Too Hard, These Days

aged care in the Tiwi Islands

The casket was painted in gently undulating waves, the colour deepening where they lapped at the sandy yellow of the base. The artwork blatantly mimicked the strait that formed a backdrop to the makeshift church: blue water stretching towards blue sky, an infinite view impeded only by the low scrub of the neighbouring island and the occasional winsome cloud. The church was not even really that — erected specifically for the funeral, it was a scaffolding of lashed-together wooden poles supporting a roof of palm fronds, their dry leaves rustling in the near-stagnant wind. Unable to provide enough shade for the hundreds of people who had come to pay their respects, it was extended on all sides by canvas marquees.

A short priest, his face flushed in the heat, tripped his way through the first half of a prayer lightly before handing the microphone to another priest, who followed the singsong incantation to its conclusion. The congregation bowed their heads. A warm puff of wind crawled across my neck, licking at the sweat. There were six priests saying the mass, each one dressed in a white gown with differing embroidered scarfs of gold, green, and red.

I thought of my grandfather’s funeral, thousands of kilometres south of here in Warrnambool, where a dozen or more priests had trickled into the church, assembling themselves like a small choir behind the altar. My brother was honoured to be in the position of altar boy, standing beside the priests and grasping a six-foot brass pole topped with a crucifix. He had tears running down his cheeks — my hard-arse brother — and I had nudged my sister, giggling, lest she miss such a rare moment. But it was Dad who responded, a warning hand on my shoulder as he bent down: ‘It’s not a time for laughing.’ And I saw that his cheeks, too, were wet. I knew that my Pop had died, of course, but I didn’t realise it was upsetting, an event to cause real tears, the kind that came unbidden. My eight-year-old mind was untroubled: old people died — what else could anyone expect?

A woman’s wail lifted into the quiet, starting off high and tumbling into a moan. Breaking free of the crowd, she lurched towards the coffin, her arms raised as though her hands were escaping her own gravitational pull. Another woman joined her, and a third and fourth, their cries wordless to me, who could not understand the Tiwi language. She lay her arms and her forehead upon the coffin, and from the congregation came a song, the same few phrases repeated over and over. Younger women joined the older ones at the casket, swaying too, arms wrapped around one another. The priests stood in a line, each one with his hands clasped in front of him, the microphone discarded on the white-clothed table that served as an altar.

I didn’t know the name of the man whose funeral we were celebrating. Beside me, David swigged from his water bottle before tossing it back into the basket of his walker. A child ran past, his tie flapping at his chest, the cuffs of his white shirt red with dust. Behind him chased another boy, bare-chested and barefoot, wearing only a red cloth tucked around his waist. A woman’s arm shot out to grab him as he passed, lifting him clear of the ground, his legs pedalling in the air. She asked him something and he nodded, eyes wide, no smile, before she set him down again and he raced off into the crowd.

‘You’ve come on a bad day — there won’t be anyone around. Nothing’s open.’

I’d arrived in Wurrumiyanga from Darwin that morning, the shudder of the plane’s propellers ringing in my ears, to find there was no one to collect me from the airport. After hanging about for a few minutes as the other passengers clambered into a collection of utes and four-wheel-drives, I’d knocked on the door of the shipping-container office, interrupting the banter of the pilot and the single airport staff member, a man who later introduced himself as Grant.

‘Well, I can give you a lift in, for what it’s worth,’ said Grant, looking increasingly doubtful when I explained I was just there for the day to do some interviews. We took in the remainder of the airport — an expanse of tarmac and a waiting area open to the elements, its two halls painted in intricate cross-hatched Tiwi Islander designs. Arms folded and unsmiling, three footballers in the Bombers’ red and black stared down from a billboard: Essendon Football Club proudly supports the Tiwi Islands and the Tiwi Bombers.

‘Everyone will be at the funeral, though — the whole island will be there. Even the ferry from the mainland is booked out.’

The sole aeroplane on the tarmac was the one I’d arrived on. If I wanted to call it quits and head back to Darwin, I’d need to decide quickly: Bathurst Island wasn’t the kind of place you could just wander around being a tourist for a day, especially if everything was going to be closed. But I wouldn’t have another opportunity — I was only in Darwin a short time and, funeral or not, I knew I wouldn’t be making it out this way again anytime soon. Besides, I was here to visit older people at the Mulakunya Flexible Aged Care Facility, and I knew enough about nursing homes to know that they tended to operate in their own bubbles, closed off from the world. They were the kind of places where the mention of a funeral was so commonplace it didn’t merit disruption to the daily routine — death was not something to be dwelled upon.

‘The last big funeral they had here shut the place down for five days — the shop, the club, everything,’ said Grant, as he drove me into town. He explained that this funeral might be even bigger — it was one of the community elders who had passed away. ‘See? There’s no one about.’

