by Molly Murn
Nup. Can’t see anything. Could be grown over?
Maybe.
Pearl remembers Nico for a moment stretched out vulnerably after they’d made love near the inlet following Nell’s wake, and she cupping his penis and everything of him in the whole of her hand, the sun glaring down on his chest and the side of her face, and his skin so white and so bare. But he shone. And the scrimshaw shone, like some other kind of matter. Not dirt, or leaf, or plywood, or desiccated bees. This was polished bone, not the weathered bones of fallen animals. Sea bone. Out of place there, and strangely cool. Nico had fingered the yellowing surface and the etched lines of a woman’s face. They’d marvelled at it and then he’d smoothed it over her cheeks and lips and in the dip of her collarbone. She thinks of it now as some kind of talisman of fertility. She is pregnant.
Nico puts his arm around Pearl and leans his forehead against the back of her neck. They stay there a long while, the tree imprinting its rough pattern on Pearl’s skin.
This is the one, she says.
Nico stands and unpacks the box of implements they’ve brought. He begins sweeping the dirt in a methodical perimeter around the grass tree, clearing debris. Pearl takes out the long matches and the newspaper and the kerosene. Nico uncaps the jerry can and pours water on the dirt around the tree. Dampening. Together they stuff the screwed-up newspaper in the tree’s secret places, parting the protective leaves lovingly. They are careful with the kerosene, not to get it on their hands, and dab it on the little bundles of newspaper. Nico had wanted to use firelighters—safer. Pearl thought it somehow cheating, though now she wonders whether Nico had, in fact, been right. The element of fire, not to be reckoned with. And this plan, slightly mad, she knows.
You should be the one to light it, he says.
It catches easily. Flames spreading in quick dancing steps and then wrapping, spiralling around the tree like a dervish. The leaves are oily. They spit and snarl and resist. Pearl and Nico step back and the tree roars at them. In the middle of searing brightness and the smoke, Pearl sees in flashes the silhouette of the tree, the heart, the bones, its crooked naked outline. Pearl cries and it is not for Nell, not even for herself, but it’s some other bodily response that she surrenders to. Something primal. Nico stamps at the spot fires and wields the second jerry can of water heroically on the nearby shrubs.
When the fire is just a gentle crackling and the smoke whips to follow them wherever they stand, they step back to the clearing and sort of crumple. Together, they watch the whole thing burn. Release it from the heart place where it grew—Nell’s love, her own grief, and all the ways we are connected to each other. Connective tissue of the universe. Her tears sting as they dry. Nico’s hand is strangely cold on her shoulder—adrenaline, she thinks.
There is something about that place—its expansiveness, its wind-rush, and its sea-howl that makes everything she holds tight just fall away. Her mind turns to all those before Nell who have on the island known the thrum of the sea in their ears, the wind beating around their shelters, or shaking the windows, and the damp smell of salt in the midnight air. And the sand. Everywhere sand. In the bed, under fingernails, in the hollow at the base of the neck and sand with every mouthful of food.
In the last of the light, the smoke is a shroud, monochrome over the sculptural lines of the tree. Its shape revealed. A chiaroscuro. Two stems charred and hopeful in the way they stand so straight and sure together. The letters gouged into its skin long blistered over—healed and bumpy with scar tissue. All the names are gone now and in the deep of the tree. Disturbed by the smoke, a bee drifts above, its wings glinting.
Lubra Creek
there is nothing that says you were here,
the mallee continues to grow in a tangle
with its gold-tipped crowns of green
and messy bark hanging down like scrolls,
that I wish I knew how to read
there is nothing that says you were here,
it is cool and muted as it was
the creek curving to a breathing sea
out and in
the mainland beckoning like a mirage
there is nothing that says you were here,
even though you were tied and lashed
for trying to escape across Backstairs Passage,
flesh sliced from your buttocks like a seal’s—
the blood is all gone now
there is nothing that says you were here
but the minka bird—messenger of death,
who wails overhead as its ancestors did before.
