Heart of the Grass Tree

by Molly Murn

  There is smoke coming from Guvner’s chimney and Sal waves her hand towards it. Guvner back.

  Together they speak in that third way. Not Palawa. Not Ngarrindjeri. But in the short quick falling stones of the men, yet not quite. More like stones falling into water—they’d made something new.

  Guvner had been gone for some time. Down at Nepean Bay along with Munro and Piebald, William said, trading his wares—skins, vegetables, wheat—with the hookers, the small vessels passing through. When Guv was gone his wives and the little boy stayed down at camp, scared of the wind through the cracks in the hut, and the snake that got in one day and could not get out again. But sometimes, Maringani thought, those wives looked at her cold. Spoke Palawa only. They were back in the hut now, making tea from swamp ti-tree, grinding wheat for damper.

  She puts down her weaving, smoothing the sweep of rushes that stick out and are yet to be woven in. Standing, she stretches out the back of her knees, and sees William in the garden, making those melons so sweet. She waves to him and he calls her over. One of the dogs follows, licking her hand as she walks along the track to the garden, and then barks wildly as they pass the penned-in hogs.

  Guvner’s back. And Piebald.

  She nods. He puts his hand at the small of her back and even through the fine sealskin, she feels the scar from his burning. Knows it’s there, and turns into it, taking his hand to her lips and holding it there. He tastes of the earth. Scorched earth. And she knows just how completely he can set her aflame.

  We’ll take ’im something. An offering, he says, looking towards the hut, there’ll be a feast tonight. William curls his hand around the back of Mari’s neck. She folds into his chest.

  Tiyawi, she thinks. And then says, Iguano. She frees herself from William to get the brugi, the fire, the coals going. She’ll cook it sweet. With ant eggs and waikeries. The children run past in a flock, shrieking, and setting off the kukaki, the kookaburraslaughing.

  King George Beach (Sandy)

  In the heart of Diana’s newly built room—shell room—there is a pot-belly stove with a fire burning, orange flames licking the glass brightly. They’re new flames. Just lit. Not yet the deep warmth of coals. Diana kneels before the door of the stove. The room is round but just before it makes a complete circle it widens out to a small passageway, more of an opening, and begins to loop around again. The beginnings of a spiral. She stands and walks to the entranceway, pushing open the wooden door, stepping over the woven mats as she crosses the threshold. Her hand rests on the little shelf made into the wall for a candle. Outside the air is wet on her cheeks. The grasses on the dune pressed flat in the wind. She turns towards the alcove and lights the tea candle, dropping it down into its glass holder. Uncle Jim died yesterday. Diana walks the perimeter of the stone room, the light so washed out it could be dusk but it’s only morning. Every stone for the building was found here on the island and placed carefully by hand. Uncle had worked with Joe and Nico and the girls to find the stones—helping out whenever he visited the island. It had taken more than a year to collect all the pieces. It’s a kind of cairn, she thinks, this shelter. Diana wraps her shawl tightly and takes the path down the dune. She should have more clothes on, but she’s not turning back now. Stooping against the wind she weaves down the hill, the path so familiar her feet know just what to do. The beach is wind-tossed. Driftwood scattered along its length. Spinifex uprooted and spinning along the sand. Seaweed banked up in a series of mounds at the highest watermark makes it look messy. She sinks into the scratchy dampness of the seaweed. Jim once told her he’d slept in one of these pillowy seaweed channels. Just for an afternoon, he said, winking. Best nap I’ve ever had with the sun beaming down on me and the sea singing lullabies.

  Diana first met Uncle Jim when she and Nell had gone to stay at the Ngarrindjeri Cultural Centre, in the Coorong. Nell insisted. David had just left Diana and she wasn’t coping. Nell said it would give her some time out. Their dormitory was sparse and utilitarian. Diana had lain awake all night, swatting at fat, slow mosquitoes, listening to Nell snoring, and to the wind whipping eerily around the concrete building. In the morning, they were up early for a strong, sugary cup of tea and workshops: fabric marbling, weaving, a bush foods walk. Diana had been fascinated watching the barefoot children that ran together in a clump right to the edges of a weedy paddock, or in and out of cabins under construction. As a child, she’d always wished for a gang, a clan, to carry her along. Her childhood had been lonely. But her first memory of Uncle Jim was him telling off a little girl who’d used the wrong bathroom—the boys’ instead of the girls’. Diana had looked to Nell. There are strict rules for boys and for girls, Nell explained simply.

