by Molly Murn
Next time I see you, I’ll go down on my knees, I promise. I’ve upset you. I haven’t heard nothing from you. You okay? I could feel you across the table. The more I tried not to think about all that space between us, the more I couldn’t bear it. Makes me jingle and jangle. And the sting, I’m alright y’know. It’s just I was thinking about what I was gonna say to your father bout us getting married and wallop I was stung. It was like a hot wire pincing. Couldn’t think straight. I am reading too much into it. I’ve noticed I’m doing that lately. When I see you, I know everything is good between us. The best things could be. But when I don’t see you, I have mad ideas. Too long apart. Let me know how you are. What you’ve been up to.
Nell where have you gone where have you GONE.
Nelly! Nell. Hettie and I was that worried we came to see you and you weren’t there. I’m still putting these notes in our spot. Hoping you’ll find them. Not giving up.
Nell. Honey. I hope this letter finds you. I’ve writ you that many. Where are you? Please let me know everything’s okay. Is it my fault Nell? Your mum says your staying with cousins in Adelaide and helping out in a button shop. You never said anything about cousins. Or buttons. Not ever! Your mum’s so sick of me badgerin her that she says I’m not to work for her anymore. It don’t bother me. It wasn’t that kinda work—she didn’t pay me and I thought we was all friends. Neighbours. You see Nell it was all about you. And the bees, they brought us together, don’t you think? That’s why I was always comin’ around. And Aunty said I had to help your mum with your dad sick and no brothers. So that’s how it was and I liked things the way they were. If I’d known you was going, I’d of kissed you more. Told you more things.
Your mother was real sad when last clapped eyes. I think she misses you. But I worry for you Nell. She’s a tough bird that one. She’s gonna turn that sadness into something real hard. It scares me. I know she thinks I’m not good enough. I could be. You used to think so too.
Your old man wrote down this address and told me not to breathe a word to your mother or anyone. Which is further proof your mum don’t approve of me. Please write. Please talk to me. I’ll wait. Remember last summer when I sat all night outside your bedroom window? I slept with my back to the wall. And you never came. Your dad was in a fever and you were helping your mum. Well I’m waiting like that now. Back to the wall. Geranium perfume tickling my nose. And through the cold. You know how I hate the cold. How it gets in my bones and won’t leave. But I’m waiting. Nell, I’m waiting this out.
Still nothing back from you, I’m breaking. I’m never gonna be the same. Sorry Nell. I upped sticks and came here for yaccaring. Antechamber Bay. What else is there for me to do? The yaccas are nice and close to the road here, so’s I don’t need my own transport. Just an axe and a hook and a pile of jute bags. Hettie’s gonna lose the farm, and so I got no other prospects now. Nothing to offer you. It’s no wonder you’ve turned away.
By the end of the day, I’m coated in red dust head to foot like I’m ochred up for ceremony. And the sweat runs down like rivers through the red dust of me. Like tears. I’m just a body now, and I can put it to work—yaccaring, laying roads, farm jobbing, eucalypting. I like being with the yaccas, your grass trees best. I think you know why. And I can turn these bags of gum into food on the table just by flexing my muscles. I can put in the effort. Keep my reaping hook sharp. I’m just dragging this body through sunup to sundown. Trying not to think of you.
It’s a small camp near the old sealers hut at Chapman River. Just me and a couple other fellas sharing a tent made of hessian. Dirt floor. Cooking up potatoes and onions for dinner. Yarning by the fire at night. Especially with Tiger Simpson—he’s a character alright. He says he’s camped on every three-quarter mile of road in the Dudley district and I believe him. Tiger’s got everything we need out here piled up in his old wheelbarrow including a banjo and we sing at night. In the day we strip the gum from the trees with our axes. It’s my job to keep moving the boat around the trunk—that’s the little tray that catches the fibres and the gum. When it’s full I tip it out onto the canvas spread round the bottom and then I tie it all up in a bundle and haul it over to the jigger for sifting. The damn thing gets shaken by hand and that arm shuddering job falls to yours truly. But the gum’s fine as sugar once it’s gone through the sieve. All set to be sent off overseas for explosives. Isn’t that a thing! Nell, you should see what happens when you set fire to the trees. I wish you could see.