Glossary of Ngarrindjeri Terms
brugi fire coals
dawuldi crow
kalari coastal wattle
kalathami native currant; coastal bearded-heath
kateraiperi echidna
kildjeri grass tree
kinyeri heart of the grass tree
kondoli whale
kringkari spirit people; whitefella; corpse; under layer of skin
kukaki kookaburra (laughing)
kuti cockles
Maringani Autumn, when the Maringani stars appear in the sky
minka bird (most probably a stone curlew) messenger of death
munthari wild apple; muntrie
Muntjingarr Seven Sisters constellation; Pleiades
narambi period of initiation; sacred; dangerous; forbidden; taboo
ngalaii honey from the flowers of the grass tree stem
nganangi fruit of pigface plant
ngatji totem; friend; countryman; protector
nginbulun run(ning) away
Ngurunderi the Creator
Ngurungaui Kangaroo Island (from Ngurunderi)
nori Australian pelican
panpandi native cherry; wild cherry
plonggi fighting club
ruwa/ruwar body
ruwi/ruwe/ruwee land; country; ground; birthplace
taralyi throwing stick; spear-holder; woomera
tawari basket made of rushes
tiyawi goanna; iguano
wakaldi shield
wiloki winter yam
wiltjeri native cherry
wolokaii sponge for collecting honey
wurlie shelter
yalkari old man’s beard; reeds; rushes
yunnan speaking; talking; yarning
Author’s Note
Set into the hill that faces the mainland and overlooking Penneshaw Beach, Kangaroo Island, is the Contemplation Seat: a memorial to the Tasmanian and mainland Australian Aboriginal women (including Ngarrindjeri, Kaurna, Peramangk and Ramindjeri nations) brought to Kangaroo Island by sealers prior to official settlement in 1836. Engraved on each concrete step leading to the seat are the names of women (the ones we know about from both public and anecdotal records) who contributed to the history of Kangaroo Island. Some of the women’s names can be made out, but most of them are starting to wear away because of the weather. They are disappearing. Some names never made it onto the steps.
More often than not, the women were forced into these relationships on the sealers’ terms. They were stolen from their homelands and brutalised. In some cases, however, the partnerships over time became more equitable than they seem at first glance. The relationships between the Aboriginal women and the sealers were complex. And in these relationships there was the opportunity for cross-cultural exchange and for a shared space to develop, where the two cultures became inextricably tied to one another. My aim in writing this story was to show a nuanced perspective on the relationships between sealer men and Aboriginal women. I was both inspired and informed by the work of Lynette Russell in her Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790– 1870, where she highlights the complexity and transformative power of these relationships.
While this is a work of fiction, I have drawn upon a range of primary and secondary sources. I would like to acknowledge those anthropologists, historians, scholars, authors and early colonial writers whose research and writi
ngs have helped shape my understanding of Kangaroo Island’s past, as well as my knowledge of aspects of Ngarrindjeri culture. These include Norman Tindale, H.J. Finnis, W.H. Leigh, John Wrathall Bull, Alexander Tolmer, Rev. G. Taplin, Jean Nunn, Wynnis J. Ruediger, J.S. Cumpston, Rebe Taylor, David Unaipon, Lester Irabinna Rigney, Deborah Bird Rose, Stephen Muecke and, especially, Diane Bell.
I owe much to Richard Hosking’s body of work on Kangaroo Island; particularly, his introduction of William Cawthorne—educator, diarist, columnist, author, artist and occasional preacher of the new colony of South Australia. Cawthorne’s novella, The Kangaroo Islanders, depicts the lives of sealers and their Aboriginal ‘wives’ in the first literary representation of Kangaroo Island’s early history. Cawthorne’s novella gives an insight into the sealers’ lingo and patterns of speech, but it also describes the landscape and climate of Kangaroo Island in exquisite detail. It also references ‘A Kangaroo Island Dinner’, where the heart of a grass tree, ‘a queer-looking vegetable’ is eaten as a delicacy.
Nell’s Seal Brother story is adapted from Duncan Williamson’s story of the same name in Tales of the Seal People.
The lines on pages 204 and 231 are taken from 2:14 and 8:6–7 of The Song of Songs: A New Translation and Commentary by Ariel Bloch and Chana Bloch. Thank you, George Borchardt, Inc, for permission to reproduce this.
The poem ‘Lubra Creek’ was first published in Rewired: Friendly Street Poets 32. Thank you, Maggie Emmett.
While this is a work of fiction, I have identified individual Ngarrindjeri people with whom I worked, such as Aunty Ellen and Uncle Tom Trevorrow at Camp Coorong. I have also retained the names of key individuals whose lives are documented in the historical records such as Nat Thomas, Piebald—one of the names given to the well-known figure of ‘Fireball Bates’—Governor Henry Wallen and Tiger Simpson. These men are all Kangaroo Island personalities about whom information is easily available. In the naming of other characters, I sought names that reflected the time period and sensibility of the story; for example, Maringani. By coincidence, ‘Nell’ and ‘Pearl’ were also the names of sisters born at the mission at Point McLeay (Raukkan). The ‘Nell’ and ‘Pearl’ of Heart of the Grass Tree are fictional and not based on the Cameron sisters of Point McLeay. The characters of Anderson and Emue are sketched from records found in N.J.B. Plomley’s Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834, and his Weep in Silence: A History of the Flinders Island Aboriginal Settlement, with the Flinders Island Journal of George Augustus Robinson 1835–1839. I also used Luise Hercus and Jane Simpson’s History in Portraits: Biographies of Nineteenth Century South Australian Aboriginal People to help imagine my characters from two hundred years ago into being.
