Riding the Black Cockatoo (11 page)
{ 7 OCTOBER 2005 }
The handover was only five days away and I was getting jittery. Gary phoned to discuss preparations; he was delighted at the news that Mum and Dad had agreed to come along. Before the call, I’d been reading about the importance Indigenous people place on totems, so I asked Gary what the Wamba Wamba totem was.
‘That’s a sad story, they’re extinct down here now,’ he said, and he did sound sad too. ‘Our totem’s the black cockatoo, the one with the red tail feathers.’
I don’t have much hair on my head, but the little bit I have stood on end!
‘We call him Wiran,’ Gary went on, ‘but he’s been gone a long time, when the trees were cleared he went too.’
‘I saw him, I mean I saw one, last Sunday, on Mount Coot-tha,’ I stammered. ‘I’ve never seen one before, and I’ve been riding through that bush for years.’
‘Did he go like this?’ Gary asked, his voice bright again. ‘Ka-rak, ka-rak!’
‘That’s him! That’s the call! He was looking right at me, calling just like that, he was strong, beautiful—’ The words were rushing out of my mouth.
Gary laughed, but he didn’t seem at all surprised. ‘He was just watching over you, to make sure everything’s okay.’
‘What, like a guardian?’
‘That’s it. This is a powerful business, brother, a powerful business. Tell you what, if you can find some of those feathers for the ceremony, it’d be the icing on the cake.’ And then he was gone, his parting words – which sounded more like an order than a request – echoing around my head like stones in a tin drum. The phone cord slipped through my hand, each coil passing slowly between my fingers like worry beads until the handset beep-beeped at my feet. Where on earth was I going to find black cockatoo feathers? I pictured myself crawling through the scrub at Mount Coot-tha, and for one silly second considered taking a drive in the country to look for some road-killed crow whose feathers I could doctor with red paint. Maybe the Queensland Museum would lend me one or two; surely they’d have some.
I ran an internet search on black cockatoos and found a scientific journal article on the plight of the species in the southern parts of Australia. The main reason for the bird’s disappearance was loss of habitat. Over four million gum trees were chopped down along the Riverine reaches of the Murray River between the mid-1800s and mid-1900s: four million redgums that had provided fruit and nesting hollows for black cockatoos and many other species, sawn into railway sleepers or shipped abroad to shingle the streets of London. Then there were whole forests devastated by the weirs and levees that were constructed all along the Murray, ending the annual floods on which the plains relied for renewal. I scrolled through the article, with its photos, tables and graphs, and there at the end was a colour photograph of a single feather. Then it hit me, of course – the headdress that the Wik women had displayed at the writers festival! I don’t know why it took me so long to figure it out. I suppose my mind was overloaded, trying to stay on this weird and wonderful wave that was sweeping Mary homeward. Again I wondered, was the headdress made from the feathers of a black cockatoo, and if it was – and if I could contact the women – would they let me borrow it? It was a week since the festival. Had they returned home to Wik country already?
I knew that one of the women, Fiona, had been published by the same publishing house that had released one of my stories. I looked up my editor’s home phone number in the directory. It was a Saturday night and getting late but I decided to throw the dice again before I had the chance to talk myself out of it. I phoned Leonie, and explained rather breathlessly that I needed to get in touch with Fiona and Auntie Alyson. Leonie read out the number in her filofax and explained that Fiona was living in Brisbane and that Auntie Alyson might be still with her. Within a few minutes of remembering the headdress, I had Fiona’s phone number in my hand.
Fiona was having a pleasant evening with her family in front of the television when I phoned her. I introduced myself and explained that I had attended her talk at the writers festival and told her how I had been mesmerised by the headdress. Then I mentioned that I had grown up with an Aboriginal skull on my family mantelpiece. She groaned, as though I had reached down the telephone line and punched her in the stomach. Her reaction must have alarmed her family because the volume of the television in the background suddenly dropped and I heard a concerned voice ask, ‘What’s wrong?’ I continued, Fiona punctuating my story with gasps and exclamations of bewilderment. I felt as though I was bludgeoning her. I finished my story by going through all of the coincidences: the black cockatoo at Mount Coot-tha, the headdress, the lost Wamba Wamba totem and Gary’s request that I find some feathers. There was a long silence, and then she said, ‘So, are you asking me if you can borrow the headdress?’
