes, I thought. Sent away like dirty washing to be laundered. I said nothing and waited for Aunty Hettie to continue. She spoke slowly and in perfect time with her careful deft weaving.
Your mother said that you had a job for the autumn with some cousins in Adelaide. We had to believe her. We were patient people, and Sol said that he would hang on for as long as it took, that his wish to marry you was not something that he could make go away.
I swallowed some tea and wondered whether she’d heard how loud my gulp was.
We were prepared for resistance, so we put our offer on the table. It was all we had. Sol was old enough to take on the farm, and I brought the papers to show that it had been transferred in his name. As you know, this was my great-grandfather’s land—he was granted it by the government because his wife was Aboriginal. That’s what they did back then. They hoped to encourage European-style farming among the ‘natives’. But anyway, in this case, that granny of mine was a curse. We was offering you a home and income, but it wasn’t enough. We pleaded: you would still live next door to your own family and Sol could be of help to them too.
I watched the spiral of her weaving slowly grow. But none of that mattered. We were a black mark on your name, your mother said. We had too much dark blood in us and it would keep showing up in your babies and in your babies’ babies.
I swallowed. And all of those scattered parts of me came flying back in like great angry wings. So what, I said. So what!
Aunty smiled. You’re a generation on. You understand things they cannot. Understanding takes many lifetimes. Let me tell you a story? She looked at me, her eyebrows raised into a question. I recognised Sol in her eyes.
Please, Aunty. Yes.
Back in the sealing days, before we were settled and when all that was needed to survive was all that was traded—salt, skins and Aboriginal wives—there was a woman brought here from the mainland called Emue. She had many children with her Ngarrindjeri family, and one of her daughters was caught too and taken to the island. We don’t know much about the children Emue had with her sealer man—the records are scant. You see, before 1836, it’s like islanders didn’t exist, or were too ‘uncivilised’ to go on the colonial records.
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One day Emue was brought home in a dinghy by a young sealer and another woman, a relative. Emue was dead by the time the boat washed up on the shore and the young man was half drowned. Emue’s people revived the boy by placing his frozen body in a scooped-out hole of warm sand, heated by fire. They buried him up to his neck until he woke up. He became an initiated man, you see, Nell? Do you see what I’m saying? After Emue had been properly buried, and the boy had recovered, he returned in the dinghy to the island. Before he left, he promised that he would take care of Emue’s daughter and bring her back home too. But he and the girl never did return to the mainland. Perhaps they tried but the passage of water separating the island is so very treacherous. We just don’t know. When the sealers took our women, they left gaps in our history that we won’t ever fill. But the story of that young boy and that young girl, and the stories of many other such unions between blackfella and whitefella, they belong to us. I am a descendant of this heritage. We must acknowledge our sisters and the blood they shed—the children they carried. This is a two-way exchange.
And because of your child, because of Sol, you must know this. We are all in this together now. Dear Nell, we are all stitched in together.
I smoothed the reeds in my lap and saw my baby boy floating towards me on a raft made of rushes. I saw not water, but waves of blood.
Make a place in your heart, Aunty said. Oh but that place, Sol, it hurt so much. Diana, Pearl, it hurts so much.
Charlotte came sweeping into the kitchen then, plonking the baby Elijah on the floor. I watched him—the film of spit on his lip, the bony bumps on his skull, the tight curls, the way his knees fell outwards like butterfly wings—and then Charlotte scooped him up, glaring at me.
What?
I held the weaving tight in my hands, knuckles whitening. Aunty stood and took the baby from Charlotte.
Mind your tongue. Nell’s our guest.
Charlotte leant against the sink and scowled at me. Just been over at the Simpsons’. Tom’s enlisted. And Sol, too. Leaving tomorrow. She looked right into me, her eyes glistening with a kind of greedy pleasure.
So there I was, burnt to the ground. And not even seventeen yet. Aunty Het my witness, like a guardian angel. He was leaving. And on his own accord. Either way, I lost him.
No one wants to marry our boys, Aunty said, and my cheeks flared. And so we are losing our land, our farms. Again and again. On the mainland, we’re herded into missions. Here, we’re frozen out. We are removed over and over.
I took a swallow, and kept weaving, my fingers less clumsy now. In fact, I’d never felt so alert. Aunty Hettie had an autonomy that I admired then and have now grown to deeply appreciate. And it was only during that conversation that I became conscious for the first time of her heritage and all it meant and all it was. All she’d strived to hold on to. I’d not seen Sol and me as any different from each other. But we were. It wasn’t just my parents’ disapproval, disgust even, that we faced; this was a bedrock of prejudice, denial and theft that we may never break open.
If no one marries us, then we have no children to pass the land on to. You have to understand, Nell, Sol doesn’t have a choice. He must enlist. Take that tonic three times a day with food. A big spoonful. You’ll start to get your spirit back soon enough. And about Sol, you have to let him go. Let him find his own peace. There were tears in her eyes.
