I Knew You'd Have Brown Eyes (10 page)

The health workers and I developed an afternoon routine where we held different activities each day after lunch and the morning clinic. These included education, immunisation and trachoma-drop day, when we would walk from one end of the town to the other giving each resident eye drops that helped prevent trachoma. We also held training sessions where we practised techniques such as taking blood for testing and how to diagnose a urinary tract infection, for example. On top of this, I was on call at night. Some nights I got very little sleep.

Occasionally I got an invitation to the homes of the other whites but most nights I spent alone. There was no TV and I exhausted all the books in the clinic. In those first few months the Aboriginals kept to themselves. I wrote long letters home to my mother, listened to Eric Bogle on my tape recorder as he sang ‘My life’s a blind migration to an unknown destination’. I played my flute. I was lonely. When Easter came I knew the store would be closed for four days so I stocked up my fridge and cupboard. For my Easter Sunday dinner I bought a can of Harvest Beef Goulash. I asked myself over and over again what had possessed me to come here.

Around three months after my arrival, I rang Charlie one night on the radiophone, located in the community office.

‘I think I made a mistake,’ I said. ‘I’ve had no training for this work, and I’m way out in the sticks, over.’

We chatted for a while about work and news from home.

‘I don’t know what I was thinking. What I really want is to meet a man and get married and have children, over.’

‘If you do the things you’re interested in, you’ll meet people with similar interests, over.’

‘The only men here are all married, over.’

Tears streamed from my eyes. I slumped against the wall in the small room. The overhead fans whirred. I’d had such high expectations. I thought I could make a difference; now I felt stupid. We finished off the call and I walked back to my house. As I made my way through the tiny town I heard the now familiar sound of clapsticks and didgeridoos, the stamping of women’s feet as they danced. How could I get my brother to understand all this in a single phone call? I admired the closeness of this community, I knew there were some family rivalries but when the ceremonies were on, and they had them often, the community came together. Even though I appreciated this celebration of culture, it was not something I could see myself ever being wholly a part of. It was that realisation that left me feeling alone.

I recalled nightclubs in Brisbane. I hated those places; meat markets. I shuddered. It was a long shot to meet anyone way out here in the bush, but it was a long shot meeting anyone in the city too. I thought about my brother’s words. It would be so much easier if I had a partner. We could enjoy all this together. Perhaps I had put myself into a situation that was too difficult. I didn’t want to end up like Marie, living alone in a place like this at forty. But I’d taken on the job and assured the interview panel that I could cope with the isolation. I felt morally obliged to stay on, and I knew that finding a replacement would take time. As I opened the door to my lonely house, I resigned myself to stay for a little while longer.

The complex skin group system that the Aboriginals use ensures that, in small groups of people, first cousins don’t marry. I had aunts, uncles and grandparents, and was forbidden to communicate or even look at some people. Maynbunu was my aunt in every sense of her responsibility. Some weekends she took me hunting for food in nearby rivers and bushlands with other women from her clan. We walked through creeks looking for bush plums, which I later found out were a very rich source of vitamin C. We found bush honey, the sweetest honey I have ever tasted. And we fished and caught turtles. I realised that the Aboriginals didn’t need a store, they had healthy nutritious food on their doorstep and they knew how to find it. The women collected enough food for the group and Maynbunu made damper, a type of bread made from flour, salt and water. Once it was moulded into a round loaf she buried it in the sand over coals from the fire she’d made. When it was cooked, she pulled it open and we ate from the middle out – no need for foil!

On these outings it occurred to me that the basis of racism was misunderstanding. What mattered to one race of people was not the same as to another. These women were happy in the bush, collecting food, sitting in small groups gossiping as they cared for their children. I enjoyed the outing but missed going to the movies and going to the pub or out to a good restaurant. If we could just accept that people enjoyed doing different things, accepting our differences, then surely we could all get along.

‘When did your family settle here, Aunty?’ I asked her one day on one of these excursions.

‘My father came here from Roper River, when I was six,’ she said.