We passed a scattering of houses that barely interrupted the flat landscape, scrubby trees thickening towards the horizon. A high-school basketball court crouched under a shed roof designed to block the ubiquitous sun; black- and yellow-haired dogs stalked the road, each one looking the same as every other.

‘Well, here you are.’ Grant swung the ute through the gateway of a chain-link fence, pulling up next to a white van. There was no front door to Mulakunya, just an entranceway lined with timber plank chairs from an outdoor setting, a fan spinning overhead. A Tiwi woman glanced up at me, returning my smile before her eyes slid past to see where I’d come from. A yellow XXXX cap was lopsided on her head, her greying hair falling to her shoulders.

‘Are you working here?’ A young woman turned to greet me, balancing her cigarette in the groove of an ashtray. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, arms white and freckled in a sleeveless denim shirt. ‘I’m Clare.’

‘Hi, I’m Melanie.’ I searched her face for recognition. Nothing. ‘No, I’m not a worker — I’ve come to talk to the residents for a book I’m writing. I organised it through the Darwin office.’

‘Well, it’s Liz you’ll be wanting.’ Clare was cheerful, her Irish accent unmistakeable. ‘She’s just gone out to deliver some breakfasts, she’ll be back soon. This is Bernadette, and this is David.’ She pointed at the woman in the XXXX cap and then at a man sitting on his walker beside her, who nodded at me. ‘I better get back to work. Let me know if you need anything.’ She took a final drag on her cigarette before stubbing it out and emptying the ashtray into a bin.

‘Are you here for the funeral?’ asked David as I took a seat.

‘I’m here to talk to some of the people, like yourself, who live here. It’s for an essay I’m writing on ageing.’

David looked down at his feet, lifting one experi-mentally, as though checking it still worked, before putting it back down on the blue-tiled floor. I wanted to ask him who the funeral was for, to offer my condolences, but I was hesitant. What was I allowed to say? What should I not? I had watched the Australian Story episode earlier in the year about Mandawuy Yunupingu from the band Yothu Yindi, and I knew that in some Indigenous cultures a person’s name was not spoken after they had passed away. I was disappointed in myself that most of my knowledge of Indigenous cultures came from documentaries.

‘There’s lots of people to talk to,’ said David. He stood on his rickety legs and slowly pivoted the walker around to face him, and then he walked away, lifting his feet high and rapid. I was not the first to blow in from the mainland.

As I had sat in the Tiwi Air waiting room that morning, I had realised I was more apprehensive about turning up on Bathurst Island than I’d been about any of the other interviews I’d done; the gulf between me and my potential subjects seemed unassailably wide. I recalled a social-work seminar I’d attended a few years before at the Koori Heritage Trust in Melbourne, where we explored the exhibition gallery before doing a workshop with some women from the Koori community. I think I was hoping they would tell me some kind of secret, give me a free pass that would let me know the right things to say so that I wouldn’t offend when I only wanted to help. Not help — empower. That was the word we always used in our assignments, each reiteration of it somehow rendering it more meaningless. Even better than empowering someone was assisting people to empower themselves. Studying social work taught me that there are lots of ways to talk about doing things, and there is no right way to do anything.

It wasn’t a secret I learned that day, but something far more difficult to make sense of: a truth. First the Koori women told us what we already knew — that white people needed to consult with Indigenous people, in particular the community elders, if they wanted to work with them; we needed to seek understanding and not make assumptions. But then one of the women told us something I have never been able to forget: ‘Most Aboriginal women do not want anything to do with white social workers. There is no way around this. It was social workers who took away our babies, and they thought they were doing the right thing then, just as you all think you’re doing the right thing now.’ It made perfect sense, but what could I do with that knowledge? It made me feel unsure and inadequate. My feelings, however, were not the point.

In the airport waiting room I had gotten talking to Sister Barbara, who was heading back to Melville Island after accompanying another nun to her monthly medical appointments in Darwin. Sr Barbara seemed bemused by my questions about her age — seventy-six, she said she never gave age a thought.

‘I suppose you get more respect the older you get,’ I said.

She gave me a close-lipped smile, all patience. ‘But people have always been respectful to me.’

I found myself sharing her amusement. In her light-grey habit with white oversized collar, matching veil, and an impressive crucifix hanging from her neck, I could see that Sr Barbara commanded respect whatever her age. Still, I persevered. ‘Do you find yourself reflecting more on your life as you get older?’

‘I haven’t come to that stage yet, to sit and reflect.’ Sr Barbara smiled at the thought of such indulgence. ‘I haven’t come to that part of my life. I’m too busy with many other things.’

‘What keeps you busy?’

‘Most days I spend at the Women’s Centre. I’m trying to help the women organise themselves to start up their own textile business, trying to get them off the community development wages.’