When I climbed back into the cart for home, Father didn’t say a word, but kissed me on the forehead, and he was so gentle in his big coat and his scratchy stubble was so familiar that I wanted to cry on his shoulder. But I pushed him away. I wanted to hate him but I was too spent. Broken. Anyway I knew Mother was the one who had put her foot down, so I didn’t berate him. Great wracking tears made me feel like weeing, I was that full of water and dandelion tea. My hand closed around the black glass scraper Aunty had given me from Sol. He had found it when he was out yaccaring. After my parents bought Aunty’s land, I never saw her again. Before she left for the mainland, Aunty gave me other things, too—I keep them in this pale green shoebox like talismans. What can they tell me what can they tell me what can they tell me of you? Old dusty things. And Hettie, I am sorry. Dear Aunty, give me words. At least just those. Sol. Sun. Song of songs.
Bind me as a seal upon your heart,
a sign upon your arm
for love is as fierce as death,
its jealousy bitter as the grave.
Even its sparks are a raging fire,
a devouring flame.
Great seas cannot extinguish love,
no river can sweep it away.
1828
Backstairs Passage
William wonders whether the cold of Emue, her skin like wet stones now, is seeping into his own body. His shoulders ache and it’s because his arms are so numb. He could break bits of himself off, like cleaving ice, but he keeps rowing, his gaze set on the steady outline of Poll. They are just a little slit in the ocean—a little fissure seaming through—the water black and heavy and surging around them as if they’re in the clutches of an animal. He shifts his feet away from Emue. Poll sings. William remembers sleeping in a channel of rock wrapped in seaweed. Oh what he’d give for that seaweed now. Its embrace. It seems they are suspended in the mid-point, the crumpled hills in the distance never any closer. William dares to glance down at Emue and, all wrapped up like that, she is like a seal.
The night keeps coming on. The sky getting higher and higher—blankets of cloud peeling away, so the bones of his skull burn cold. The stars burn holes, too. But Poll does not stop rowing—her arms are strong—and her song weaves around him, stitching him all in. Keeping him going on. He wonders how long it will take for them to become more sea than boat. How long to dissolve into her seductions? Would it be an embrace? He holds on to Poll’s song like a thread. She scoops water from the boat and it gleams like fat thrown onto a fire. Last time she’d tried to cross this passage she hadn’t made it. Everitt carried her from the shore and then chopped off her ear. William thinks of Poll’s baby rolling somewhere beneath them. Wrapped in her sedge cloak. And he imagines himself wrapped in a sedge cloak and closes his eyes. He imagines he is a seal wrapped in blubber. He rubs the scar on his hand. The sea, his kin.
near Encounter Bay
The light when it lands is like his mother standing over him—the face he once knew. Her hands blaze like a furnace. The sand is a lance. He is naked, but it is still too hot. There are voices and they overlap and overlap like waves getting closer. He makes out words from Maringani’s language. He understands the way they curl and ring. Maringani. If only for her cool fingers on his swollen lips. They will burst like waikeries. There are many hands and he is lifted, floating on songs and whisperings. William opens his eyes and the sky shudders white and is scored with black lines. Crows, dawuldi, he thinks, and then a hand smooths his brow and palms his eyes shut. He is rubbed all over, a sea of hands, and his skin might be falling off. They could just be rubbing at his bones. Scouring him down to ash. But then he’s lifted gently again and placed into a recess. He feels the hands putting his flesh back on. Patting it firmly in. Building him up again with hot sand. Enclosing him. There is smoke and it curls and rings around him. It rings out with the clean smell of ti-tree. And there are men with old faces, and younger faces too, watching him, talking in low voices. Their chests are bare and painted. He dreams he is growing fur like a seal. Or perhaps he is a wallaby roasting in a hole.
Days later and he is painted in ochre. He can’t remember getting here but thinks they might have sailed on the stars in a bark canoe. Poll is different. She’s hacked her hair and she is caked in mud and she keens. All the women scratch and cut at themselves; the men keep the fire going in a circle of ti-trees. William is swept up with the men, falling in with their rhythms, of hunting and singing, tending the fires, and keeping watch, and he is buoyed by them. Their strength, their ordered world, their acceptance of him. He observes carefully. Emue sits on a raised platform—her head bent
forward. Shoulders slumped. She is wrapped in branches. The fire is a long way beneath her, and the smoke wreaths and conceals and then clears again. The body drips down, the men say. And William is sometimes frightened by the acrid smell lurking beneath the aroma of burning ti-tree. He remembers his own hand burning. The spirit travels up, they say, and point to the Milky Way. Ngurunderi’s canoe. The bones will remain. To be buried, they say. This goes on for many days and William sleeps more than he ever has before. He dreams every time of pelicans—their feathers sweeping over Emue and sweeping out her wurlie, like Poll had done before they left. Sweeping and sweeping until his dreams are brushed clean and he wakes again to the high-pitched wailing. The women’s voices are carried up with the smoke and stretched out along the clouds. He wonders if Maringani can hear them. He looks across to the island—the water is a sleeping wild animal between them.
William wipes the red paint from his body in long deliberate strokes. This covering has protected him for weeks now and he’s afraid of what scraping it away will bring. But the men have instructed him—he is ready. Narambi. His skin underneath is startlingly white after the earthy dry red he’s become used to. Yet his body feels unusually energised—like it could never be cold again. His blood is singing. And as he rubs at the ochre his penis is impossibly taut. Ignoring it, he concentrates on wiping away the red from all the hidden places—behind the knees, at the back of his skull, in his hairline. When he emerges blinking and new and so brightly naked, he is given a plonggi, fighting club, a wakaldi, shield, and a taralyi, throwing stick. He is given other things, too, and foods to break taboo.