  Diana tucks up her hair and wraps the shawl around her ears. Her fringe is going to dry funny now, and the wind makes the bones of her face ache. She’s ploughed a track through the seaweed—a little trench of water ribboning in her wake. Diana’s not quite sure what she’s looking for. She’ll know when she sees it.

  At that first visit to the Cultural Centre, Diana smoked almost as much as Uncle, so she’d spent many hours beside him sitting on crates by the outside wall, stubbing their butts into a bucket, while Nell made silk scarves with the women inside. Diana, Diana, Diana, he said, what can we do for you? Nothing, Uncle. I’m just taking a break from everything. He nodded. Do you have your mother’s island thing—interest? I guess, she said. But she didn’t really. To her, the island was always its same old self—beautiful and stifling. She couldn’t have imagined, then, ever moving back.

  In the cultural museum, she’d sensed something she couldn’t explain. The artefacts were not lying mutely; they were not like the dusty relics she’d gawped at on school excursions. Diana spent hours in the hushed half-lit room, leaving Nell to her socialising, and she began to notice, to pay attention. The artistry in the fish traps, the spears, the baskets, the shields, the clubs, an archive of knowledge that she could only glimpse at. It overwhelmed her. The graceful curve of the plonggi, the fighting stick, perfectly honed to be held comfortably in the hand, and the weavings, all made on slow time, and created for protecting, transporting and carrying. This was art not separate from its utility.

  Diana squats at the edge of a pool and a pelican lands in the distance; it bobs on the choppy water. That gullet, she thinks. Perfectly suited to its needs. The end of her shawl drops into the pool and she whisks it out. Christ! Diana straightens, her hands on her hips, and another pelican joins the first and then another. She looks on, incredulous.

  Near the end of their stay at the Coorong, Uncle and Nell had been yarning, yunnan, and Diana remembers Jim talking about ruwe, country, lands and waters and all living things. And ruwar, body and spirit. Ruwe and ruwar are those overlapping words at the centre of the Ngarrindjeri concept of wellbeing. All things assessed as being healthy and lawful according to Ruwe. Everything is connected, he said. His body got sick because his country was sick. Like so many Elders, he was exhausted caring for country. The Murray River is dying, he had said then. We need whitefellas, like your Nell, to come on board with us. Protect our spiritual waters. Diana had been too caught up in her own lonely situation to realise the significance of the conversation then. To realise she was part of something much bigger than herself.

  Caroline told her yesterday that Uncle’s heart just stopped. He was working at his computer and his heart just gave out, she said. Pelicans were his ngatji, his totem. There are six of them now, gathering at the water’s edge. Diana walks towards them, going slowly over the jagged rocks. In her pocket is her seal brother letter. Her hand closes around it. The pelicans all face the same direction, sitting on the water, drifting.

  Diana places the pelican feather on the hearth of the fire and hopes it will dry out. After the whole mob of pelicans had shaken themselves out and swung into the sky, flown away, one feather remained, caught in the dry seaweed.

  She studies it now to understand its design. She wonders whether the white part will
brighten when it dries. On the opposite wall Nell’s last painting hangs like a promise. It is finished now—the blue at the edges all filled in. Through the bay window facing the ocean, the light spills suddenly and everything gleams—the scrub, the sky, the crests of the waves. Diana stokes the fire and puts in another log. It makes a ticking noise as it catches. A curl of smoke drifts past the side window, and beyond the haze, the main house nestles squatly in the dunes. Further on, Marian and Red’s outside light is still on. When the daughters aren’t around, Diana rarely makes it back over to Nell’s house from the shell room. It’s too cold to make the walk across. And the space is so small it holds heat right to its edges when the fire’s been on all day. Sometimes she sleeps on the wooden bench under the window, or by the fire right on top of her feather quilt. She’s beginning to understand this place. So wet and clean and stunning.