‘Why did he come here?’

‘He heard about that timber mill that Bapa Sheppy started.’

‘So how did you get here? There mustn’t have been any cars or planes in those days.’

‘We walked.’

‘What! That’s miles from here! How long did that take?’

‘I don’ remember, Chorty.’ She had got into the habit of calling me Chorty Wamutjun because of my short stature and to differentiate me from the other Wamutjuns in the community.

‘Maybe one month.’

‘Did you bring food for a month, for the whole family?’

‘No, we ate bush tucker!’

Early one morning I was aroused from my bed by a young girl.

‘The baby he come,’ she said.

Just as Marie had warned me, she had absconded from the hospital. I rarely called the Aerial Medical Service at night because the airstrip had no lights and it required waking people to put kerosene lamps in place so that the plane could see the strip. Several hours later, on the old clinic bed, I delivered her baby boy, cut my first ever episiotomy and sewed it up.

Later I called a doctor to report the birth.

‘Last night I delivered a baby, over.’

‘And how are they, sister?’ It was Doctor Henny, a lovely Danish doctor whom I respected.

‘Mother and baby doing well, over.’

‘And how is the nurse who delivered the baby doing? Over.’

‘A little tired, over.’

I felt much more than tired. I’d just delivered a baby all on my own, in a tiny shack in the bush. What would the nurses back at my training hospital think if they saw these conditions! I felt proud of that. But soon another thought came flooding into my mind: the event that shaped me when I was only a little older than this girl lying before me in the bed with her newborn.

When Maynbunu came to work that morning I asked her why the young girl had come alone to the clinic to deliver her baby. Maynbunu had told me previously that if a woman had her baby in the community, there were traditional midwives who attended the birth. But in this case she explained that the baby’s father was the ‘wrong skin’. The young couple had crossed a barrier that was taboo in their culture.

It seemed that I had more in common with this girl that I imagined. Thoughts of my son came pouring into my head. He was almost ten. Where was he now? Was he happy? I excused myself from the clinic saying I needed sleep but I went home and cried. Though doctor Henny had congratulated me on my successful midwifery, I felt a failure. I remembered the priest in the hospital who told me that I was a mother now and I couldn’t shake that thought. I tried to sleep but images of the labour ward kept coming at me. What had I done? It wasn’t lost on me that had I been an Aboriginal girl living in this community, my family would have been angry but they would have accepted my baby.

My sadness turned into anger. Though I knew my decision to adopt was one I had carefully considered and taken, it was patently clear to me by now that I had no other choice. I speculated on how things would have been if I had made the decision to keep Christopher. Would my mother have eventually accepted him? I hadn’t given her the chance to have that conversation.

I sank into a depression in the days that followed. I didn’t want to see anyone. One day at work I tried to express my feelings to Maynbunu but I burst into tears and she told me to go home. I had no one to confide in. I don’t even recall how or when I came out of that episode of depression. Maybe it was just a matter of survival, maybe it was that I was in a caring role at work and I put all my efforts there, or maybe because I knew I had survived these sad moments it in the past. I got over it. There was no going back.

One afternoon after I’d given a nutrition lesson at the school, the headmaster came over and greeted me. Mark was in his thirties and very good looking. I’d exchanged pleasantries with him and his wife, Geraldine, in the past but we hadn’t spoken much before that day.

‘Would you like to join us for dinner tonight?’

‘Sure, that would be lovely. What can I bring?’

‘A nice bottle of red would go with Geraldine’s superb meal, but we’ll have to pass on that one.’

Gapuwiyak was a dry community, meaning no alcohol allowed. There was a hefty fine if you were caught with any grog. I thought it was a good policy given the stories of drunken rages and domestic violence I had heard about in other Aboriginal communities, but it was hard to do without on a hot humid Friday night.

Mark and Geraldine had a large runabout boat, big enough to take us up the Buckingham River to a bay on the northern coast of Arnhem Land. Soon after that evening they asked me to join them for an overnight trip to a small island. We fished all day and camped under the stars. It felt good to be so far from civilisation and the responsibility of the clinic. I appreciated them inviting me – it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see this remote part of Australia.