‘Fiona,’ I stammered, ‘I’m not sure why I’m talking to you, I’m not even sure they are the right feathers, and I don’t even know if they’re yours – I suppose Auntie Alyson has taken them back to Wik country.’
‘My sister has gone, but the headdress is mine, I’m looking at it right now.’ Her voice was measured and calm. There was a short silence before she continued, ‘And because you have told me this story, I am obliged to let you have the headdress. When would you like to collect it?’
{ 9 OCTOBER 2005 }
Fiona lived on the far side of Brisbane, across the river which divides the city and close enough to Moreton Bay to smell the ocean. My four-year-old-daughter Bianca was in the car with me. I was a nervous wreck and I suppose I took Bianca along as a security blanket; to demonstrate that I was a good father and not the skull-cradling ghoul I felt like. I was too uptight to consult the street directory; I knew where the suburb was and for some unfathomable reason I imagined that my own intuition would lead me to the correct street. I became hopelessly lost, and even after checking the directory I overshot the turnoff to Fiona’s street by kilometres. I suppose I was nervous about stepping through the door of an Aboriginal home for the first time in my life. Would it be a rundown place with broken windows and a yard full of car bodies and yapping dogs, the classic media cliché that’s rolled out every other night on television? But no, that wouldn’t have worried me; I knew that Fiona was a strong and gifted woman, a fellow writer, a dancer and actor. I wouldn’t have cared if she’d lived in a tent. Perhaps
that
was what I was afraid of, meeting an Indigenous woman who positively radiated her culture, a culture that mine had endeavoured to keep under its heel for the last 200 years.
When I scribbled down the street name Fiona had given me – Cook Street – I hadn’t given it any thought. But as I got closer I noticed that all the surrounding streets bore the names of famous British explorers: Wentworth, Blaxland, Cunningham, Leichhardt; men whose expeditions opened the country up to waves of settlers who in turn pushed the original inhabitants from their homelands. Fiona’s home was halfway down Cook Street – named after the legendary English seafarer who’d claimed her ancestors’ country for the British Empire. And just in case anyone missed the obvious connection, her street was flanked by signposts which read James, Endeavour and Banks. For the first time in my life I felt the power of name, what it must be like to be constantly reminded – even in subtle and unintentional ways like this – that your land has been conquered, and that you, a descendant of the original owners, are now part of a minority, an ‘Other’. I wondered if Fiona felt a pang of discomfort or resentment whenever she wrote out her address, or was she used to it. I decided not to ask; I’d stepped on enough sensibilities lately.
Bianca and I pulled into the driveway of a neat little brick house. Why did I make the mental note that it was
neat
? Had my conditioning been so thorough that anything other than a clapped-out, corrugated-iron cliché would come as a surprise? Had the media done that good a job on me? Good god, was I carrying around some baggage!
Fiona’s two youngest daughters spilled out of the house; they held back for a moment, trying to look shy, but once they saw Bianca their smiles lit up like sunbeams. Fiona followed, looking a little hesitant, but after sizing me up for a moment invited us in. Inside the lounge room it was all perfectly ‘normal’:
Australia’s Funniest Home Videos
was playing softly on the television set, Fiona’s eldest daughter gossiped to a friend on the phone, a computer workstation sat in a corner overflowing with folders. But there was a strong cultural presence here too: the walls were covered with Indigenous paintings and prints, Aboriginal handicrafts and books dotted the bookshelves, and family smiled proudly in traditional dress from framed photographs. Everywhere the colours of the land dominated – natural yellows, ochres, reds – colours of country that brought the outside inside. It was much more than
neat
; here was a home that straddled two worlds. And there, high on the bookshelf, was perched the black cockatoo headdress.