  Diana lights another candle and sets it in the middle of the table. She turns on the stereo. She needs music when she’s working. The letter had come benignly with a stack of bills. Now, she takes it from her pocket and smooths it out. She’d opened it unknowingly when it arrived, but that was in the weeks after Nell’s death—almost two years ago. She’d scanned her eyes down the page, and everything took on new startling definition. It was as though she’d stepped out from a cave she’d been sheltering in. Hiding in. She walked out into a crescendo of sound and sensation as the words on the page dropped into place. She remembers thinking, Why is it that some days are just ordinary days, and others, you find out you have a brother, or your mother dies, or your child is born, or your beloved cat drowns. Why is it that some days, the fabric of your world tears open and you fall into the fissures, changed forever—bruised and transformed all at once. Lucy wept and gripped on to a stony-faced Pearl—just like when they were little—after Diana showed them the letter. Nell’s grief belonged, now, to all of them.

  This letter she will not burn. Not ever. Not like the others. She tears it into three clean pieces.

  Being Nell’s next of kin meant the request had come to her. The son, her brother, had been notified of his birth mother’s death. The son, her brother, wanted to make contact.

  She places the first strip carefully onto the archive paper. This will be the first of the triad. She hadn’t thought to work in the image of a pelican feather before. Maybe for the last in the series, she thinks. Yes, for the last. For this first one she’ll sketch the fine hairs of sealskin: the pelt like the flattened grasses on the dune—so many colours when you look up close.

  On the day they were to meet—just months after the letter came—she’d spent hours beforehand in the art gallery on the mainland trying to still her nerves. This was her solace; this was to galvanise her. She’d spoken to him on the phone. They’d emailed. But she was so nervous about seeing him in person. Would she be able to handle it if he looked like Nell? Or if he didn’t? What if he looked like Diana? And so there she was in the gallery. The emerald walls, the parquet floor, all the creative endeavours fully realised and on display were long ago witnesses to a kind of awakening in Diana, and so she needed them again. She stood in front of the Ngarrindjeri sister basket, woven from sedge, and admired its perfect circles, its long neat handles, and tried with her eyes to follow the spiral of the weaving. It was so clear and so unfathomable. During that first visit to Camp Coorong with Nell, it was in the learning to weave with the women, the aunties, that her sorrow over David began to unfurl. They sat around a big table with the rushes of varying lengths in the middle. The women spoke in low, gentle voices and she had never felt so welcome, so accepted with all her failings. Aunty Ellen sat up close beside her and got her started on the weaving. You’re making a spiral—begin in the centre, like this. She showed her how to bend the rushes over and stitch them together to form the heart of the weaving. The hardest part is getting started, she said. And later, We need fresh water for our rushes. When the land salts up our rushes die. The council has been growing us big ones. Great big long rushes we use for weaving kondoli and pondi. Diana remembers that each time she brought in a new reed to the weaving more tears would come and the women kept talking, or laughing like a song, or they were quiet, and all together they were a held circle for that moment in time. Even Nell was gentle then.

  And so that day, before meeting her brother, Aunty Ellen’s basket in the gallery was a touchstone. You keep adding the sedges like family, Aunty says. All at different stages, all connected. The blood was thumping in her ears, her heart was muscling so fast.

  Diana would have been kinder to Nell if she’d known. If only she’d known. She always imagined that the brother in Nell’s selkie story was hers. And, she supposes now, he was. Seal brother.

  The second in the triad will have a weaving pattern as its backdrop. She already knows how she’ll use the different edges of the charcoal to show its warp and weft. But first, something else. The words she’d torn up yesterday—strips of paper like fallen petals in the fruit bowl. Diana takes one curl of paper and uncrumples it with the edge of her hand.

  Regarding our recent discussions about your current situation I am offering the following legal information below for you to consider.

  The Aboriginal Ordinance Act 1918 places restrictions on Aboriginal people’s rights to marry whom they choose; namely, legal permission is required. While the law is particular to the Northern Territory, in your daughter’s case, there are certainly ways to obstruct the marriage, if you so desire.

  She is hot at the back of her neck as if great angry roses bloom on her skin. Then she scrubs at the words with her nails, tearing the paper, until the words have no meaning at all. Diana incises the paper as the words once incised Nell. She rips them up. They are just drifts of torn snow. They are just drifts of torn snow that flurry and settle. Second triad.

