Riding the Black Cockatoo (8 page)
‘Mate, Mary is going back into the same ground, the
same
ground he used to walk on, the same side of the river even!’
Craig was pleased, but remained calm. ‘Mate, there are big wheels turning in the universe that we haven’t even begun to understand yet.’
I could only agree. After the call I closed my eyes and for a moment I could
feel
those big wheels turning like constellations, unstoppable in their tidal force. Since deciding to return Mary, doors had been flying open before me. Something was going on, ‘it’ was all around me, but if I looked too hard it vanished.
I made my way to the desk and tried to concentrate on my work and studies, but it was impossible to stay focused. I looked up my uncle’s number; like my father, he was a veterinarian and the two had shared a practice together for over 20 years, but since their retirement I’d rarely seen him. He seemed happy to hear from me and had heard of my efforts to have Mary returned. As a man of science and medicine, he was a little bemused by all the fuss being made over some old bones. My uncle was a country vet fresh out of veterinary school when he started his practice in Swan Hill in 1966, and like my father he spent much of his time calling on farms.
‘There were bones everywhere along the Murray,’ he explained. ‘Before we came along, the Riverine plains supported the highest concentration of blacks in the country.’
My uncle described the vast networks of irrigation channels that were gouged through the earth to draw water from the Murray River into the distant fields. Excavation machines called ‘rippers’ would tear open the earth in long lines, often opening up burial sites.
‘These burial sites were often in raised mounds called camp ovens,’ he explained. ‘When the Murray flooded, which it did every year, the blacks would camp on these ovens; I saw some that were bloody huge. Well, if a blackfella died during a flood they had to put the body somewhere, so they planted it in the camp oven.’
I asked why they were called camp ovens.
‘Well, I guess they were really midden heaps, like the ones you find along the coasts – they’re a build-up of thousands of years of shell and bone, leftovers really. The mounds are just shell-grit and ash. They’d dig a firepit in it and do all their cooking there. Sometimes they’d cover the food over and do a slow cook using big clay balls to hold the heat.’
‘Like a Maori
hangi
?’ I asked.
‘That’s it. You can still find the clay balls all over the place. But the thing about these camp ovens is that they drained really quickly – because they were mainly ash and shell-grit – so bones and artefacts tended to be really well preserved. Things buried in normal soil break down much quicker.’
My uncle explained that one night in a Swan Hill pub he’d mentioned a recently ripped open mound to a young pathologist.
‘This young fella begged me to take him out to the farm, so a few days later I took him out. There were bones all over the place. He thought it was Christmas,’ my uncle chuckled. ‘That’s when I decided to souvenir a couple too, and that’s how Mary ended up on your old man’s wall unit.’
‘So, you didn’t have to notify anybody?’ I asked.
‘No!’ My uncle scoffed at the question. ‘Burial sites were being ripped open and ploughed up all over the place. Sometimes a farmer might feel a little guilty about it and leave a few sugarbags of bones by the police station at night.’
‘So what did the police do?’ I was hanging on my uncle’s every word by now.
‘Loaded ’em up into the paddy wagon and took ’em to the rubbish tip,’ he replied.
‘The dump! You mean they just chucked them in with everyone’s garbage?’ I imagined bags of skulls lying amid stinking kitchen scraps and broken toys. ‘My god, people were allowed to scrounge in those days, imagine coming across . . .’ My voice trailed off as I imagined someone – a child – peeking into an inviting-looking sugarbag.
My uncle chuckled again. ‘No, it wasn’t like that, they had a quiet corner set aside for blackfellas’ bones.’
I breathed the slightest sigh of relief and wondered what had become of that ‘quiet corner’ now; had the dump been developed? Was there now a house on top of all those remains, a sporting field, a school?
My uncle was on a roll now; we talked about his experiences with the Aboriginal people who lived in the camps outside Swan Hill.
‘They used to come into town for grog mostly. At first I used to get angry with the shopkeepers and publicans. I’d say, ‘Why are you selling them this booze, can’t you see it’s killing the poor bastards?’ But I was young, new in town; you learn to accept things the way they are.’ A sadness began to weigh down on what until then had been happy reminiscences. ‘I saw too many things, too many – I guess it just makes you switch off.’ My uncle was a larger-than-life character; in his prime he’d travelled the world and mixed it with the big boys – he’d been a player. But I’d never heard him speak like that before; I’d never heard his voice falter.
{ 28 SEPTEMBER 2005 }
The ceiling fan churned hot air. My daughters were in bed. Crickets buzzed; but it was only when they paused to pant in the sticky night that I noticed them. The lights of Brisbane’s CBD hummed silently, but you could feel a transfer of energy drawn from the midnight earth into filaments and glass that rose up in the distance. The carpet-snake river curved though it all in timeless twists, cooling its tongue in the sea. Good god! It was starting to get to me, this other way of seeing.
Gary was on the other end of the phone, half a continent away in Melbourne. Our conversation came easily, naturally. I’d been holding back a couple of details about the skull – about Mary – but Gary sounded cool, relaxed.
My first concern was the name, Mary; I’d been worrying that by calling a male – albeit a deceased one – by a female name, my family had been disrespectful, or even worse was breaking some sort of taboo. Gary laughed when I made my first confession. ‘Mate, at least you gave him a name, you humanised him, you respected him. Most of the remains we get back are tagged with a serial number, like army dogtags – only there’s no name, just a number, like the numbers the Germans tattooed on the arms of the Jewish people in the Holocaust. It’s a beautiful thing that you and your family cared enough about my ancestor to give him a name.’