Fiona’s husband, Danny, was working through a set of vigorous exercises and stretches on the floor. I sat on the couch with Bianca beside me and tried to look relaxed. Danny jumped up and shook my hand – hard! – before launching himself into another set of stretches. This man was well put together, and as his muscles rippled the word ‘warrior’ flashed through my head. I asked Danny whether he boxed, tilting my head towards a picture of Anthony Mundine on the wall. He shook his head and explained that he’d just set up a personal training business. ‘It’s gunna be a growth industry, you just wait and see; got a few steady clients already.’
Fiona’s younger daughter Ebony, who had been holding back, was unable to contain herself any longer. She leapt in front of Bianca with her hands out. ‘Let’s play !’ Bianca flew off the couch and the two skipped down the hallway to Ebony’s room.
‘Tell me your story again,’ Fiona asked. ‘Danny !’ she gently remonstrated as her husband began another impressive set of contortions.
‘Don’t mind him,’ she smiled. I could tell by the way she looked at her husband that she was crazy about him. He shot her a cheeky grin back.
I told the story again, in more detail than I’d told her over the phone. Every now and then she winced in pain or shook her head.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I just find this so hard to comprehend – I mean, why?’ She turned to Danny. ‘Can you imagine having a whitefella’s skull on our mantelpiece?’
Danny was glistening with a light coat of sweat, the veins in his arms bulged and I was expecting at any moment to be thrown out the door for upsetting his wife. When I got to the end of the story – to the bit about the cockatoo – Danny took down the headdress, gently stroking and straightening the feathers as Fiona explained the importance of birds.
‘They’re our messengers. Just the other day one landed on my windowsill and straight away I knew an auntie was sick. I rang her up and sure enough she had a really bad stomach bug.’
‘This is beeswax,’ Danny explained, pointing to the black, resin-like lump that held the feathers in place. ‘It’s strong stuff, but this headdress has been travelling to lots of dances, so it’s getting a bit knocked around.’
He placed the headdress in my lap.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of it,’ I promised.
Danny pointed to one of the feathers. ‘This one’s broken, I’ve just put some Blu-Tack behind it to keep it straight.’
Giggles and laughter wafted up the hallway from Ebony’s room and washed over us. I felt much more at ease, with the laughter, with the headdress in my lap.
‘Is it always like this?’ I asked Fiona.
‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘Well,
this
, this thing that’s happening, this power. It feels as though Mary’s being carried home on a wave that just keeps building. I feel as though I’m hanging on moment by moment.’
‘That’s the way life is supposed to be,’ said Fiona. ‘It’s normal for us, the land is telling us things all the time.’
And then she said something that I will carry with me forever. ‘You’re just a whitefella who’s learnt to listen, that’s all.’
Ebony and Bianca came bounding into the lounge room.
‘Look, Dad, look what Ebony gave me!’ Bianca held up her wrist. Around it was wrapped a homemade bracelet with Ebony’s name spelt out in beads.
Fiona smiled. ‘Trading gifts already!’
If not for the difference in colour, our two girls could have been twins; their hair was the same length and they even wore similar flowing dresses.
‘Bianca is an Italian name,’ I said, ‘it means white. Ebony and Bianca, black and white.’ There were smiles all around, until I put my foot in it. I must have gotten carried away by all the lovin’ in the room.
‘Ebony’s a special name in our house, we have a big, fat black chook called Ebony.’
Suddenly all that lovin’ froze.
Fiona wasn’t sure what to say. ‘You have a black chicken called Ebony?’
‘She’s more like one of the family,’ I said meekly.
‘She’s beautiful,’ beamed Bianca.
Fiona shook her head and laughed.
As if on cue, we all rose and headed for the door. I placed the headdress gently into the back seat and said goodbye, promising to return the feathers in a weeks time.