The black glass scraping tool that belongs to Emue and Maringani in the story was found on Kangaroo Island by textile archaeologist Keryn James, and is described in detail in her thesis, ‘Wife or Slave’. Thank you, Keryn, for illuminating the minutiae of life for the islander women in the 1800s. I would also like to thank Andy Gilfillan of Antechamber Bay, who showed me the location of Lubra Creek and Waubs Wall, and allowed me to spend a magical afternoon at those places, gestating ideas for this story. And thanks, too, to Christine Walker and the late Karno Walker for the chats at Murray Lagoon, and for the notes you both put together regarding Kangaroo Island history.
The glossary of Ngarrindjeri terms at the beginning of the novel has been put together using the Ngarrindjeri Picture Dictionary, compiled by Mary-Anne Gale and Dorothy French with the Ngarrindjeri Elders, Ngarrindjeri for Smarties, compiled by Mary-Anne Gale and Phyllis Williams and Diane Bell’s Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was, and Will Be. It was also compiled from conversations with the late Uncle Neville Gollan of Camp Coorong, who generously shared Ngarrindjeri words—their meanings and pronunciation. And without the guidance of the late Uncle Tom Trevorrow and his wise counsel in regard to Ngarrindjeri culture, protocol and sensibility, this book would not have been possible. Uncle Tom knew the importance of meaningful dialogue, across and between cultures. Yarning with him was a gift. Any errors are my own. And thank you, especially, Aunty Ellen Trevorrow, for making the conversations with Uncle Tom possible, and for your generosity and friendship along the journey of Heart.
Acknowledgements
The making of this book would not have been possible without the support of the following dear people.
My children, Saskia and Jachimo, who have lived gracefully with this book for a long time now and, in many ways, were its inspiration. I write for you. My parents, Sally and Alan, who nurtured my imagination always. My sister, Roxy, who is the loveliest person I know. My grandmothers—their stories. Thank you, Michael Collister, for your insights and your hospitality, and Geoff Wallbridge, for advice on all things weather and Kangaroo Island. Thanks so much, Jula Bulire. Jacqueline Kohler, thanks for the champagne and chats and for always checking in. Also, Catherine, Emma, Tess and Cin—lovely gals.
My gratitude to early readers of the novel, and tinker-sisters, Melinda Graefe and Threasa Meads. And to Jeri Kroll, who was there with this story when it was just a seedling. Thank you, Giselle Bastin, Janie Conway-Herron, the late Syd Harrex, Mark O’Flynn, Catherine Milne and especially Jaqueline Blanchard, for seeing the potential. Thank you, too, Flinders University and the Document Delivery Service.
Thank you to the absolutely lovely Pippa Masson and all at Curtis Brown Australia for looking after me so very well. Thank you, Lisa Babalis and Kate Cooper at Curtis Brown UK. Hannah Kent—beautiful writer and mentor—thank you! You know why. Also, dear word-weavers, Alex Miller, Rebekah Clarkson and Julia Cameron, thank you for showing the path.
The gorgeous staff and friends at Matilda Bookshop, Kim, Sarah, Fran, Heloise and especially Joanna, wonderful reader of books, and Gavin—for encouraging me to find ways for Heart Tree to be in the world, and then supporting it so beautifully. Thank you!
My dearest publisher Meredith Curnow and editor Elena Gomez, whose fine insights helped grow Heart Tree to fruition—you’ve been amazing and such a pleasure to work with. Thanks to the whole team at Penguin Random House Australia, especially Anyez Lindop, Bella Arnott-Hoare, Louisa Maggio, Lou Ryan, Clive Jackson, and all the sales reps. Lex Hirst, thank you.
Jelina Haines and Diane Bell, I am grateful for your insights and conversation and advice. Thank you for being so generous.
This book has been supported by a residency fellowship from Varuna, The Writers House. My residency there saw the beginning of this book coming to fruit.
Andrew—my fire. Without you, there is no heart tree. Darling thank you. All-ways.
Finally, thank you, dear readers. Release it from the heart place where it grew.
Molly is a South Australian writer. She holds a Bachelor of Dance and a Masters of Creative Arts, and is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing. Molly also works as a bookseller at Matilda Bookshop and teaches yoga. Her poetry has been published in various anthologies, including Overland, Transnational Literature and Friendly Street. She lives in the Adelaide Hills and loves to tango and spend time in wild places.
A Vintage Australia book
Published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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First published by Vintage Australia in 2019
Copyright © Molly Murn 2019
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ISBN 9780143792505
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ns and design by Louisa Maggio © Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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