‘Well, there’s another thing,’ I continued, feeling a little more at ease, ‘Mary is kind of, well . . . yellow.’ I almost whispered the last word. I explained that Dad had given Mary a liberal coat of lacquer every couple of years to preserve the bone, and now, 40 years later, it had taken on a yellow – almost golden – patina. Gary laughed again.
‘And there’s a tiny piece of wood glued to the back of the skull to stop it rolling backwards, but it’s only the size of a matchbox and Dad’s stained it to make it look nice. I thought about tapping it off gently with a hammer before returning it, but I’m worried bits of bone might break off with it.’
‘Listen, mate, don’t worry about it, just leave it as it is, I’m just so glad your old man made the effort to keep the old fella in one piece. Yellow.’ He chuckled again. ‘John, I’ve gone into houses where the skull’s been wrapped up in metal and wire to keep it together. I’ve had skulls returned with all sorts of right-wing neo-Nazi shit written all over them. People have used the top parts for ashtrays and mulling bowls – I even saw one wearing a rasta hat with a big fat joint sticking out of its mouth.’
My mind flicked back to Mary with a Winfield Blue balancing where a tooth should have been. ‘Oh, people did that?’ I said sheepishly.
‘Listen, mate, we don’t care what the story is, we’re just happy to get our old people back. Listen, I’m coming up to collect the old fella. Tell your old man I’d like to buy him a beer, I really want to thank him for taking such good care of Mary. We really owe you for this one, we owe you big time.’
After the call, I sat on the front steps looking out through the trees at the city lights. The gum trees danced in a swaying motion, leafy boughs raised to the heavens like shamans’ arms. How strange, I thought; I should be apologising to these people for everything I’ve taken from them, and here they are thanking me, saying
they owe me.
The bicycle is my totem. I first learnt to ride on a cattle property in central Queensland. As a vet, Dad did contract work all over the state, mostly blood-testing on cattle. Mum, my little brother and I would wake in the pre-dawn and take Dad out to the airfield in Brisbane where we’d say our goodbyes and watch him climb into a tiny twin-engined aeroplane. Dad always attempted to look a little sad as he hugged Mum and gave her backside a squeeze, but you could tell he was excited to be going bush again. My parents grew up in the country, and they are still country people at heart despite having lived in the city for over 40 years. Smelling of Old Spice aftershave, Dad would kiss my brother and me. And when we saw him again, days, sometime weeks later, his face would be bristly grey and smell of campfires and the clean red earth.
Dad always returned with treasures. Sometimes he’d bring back lumps of petrified wood – chunks of wood so old it had turned to stone. My brother and I would turn these million-year-old bits of tree over in our hands and marvel at the thought that a dinosaur might have rubbed its itchy behind against this very bit of tree trunk. Other times he’d delve into an old beer carton and produce Aboriginal implements like stone axe-heads, black and beautifully smooth. My brother and I would hold them, smell them. Cold and incredibly hard, they had a sense of the eternal about them. We instinctively knew where and how to hold these objects and it boggled our minds to think that we were the first people to touch them in a hundred, perhaps a thousand, years. Once Dad found a stone axe – its handle still attached – embedded into the trunk of a tree, as if its owner had just had enough, driven it into the wood and walked away. My father was as tough as nails, yet my brother and I were in awe of this man who seemed to us to be a cross between Indiana Jones and Dr Dolittle.
When I turned seven or eight it was announced that I was old enough to join my father on one of his shorter trips. I climbed aboard the tiny Beechcraft Baron. The pilot wore a starched white shirt with frayed epaulettes and a jaunty captain’s cap. We flew away from the green coast, across the Dividing Range and over the wide brown plains of western Queensland. From 5000 feet, the squiggly waterways and blotchy dots of vegetation looked like the Aboriginal paintings my grandmother had shown me in books. It still strikes me as incredible that these earthbound people could paint the landscape from the view of an eagle riding the highest thermals.
For three days I helped my father test cattle. Three or four hundred head were herded each day through the stockyards. As each beast lumbered down a narrow crush, a pair of iron gates swung down and clamped its neck, holding it securely. Dad would swiftly lift the tail of the animal, make a little nick with his scalpel and fill a small plastic sample bottle with blood. My job was to pass fresh bottles to Dad, screw the cap back on and record the animal’s number onto the lid. The days were hot and filled with the stench of splattering cow manure, but there were bonuses, like being allowed to use the electric cattle prod and bouncing around the property in the back of a ute as it made its way to and from the stockyards each day. But the best bonus of all was the farmer’s daughter’s bicycle. It was an old Speedwell clunker; a girl’s bike without a crossbar. I had eyed it off at the homestead as I kicked around the dusty yard while the adults enjoyed afternoon tea under the shade of a tree. The farmer had noticed me sizing up the bicycle and called out, ‘It’s a bit big, but go on, have a go.’
I was a demon on a trike, but I’d never ridden a two-wheeler and this was several sizes too large. I managed to get the old rattler moving by just riding up and down on the pedals in a standing position; the bike was so big that the nose of the saddle kept bumping into the small of my back. If it had been a boy’s bike with a crossbar (or nut-crusher as we used to call them) the bike would have stayed where it was. I wobbled around the house and past the adults.