Last night Tiger showed me how you can nibble on the spear of the grass tree. It’s like sugared almonds, Nell. The only sweet thing out here in this dusty place. And then he got me thinking about something that’s like glass in my foot now. I can’t forget it. Every move I make, wham, it hurts.
Do you remember last year when little Lizzy my cousin wasn’t allowed to be the fairy in the school concert? She cried and she cried those pretty brown eyes of hers. And we couldn’t understand why she wasn’t picked? She was the smallest and cutest. And she was the lightest one to fly through the starry sky we all helped paint. But that great lump Amelia was picked. They couldn’t even get her off the ground. Well, Tiger says it’s because Lizzy got black in her. I suppose I knew this was why all along, but I didn’t want to know it if you get my meaning. It got my ‘Tassie up’ as Tiger likes to say. Tiger says I gotta be more proud, like him. Flaunt it, he says. You’re a blackfella he says. And don’t you go getting cold-footed, he says. He says I should enlist. Tiger’s the proudest Anzac I know, Nell. He never misses the parade down in Adelaide. So I guess I’m considering it even with this glass in my foot. And it seems you won’t have me now.
I’ve been thinking a lot out here about everything and I can’t be stripping gum trees my whole life. And you? Will you be selling buttons forever? I imagined something different for us. But Tiger’s calling me now. We’re tying some bits of old tin together. Rain coming. I just wanted you to know where I am. So I’m giving you these words Nell—it’s everything I’ve got now.
Love,
Your Solomon of the bees
1849
Lubra Creek, Antechamber Bay
Maringani likes the way everything is hushed in the creek bed. The in and out breath of the ocean, muffled and regular, and the shade so thick, the women sleep here in the heat of the afternoon. She will not go near the tree where Poll was lashed. That tree is very sad now. But this is a women’s place and they protect it so that it will take care of them in return. Maringani and Betty and Minnie and Mary of Blackfellows in Hog Bay, and Waub, too, and the older children, are talking fire. They’ve been camping out, waiting for the winds to be right, the spirit to be ready. Tomorrow, in the cool of the morning they will spread out from here and light spot fires in the grass. They will walk barefoot, fanning and coaxing the flames. Cold fires. The light of the fire bringing life, and the smoke, the spirit, will cleanse. Fire is at the heart of all things, Maringani knows. It is kin. In the hearts of grass trees, even, there is fire. Without fire, the grass trees cannot regenerate.
But it is difficult now, burn grass time, with all the fences and the land carved up, so it takes more planning, more discussing. Especially after the trouble Sal and Suke got into with the settlers. They’re in hiding now. Maringani fingers the shells around her neck Sal had given her when they’d all cleared out from Three Wells River. She thinks of the shells as little ocean songs, the way they trick the light, and are blue and green and like the moon and the sea all at once.
Betty pulls her red knitted cap down low and rests against the trunk of mallee, her chin sinking into the folds of her neck. It is not because Betty is tired, but because she does not agree with Waub, and so she shuts her eyes. Waub is a loner. No kin. Just herself and the stone wall she built overlooking the gully. And so, Betty decides Waub has no say—she doesn’t have a farm or Nat Thomas’s reputation at stake. Anyway, Bet is the queen around here with her lovely Freshfields, a house just like the settlers’. She found a bar of gold, too—struck
lucky! Waub thinks it’s time for a hot fire, to burst open the hearts of the trees, but Maringani knows that even though Waub is right, it is too dangerous. She will go along with Bet for now. Minnie is there, too, and tiny, with her long stick-like arms and legs and a shock of wiry, white hair, which the children like to decorate with combs and flower-chains and shiny bits of shell. Maringani holds the glass scraping tool and runs its cool edge along her thigh. Whenever she is apart from William, it reminds her of him. And of Emue, of course.
