Home (3 page)

“Technically, that's trespassing.”

“Technically, I don't give a stuff. Let's not start with accusations of trespassing or the Baldwins will be in trouble,” Uncle Henry grins. My father grins back. They return to the car with confident strides and determined, rebellious spirits.

“OK Granny,” sings Dad, “which way?”

Granny stares out across the adjoining field directing the car onward.

“Keep going,” she mumbles, her hand sweeping in a forward gesture, as though she is chasing away a fly.

Granny's directions form a trail through the scrub. She signals the way over dry waterholes and through thorny bushes, the low tree branches scratching at Dad's new car. He starts to become agitated.

“Are you sure this is the way?” he snaps.

“Keep going,” Granny commands, unmoved, gesturing onward.

“I'm sure there must be a better way than this.”

“Keep going.”

“I hope you know what you're doing.”

“Keep going.”

My father silently fumes as a branch snaps his ear-phone aerial. It hangs limply across the back window.

“She always goes the long way,” says Uncle Henry, sensing my father's rising fury. “She avoids Temperance Creek.” Granny shoots Uncle Henry a sharp look as he utters the place name, then resumes her vigil at the window. “That's where that massacre was,” he continues. “Rounded them up like cattle, old and young, and shot them. About four hundred. And
then
they named it Temperance Creek.”

Granny speaks in her stony whisper as the branches continue to thwack the car. “There were only two young ones left, a boy and a girl. The boy they took to Milroy in 1881, and I think the girl was there too.”

Dad nods gravely, the aerial long forgotten. I feel the chill crawl up my spine and I move in my seat to shake it off.

The party in the car is silent until Granny speaks again. “Here. Stop here.”

Dad stops the car and we open the doors. The breeze drifts through the vehicle. I get out and walk around as Danielle prepares to move Granny from the car to a blanket in the paddock.

As I walk around the field I notice, beneath the tall blades of grass, the scars of the old camp, rust-eaten metal, old tins and broken glass. Everything seems still and silent, even the insects.

“Over here,” my father motions to me. I walk to the spot where he is standing and look at the ground where he points.

“This is where your grandmother lived before ...” Dad's voice trails off as thoughts flood his mind.

I stare at the soil, trying to find some sign in the dark blue and emerald-green pieces of glass and the piles of sticks, wanting something that will have meaning, but the ground stands mute. The warm wind sweeps across the knee-length grass, across my legs, like the breath of contented, sleeping children.

Through the years

3

1918

I
LIKE THE MORNING BEST of all. The fire is burning. The world seems new. Even the earth and the sky have slept.

Garibooli awoke to the prophetic laughter of the kukughagha, who always announced the dawn. Already there was movement in the camp. She lay in the lean-to, warm under the bundar
^*
skins. She watched the lithe figure of her mother poking at the coals in an attempt to excite the flames, her father and the other men gathering in preparation for a visit to a nearby settlement. In the distance she could hear her aunt's hacking cough. As the camp bustled with its early morning business, Garibooli thought of the festive atmosphere of the night before. There were visitors who had crept on to the property, unbeknownst to the gubbas
who controlled what happened on the land.

“The white man acts as though he is the only one on the land and as if it is
his
ancestors who inhabit the landscape,” her baina
would mutter, his eyes deep and thoughtful, focused on something distant. Although her parents had wandered freely all over the land when they were children, the family now lived permanently in a small section of Dungalear, confined to an enclosed space. In return, they were given the terror of God, schooling in a tin-roofed hut, clothing they now felt immodest without, and a new language which gave them new names. Garibooli had been given the name Elizabeth by the Reverend's wife, who wrote the new names into a book — making them official in dark blue ink letters.

*
bundar =
Kangaroo

gubbas =
white people

baina =
father

When Garibooli would ask why they weren't allowed to speak their language, her mother ran out of answers. All Garibooli knew was that it had to be that way because the gubbas said so. The hard thwack of a large wooden ruler across her knuckles, administered by the school mistress whose face knotted with rage at the sound of words that were not the ones that white people would use, reinforced Garibooli's understanding of the way the world worked. The Reverend's wife had tried to explain to her that she was named after an English Queen. But she loved the feel of her real name as it rolled off her tongue, preferring the way that her lips made a ripple, like on the river, to pronounce the third syllable: Ga-ri-boo-li. 'Elizabeth' sounded scratchy and high-pitched, like a bird squawk. She would whisper her real name to herself, over and over again, faster and faster. Garibooli. Garibooli. Garibooli.