‘What kind of textiles?’

‘They do block printing on material. They do their own art on lino, they carve out the patterns, and then they put the paint on and press it to the material and heat it to make it set. It’s hard work. The busiest time is when there’s a funeral around because each of them want their totems. Some of them ask for a kookaburra; last time we had a magpie, we had jungle fowl and sharks. So we print them and make the skirts for them to wear. There’s a funeral today, but it’s on the other island — they have their own colours, but our side at Milikapiti, we go for our prints.’

Sr Barbara was much more enthusiastic about telling me about the women’s business plans — the computer courses they were taking, the website they were building — than discussing herself.

‘I’m very busy, as there’s the church as well to look after — I do the decorations. Of course, we’re only three now.’

‘Three sisters?’ My visions of a bustling convent of nuns faded.

‘Myself, Sr Dorothy, and Sr Bridget, who came not long ago from Papua New Guinea. The order is from Papua New Guinea. We’re the Handmaids of Our Lord.’

‘How did you decide which order to join?’

That women of this age should be nuns was not unusual to me, but I was curious as to how one might decide what kind of nun to become. I’d grown up in a Catholic family: my Pop had four sisters, all nuns, all different orders. These great-aunts and their fellow nuns, formidable in their neat habits, rosary beads twisted around their wrists and hands more often than not, used to sometimes come and stay when we’d be at Nana and Pop’s in our school holidays. We kids would sneak glances at them at the dinner table, not ever quite convinced they wouldn’t burst into song, as Sound of Music and Sister Act had led us to believe. One nun — I now realise she was deep in the realm of dementia — enjoyed watching television with us. ‘How do they get the little men in those suits?’ she would ask, delighted, about Gumby and Goo, shape-shifting clay animation characters, and we would all laugh: us at her naivety, her at our seeming happiness.

‘I think it was … it’s different now …’ For the first time, Sr Barbara momentarily lost her confidence. ‘I was twenty-one then, and in Australia at that time, I don’t think any orders had a place for Indigenous — now it’s different. But at that time …’ She let the sentence go, staring out into the waiting room, watching a family take it in turns to step up onto the scales at the check-in counter, their weight recorded before they could board the plane. ‘The sister from Papua New Guinea, the Superior, got in touch with the sisters that were with us at the mission, and they said yes. So I went up to Papua New Guinea.’ Sr Barbara smiled at the memories. ‘It was in the Fifties, the Sixties — it was the best time. It’s a beautiful country.’

‘It sounds like it was a good opportunity, to join the order, to go to Papua New Guinea?’

‘Hmmm … yes.’ But she didn’t sound convinced. ‘It was a choice that I had to make. When my nieces ask me why, why did I join, I just said the call was there, just follow whatever call the Lord is asking you. But they couldn’t understand.’ She shook her head. ‘I said to them, the call is in all walks of life.’

And as we talked I realised, the pieces falling quietly into place, why it was both a choice and not. Sr Barbara first arrived in the Tiwi Islands as a girl, leaving her family on the mainland and being brought up by the nuns on the mission at Garden Point, on Melville Island. It would be simple to label her as a member of the Stolen Generations, but I didn’t ask, and I later learnt that she does not know the circumstance of her arrival: whether her mother took her to the convent or whether she was taken from her family. It’s not the kind of thing you asked in a waiting room, not as an aeroplane engine started up, the rumble of it blanketing our conversation until we gave up with smiles.

The flight to Garden Point was called, and Sr Barbara gathered her bags.

‘There’s a big funeral today, on Bathurst Island.’ She held my arm as we said our goodbyes. ‘You’ll witness something if you go. He was an elder, he was respected. Whether that will continue into the next generation — hard to say. They’re working on it now, trying to teach the younger ones, telling them more stories. Once you lose that, you lose yourself.’

‘Are the young people interested?’

‘They are.’ She patted my arm. ‘You’ll see them today at the funeral, joining in when there’s dancing.’

Sitting in the entrance of Mulakunya, waiting for Liz, the manager, to arrive, I watched the residents go about their morning business. A handful of people sat in high-backed adjustable chairs, which were upholstered in the easy-clean pale blue and pink vinyl that was familiar from countless nursing homes and hospitals. But that was where the similarity to other nursing homes I had visited ended.

Designed for the hot island climate, this aged-care facility was built around a huge open living space capped with a canopy-high ceiling from which six fans beat the air into a pleasant breeze. A kitchen and office flanked the entranceway, and on the opposite side were bedrooms, each with three beds, and bathrooms. Both ends of the living space were open to the outside, and one offered an unimpeded view of the road leading to the Apsley Strait, which divided the islands of Bathurst and Melville. A large flat-screen TV was tuned to a breakfast news show, reporting live from the unseasonal bushfires that were burning through the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. The cycle of images — exhausted firefighters at the smoking front, couples holding to each other in front of burnt-out houses — drew no attention from the residents: all eyes were on the road as a steady stream of people walked past, heading to the funeral. The older men tossed comments between one another as they smoked, occasionally calling out to the passers-by and to the children who would run up to the fence, waving.