Chapman River, Antechamber Bay
William thinks that in being here at the river again, there’s a sort of beautiful endless return, not quite a circle, like Maringani’s weaving that grows out and out from the centre, ever-widening. He is digging for kuti, and like Maringani’s country, across the way there is freshwater and saltwater mixing here. There is sand dune and grass country. There is spinifex. William loves to be between the river and the sea listening to the sea grass whisper and croon. Place of crossing over. If he cranes his neck towards the south-east he can just make out the Sturt Light that he helped her build—that lighthouse that made his shoulders strong and his cough so ragged. The lighthouse that trapped his breath, so thinks Maringani. Behind the river, he has cleared a space for watermelons and vegetables, though they don’t grow so well here as at Wallen’s, and he’s added onto the remains of the sealers’ hut, making the back outer wall an inner wall, keeping the original hearth.
There’s four of them living here now—Minnie, still in her wurlie on the other side of the river—William, Maringani, and their youngest, Beatrice. Emma, the only one born at Three Wells, lives in Hog Bay now with her husband and the little’uns, Jack, Silvie and Hettie. And Samuel stayed with the Wallens all that time ago, and was god knows where now. William sends little arrows of hope and light his way whenever he thinks of him, though he’s not to mention his name. Firstborn. He’d be a man now—older than William was when he’d become his father. To William, Samuel is a lurch in his chest that is something between worry and longing and surrender. He wonders if Mari ever thinks of him. He doesn’t think so.
In the shallows a black-winged stingray steals gracefully along the sandy bottom, and William straightens to follow it with his gaze. A small cloud, he thinks, in a fathomless sky, and he wonders how long he and Mari can hold fast here. He worries about burn grass time now—they’re already attracting too much attention from the settlers, and he’d tried to be so very quiet, just tending his own little patch. Everything was changing. When the boats started coming in one after the other, thick as sap, the island grew heavy and weary with footprints that would not disappear.
King George Beach (Sandy)
On the threshold of a hive, thinks Diana, preparing the smoker, and acknowledging this small ritual she has come to understand. It is the first day of the new year. She tests the bellows and the smoke is gentle as whisper. Not too hot. Bees have a tenderness for the colour blue, Diana read in Nell’s falling-apart copy of Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee that now sits on her mantle, so she’d painted the boxes blue. I have a tenderness for blue too. She fingers the lapis lazuli pendant she bought to mark her shift to the island and hopes this keeping of bees is a somehow fitting way to acknowledge Nell’s hexagon-holed story. And Sol’s. And Nell’s mother’s, too. She has an inexplicable sorrow for that grandmother, knowing how easily one can be placed on the outside of children—even their own. Especially their own. Diana marvels at the baffling industry inside the box. The slow drone. Every bee playing its small perfect part. Each time she waves the smoke in large slow gestures, it is not that the bees are under attack, but that they submit to a force, something like a natural catastrophe, and they dip themselves in honey, ready to build a new refuge should they need to flee the ancient one—the first one. She loves the drama of this. The passion—the higher purpose. Fleeing. She hovers at the hive like the bees are her wily charge. She knows them at their noisiest, knows their shivering darkness. Knows their honey to be a beautiful golden thing. Sweet nourishment. Belonging, now, to the island like so many have before. The bees and Diana. The wounds passed down from her mother are staunched—a little. She might come to understand them yet. Understanding is only ever first a listening. The bees huddle together like they’re listening. And, of course, they always know just what to do.
Sol, my streak of blue—once awakened, I could only burn; burn away all that was before and burn in the inmost heart of me where you reached right in, setting us aflame, burning down the tinder of your burning world and mine; our fire leaves a wake that burns us to the bone—guts this house of love my love—but turns us to burning burnished gold too my love. What can we salvage but our own charred remains? Let me love you long and burning light light light.