Her brother had been given the name Sonny. Garibooli thought of the word 'sunny' from the first time she heard it so began to call him the name 'Euroke', which was the name for the sun in the language they were forbidden to use. He, in return, called her 'Booli', because he knew she liked her real name best.

Yesterday morning the camp had been bustling with soft excitement over the arrival of old Kooradgie
^*
. The men hovered expectantly and the women had been especially diligent in preparing the food. Larger bundar had been killed. There were fewer now with the farmers and the fences. Her father and the other men were gone several days to bring them back.

*
Kooradgie =
a wise elder with a gift for healing

Kooradgie hobbled with a stick and had an eye missing, the lid in a permanent wink. Garibooli had known him all of her life, almost twelve years, and she now looked forward to the sporadic visits from the hunched-over, strangely shaped man. His skin was marked with deep spots and he might have scared her had he not been so kind. In the afternoon, he had sung to the children and told a story about the biggibilla
^*
man:

*
biggibilla =
echidna

Long ago, food was scarce and the people were hungry. Even when people had shared what they had managed to catch and find, they were still hungry. Everyone was getting thinner and thinner, except one old man. So one night, after they had shared some small fish that had been all the food that they could find, the other men followed the old man back to his camp. From the bushes, they watched him as he leant over his fire. They could see, just as they smelt the sweet smell of cooking meat in the air, that the old man was eating a big piece of bundar, from one he had killed but kept to himself. The men were angry and beat the old man who had broken the law with his selfishness. As he hobbled off, his legs broken, the men threw spears at him. The old man crawled over the land and his spears turned to spikes, his back legs faced inwards because of the broken bones. You can see them in the footprints of the biggibilla who is forever a reminder of the selfishness of the old man.

Now, when Garibooli saw the spikey beast she would remember the story and the lesson of sharing.

Earlier in the evening, she had joined her mother in the women's circle, listening to the talk of food. It was ration day tomorrow. The women were complaining about the salted meat that was part of the food provisions. It made the stomach grumble and painfully ache. Although the men would work with sweat-drenching effort on Dungalear and the nearby farms, selling wild game or chopping wood, there was very little money and the women would always worry that there was not enough food. The older women wistfully remembered the days when food was plentiful, but that was before the farmers changed the balance of the land forever, leaving the earth incapable of providing the essentials for life.

The talk had turned from the subject of food to hushed whisperings about a more serious and, Garibooli understood from the tone of the voices, a more sinister subject. Tom Kerrigan, the gubba who ran the ration store, had touched one of Garibooli's cousins, Karrwi.

“He's not getting those filthy white hands on my daughter. No. He'll not put a finger on Booli.” The evil in the man's touch was conveyed to the young girl by the seething anger in her mother's voice, the set determination in her eyes.

Later in the evening, the women had joined the men in a large circle. Some of the younger children were playing on the outside, behind the adults, but still close enough to see the fire. Garibooli didn't join their games. She liked to listen to the stories the older people would share.

That night, Garibooli had watched the sky, where she had seen the twinkling that formed the Mea-Mei
^*
, until she'd shut her eyes and pretended to be asleep, her head resting on her mother's lap. She could smell the smoke and feel the heat of the fire while her mother stroked her hair.

*
Mea-Mei =
the Southern Cross

The talk had moved to the war. There were men among their family who had left to fight, taking valuable manpower away from their camp. For years, the movements of the troops dominated the conversation. It was all going to be over by the first Christmas, they had all said when it began. Now, it was three years on. But this war, on shores far away, seemed less real than the wars in the stories of Kooradgie. The Eualeyai and Kamillaroi men who fought in the faraway land had fought by choice, not for survival as their fathers and grandfathers had. Kooradgie had been remembering his ancestors and spoke of the mysterious disease, dunnerh-dunnerh
^*
, caused by the evil magic of the wundat
who lived on the other side of the great mountains. The disease had caused the marks on his face, but he was one of the lucky ones because many had died.

*
dutmerh- dunnerh =
smallpox

wunda =
ghost (a reference to white people)

The voices hushed as Kooradgie retold a tale. He cleared his throat and his voice began to hum in the lilting sound of his own language, his eyes never moving from the flickering flames.

It was back in the days when the wunda were scarcer. The ones that were here were the lowest and the meanest of the lot — cattle thieves, convicts and ex-convicts. In those days, we were run down like animals. We lived in constant fear, sometimes only moving at night. Many of the Aboriginal women were captured and abused by the wunda. And you know the punishment for doing that to one of our women. Our law is very strict on that. But they had no respect, the wunda, and when they came they began to run the women down and insult them.