Mark and Geraldine were waterskiers and, once they established a place to launch their boat, they found that Lake Evella had perfect skiing conditions. On particularly hot days they would drop by the clinic on their way home from work.

‘Feel like a bit of skiing this afternoon, Yapa?’

Jumping into that clean fresh water was instant relief and I was soon skimming along on one ski.

‘What’s a young girl like you doing out here in this isolated place?’ Mark asked me one day. We were sitting in the boat after our ski.

‘Well, I think by putting myself into challenging situations I’ll grow as a person.’

‘Is that some kind of religious punishment?’ He knew, by now, about my Catholic origins.

‘Nah, I think life’s a journey, and you can sit in a comfortable place and be taken along, or you can put yourself into challenging places and really learn about who you are.’

‘Sounds like crazy religious zeal to me,’ Geraldine said, as she wrapped a sarong around her slim waist.

‘Why are you here then?’ I said.

‘To have some fun before we have children, and to save money,’ Mark replied.

‘Mmm, well I can save a bit of money here because there’s nothing much to buy, but my salary is halved because I’m employed by the Uniting Church and they take the other half.’

There was a saying in the Territory that the people who worked there were either missionaries, mercenaries or misfits.

‘So you’re a missionary?’ Geraldine said.

‘Nah, more like a misfit.’

The people of Gapuwiyak lived a traditional life. They held many sacred ceremonies, bringing people from kilometres away. I was never privy to the reasons for the ceremonies but Maynbunu often invited me in the evenings to dance with the women.

When the lake was closed once for a big ceremony and we couldn’t ski, Geraldine and I took up aerobics. I bought a Jane Fonda tape on one of my trips to Gove and we worked out in our lycra in my lounge room.

I started jogging. It was not culturally acceptable for a woman to wear jogging pants so I would drive the Toyota to the airstrip in the early evening and run around its perimeter. I liked the isolation of the strip. When the sun began to set, the colours around me seemed exaggerated. From my running point the red soil of the airstrip stretched out before me and contrasted with the lush green trees of the bush. In the dry season the sky could be pink and orange and in the wet, dark black clouds hung like a low roof over the horizon. I loved being in that zone, far from anyone, where no thoughts troubled me. A sweat that only the tropics can produce would pour from my body, reminding me that I had worked hard.

I was frustrated that our prevention messages weren’t getting through. We saw the same people presenting with the same problems, time and time again. And I wondered, what was the best solution for Indigenous Australians who wanted to live a traditional life in the twentieth century? I began to question what we whites were trying to achieve and I directed my questions at the elders of the Uniting Church.

One day I received the church newsletter and in it was a line asking for prayers for me, for guidance. It got my hackles up and I wrote a letter to the minister in Darwin asking why I needed guidance. In response he sent a lay representative of the church, a married man, to ‘counsel’ me.

I often took in guests in my house. My spare room was the only place for visitors to stay in Gapuwiyak so it was no surprise that the ‘counsellor’ came to stay. Over dinner I told him that I thought we needed a bigger strategy for helping the Aboriginals to live healthy lives in this century. I told him I’d come here thinking that I could make a difference but I felt after almost two years I hadn’t made a dent. I tried to engage him in a discussion about how we could improve things.

After dinner he tried to hug me. I pulled away, confused.

‘I thought you might like some comfort,’ he said.

I was lost for words. What was going on here? Who needed help and guidance? Not me!

Having a baby at seventeen and relinquishing him transformed me into a wiser, more cautious person. Turning down sex from this church representative freed me from years of guilt and shame. If I’d had the self-confidence to refuse sex from my boyfriend way back then when I was seventeen, I would have. The truth was I never enjoyed it, I didn’t want it, but I thought it was part and parcel of having a boyfriend – and I wanted a boyfriend. I resolved that the next time I had sex it would be from choice, not obligation.