Sol, my sun. Samuel, my lonely stranded moon.
near Lubra Creek
Maringani is almost as light as air. She knows there is nothing much to earth her now. The fire is warm, but the heat goes right through her, as if she is evaporating. She has walked and walked and walked. For a whole week, since Weellum died, she has walked, and that was the beginning of her disappearing. She has been cutting out kinyeris from the grass trees with Emue’s scraper. The hearts of grass trees to keep her alive, but with her own heart breaking, this one will be her last. William was right—this was a place you couldn’t hold on to. Always slipping through. She knows this is because it’s land of the dead, Kukakun, entrance way to the Sky World. But the country here has been good to her. Ngurungani. Kangaroo Island. She’d been gentle with its body and it showed her things. She was sorry she could no longer take care of it. No more burn grass. Their bodies were all hurting now. Choking.
Maringani rubs the scar she made for Emue just below her hairline. Where the rock had split the skin raggedly. Where the blood had gushed and dripped into her eyes, changing how everything looked. And there’s the other scar too, tight on her belly, where the rock had not got rid of the boy growing inside.
She chews the kinyeri slowly. It is fibrous in her mouth, like she’s eating a weaving. From behind Waubs Wall, she watches the grass tree burn, its heart set free to grow again. The flames bright and loud curl around and around and spiral upwards as if the spirit of the tree flies out, and Mari wants to go with it. She thinks of Ngurunderi’s wives bound up in the stem of the grass tree. Maringani runs her hands over the neatly interlocking stones of the wall and marvels at Waub’s strength. Good place, this one. Maringani lies down with her back pressed to the wall and her knees curled in protectively. Weellum always said her bones were filled with air, like the bones of birds. But it was he who made her light. And remembering the spiced honey smell of him makes her even lighter still. Light as fire. The scraper falls from her hand and when it catches the sun, it gloams like black water.
near Antechamber Bay
The scruffy limbs of the mallee turn gold at dusk, glowing almost, and reddening as the sun drifts lower—the last burning ember. Pearl wonders whether they’ve crossed some kind of threshold turning down the track that runs past Nell’s childhood creek, everything’s so drenched in other-wordly light. Small kangaroos silhouette the hills, their alert ears and humped backs making perfect outlines against the empty sky. They turn their noses towards the car, and Pearl leans out the window to better glimpse their little marsupial faces as they pass. So many of them. A gathering. The light gentle for them now after the burning rag of day. Nico slows the car to a stop.
I’ve never seen so many kangaroos at once, he says.
I know—so strange.
Shall we keep going? Do you know where to go?
Just a little further along.
But they sit in the car and don’t move. The ocean in the distance is flat and shiny. Mirror silver. And the grasses in the foreground are catching the light now. The hairs on Nico’s arms hold the sun. Eventually, Nico turns the car and they continue along the track. Pearl points to where he should pull in near the empty creek that is just a memory of water now. There is
more than one grass tree, and they wander between them, lifting up the sharp leaves and checking the black flanks. Almost like inspecting cattle for brandings. But the trees are so very quiet and stationary and give nothing away.
Nell, which one? Pearl whispers.
She scans the curve of creek and wonders where the best place to lie down would be. There is a small mound, a clearing. And there’s a grass tree beside it. Pearl crouches before the tree, placing her hands on its sides. It has two stems, jutting upwards, leaning slightly towards each other. They pin the sky. I wonder if two stems means it has two hearts, Pearl thinks.
Nico squats beside her. Is this it?
Not sure. Could be.
Nico crawls around the tree, running his hands up and down its rough stubby length, peering closely. Pearl rests her forehead against it. Her blood thumps in her ears and the grass tree’s own vascular system carries water and minerals from one part of the tree to another. Slow metabolism.