  Diana kneels by the fire again and opens the door of the pot-belly. The heat of the fire flaring against her cheeks makes her forget, even momentarily, how long she ached for that brother. For Samuel. The ache is still there even though she’s found him. Nell would have loved his hands. Just like Nell’s own. And that funny crease at the bridge of Nell’s nose—he has that too.

  She takes from the mantle the package of letters tied up in a ribbon. All week, she’s been looking at them. Today is the right day. The scene with the pelicans earlier. Jim. Yes, now is the right time. She unties the package and spreads out the notes. Diana wonders why her grandmother held on to them, yet went to such lengths to keep them hidden.

  Pearl and Lucy will never know exactly why Diana finally decided not to sell the house. It’s their own fault, though, she thinks. Diana had been the one to scrupulously go through everything, even while they criticised her. She’d been the one to make painstaking piles: for keeping, for the op-shop, for throwing away, for Pearl, for Lucy, for Diana, for the children, for the museum. She’d been the one to pack up an entire life, and so this was her reward. She’d been the one to find Sol’s letters in her grandmother’s recipe book—wrapped up in newspaper and folded into the back lining. They belong to her now. She won’t ever tell the others about the letters. Let me be the one to finally understand Nell, she consoles herself. Let me have this Nell. My mother. I am greedy for her.

  Each note catches quickly, the yellow paper brittle with age. Tinder. And they flare brightly before blackening. Carbon. What good are these words now, Diana thinks, if Nell never saw them? And if she did see them, well it was all too late. Nell, she whispers, I am sorry. Sol. Samuel. Dad. Dad, god I miss you. Diana had found out all she could about Sol’s whereabouts. He’d enlisted. She wonders how cold it was in Sol’s bones in El Alamein—the desert at night, cold as diamonds, and as pure. The tears run into her mouth.

  I want to tell you this. Last night there was a light that kept me awake. It came through the rip in the curtain and it made the whole room bright. The humps of the others sleeping were sharp at the edges like big rocks under the moon. You see, it was the moon. I saw it sliding past the curtains. But it
was not the moon I’m used to, the gentle one. It was yelling wake up wake up wake up. My whole body was twitching. Bursting out of my skin. I wanted to run outside climb up the iron shed. Shout your name across the paddock. But I stayed where I was. Aunty’s been ill. Sleeping lightly. Not yet snoring. I didn’t want to wake her and start her up coughing again. Then the little ones would start up too. But Nell all I could think of was you. Your hair on the pillow. We have the same moon. Did it wake you up too? We have the same moon. same paddock. same wind. Same trees stringing between us. I stared into the rip in the curtain and wanted you.

  It will be soon. I’m chucking my hat in the air. Clicking my heels. You better watch out Nell. I’m coming to check the hives Tuesday for your mum. Hettie is getting better. Thanks for asking she says and she says very keen on that ginger you mentioned please. It was a fever that went to her chest like you thought. She says she swam. chasing after the little ones who were very naughty to go in the water—before the dandelion flowers had properly died off. before the Muntjingarr, what you call Seven Sisters, were moving on a bit. Water still in chill. Brings sickness. We are not allowed to swim for a couple more weeks. If I don’t get to talk to you much on Tuesday know this. I would plait your hair every night if I could. Your Sol. Don’t swim.

  Nell, I got your note. I will meet you by the grass tree. The one with two stems. I’m worried to know you’re sad. I aint going nowhere, Nell. I’ll be waiting for you. Tomorrow night and always. S

  Nell darling, Hettie says we must get married. It’s the only way to make your folks okay with this whole thing. And so we can be together every day, always talking, always touching, never going our separate ways home like you said. Hettie heard me sneaking out last night and was waiting up for me when I come home. At first, I was gonna lie she looked that grim, but she kept saying tell me the truth boy or forever hold your tongue. I told her everything about us. Except that we been finding ways to meet long before now. I played it down a bit. But she knew we met up last night. She’s clever that way but I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face so it probably wasn’t too hard to tell. She likes you, Nell. Not quite as much as I do, mind you. Hettie says it will all work out. I’m jumping for joy. Clicking my heels. Honey harvest in 2 weeks, so I can see a lot of you then. Official! Hettie says we shouldn’t meet in secret anymore so we don’t mess everything up. I’ll have to speak to your father. What do you think, Nell my girl? I love unplaiting your hair too! Your loving Sol xx