So many of the nursing homes I have visited have been inward-looking — small bedrooms arranged around courtyards, front doors that can only be accessed with a code, waiting areas monitored by steely reception staff, registers for visitors to sign in and out. The consequence of trying to keep residents safe from unnamed harm, and stopping those with dementia from wandering and getting lost, is that nursing homes are so often shut off from the rest of the neighbourhood — one of many ways older people are rendered invisible. At Mulakunya, the residents could watch the happenings of their community; they were not cut adrift from the day-to-day goings-on.

Before mainstream health policy took the idea of wellbeing on board, the National Aboriginal Health Strategy Working Party understood that health must also be a measure of a person’s happiness, satisfaction, and quality of life, and it may be influenced by their culture, spirituality, and beliefs: ‘Not just the physical well-being of the individual but the social, emotional and cultural well-being of the whole community … This is a whole-of-life view and it includes the cyclical concept of life-death-life.’

The strong ties to community and an acceptance of death as a part of life are things that white Australia can learn from Aboriginal Australians — that older people are not to be hidden away, separated from the rest of us in a practice of social death experienced well before the physical. As well as keeping the facility open to the wider community, each day staff at Mulakunya transport those residents who wish to go back to their home, or that of sons or daughters, so they can enjoy life among their family before returning to the aged-care facility of an evening. Not many older people, Indigenous or otherwise, want to go into care, and this kind of permeability between family and institutional life no doubt makes the option much more attractive: people don’t become cut off from the community where they have built their lives simply because their body or mind is slowing down.

One of the reasons that Calvary Community Care, the organisation that runs Mulakunya, can provide this kind of service is that the home is not party to the highly regulated accreditation bodies and funding models of mainstream aged care. Funding instead comes through the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Flexible Aged Care Program, which, as it says on the box, aims to provide flexible aged care close to home and community for older Indigenous people, with the services assessed against a set of culturally appropriate standards. Flexible, culturally appropriate care, close to home and community — shouldn’t that be a focus of any aged-care service provider, not only the remit of organisations providing care for groups designated as having special needs?

In a research-to-practice briefing paper on working with older Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, Australia’s oldest non-religious charity, The Benevolent Society, made the observation that ‘providing community care services to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people may be more time-consuming, intensive and complex than providing services to non-Aboriginal people. Additional time will often be required to build genuine trusting relationships.’ It goes on, quite rightly, to suggest that visits to older people should include ‘time to build trust, a cup of tea, a chat’. It is disappointing that this is seen as unusual — that the need to have a cup of tea and a chat is a point of difference between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous population. When did we stop being a community willing to care for its elderly, and become providers delivering services to consumers and seeking to make a profit? When did staff stop having time for a chat and a cup of tea before bustling on with well-meaning but perhaps misguided medication schedules, meals on wheels, and timetabled toileting? I suspect it was about the time the well-meaning phrase ‘person-centred care’ came into existence, a rude tautology that robs every individual of their selfhood. To provide care for a person should be to put their needs and concerns at the forefront, while also seeking to do no harm. That health and aged-care services have had to develop a term to remind them to do the most basic of things is a sign we’re doing something very wrong.

Physical and psychological harm, compounded by generations of disadvantage and poverty, are risk factors for chronic illness and early death. Consequently, Aboriginal people in Australia have an overall life expectancy lower than that of the rest of the population: while an Indigenous child born today is expected to die ten years before a non-Indigenous child born at the same time, this gap in life expectancy is much larger for Aboriginal people born throughout the twentieth century and those who live in remote communities rather than urban areas. A government review of the literature around ageing, cognition, and dementia in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people showed the striking differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous older people. A number of factors affect a person’s ability to age in good health, and many of these are experienced disproportionately by the Indigenous population, who are twice as likely as the rest of the population to be smokers, and more likely to have rheumatic heart disease, diabetes, and end-stage renal disease — in remote areas, the incidence of end-stage renal disease is thirty times the national incidence. To this end, aged-care residential and community services are available to Indigenous people from fifty years of age (rather than from age sixty-five, as applies to the non-Indigenous population), and Indigenous people use community-care services at a much higher rate than the wider population: thirty-nine per 1000 Indigenous people aged sixty-five to seventy-four access a Community Aged Care Package, compared to 3.2 per 1000 non-Indigenous people.

One, two, three, four, five. Her fingernails, painted red and sprinkled with glitter, swooped an inch over the end of her fingers. She paused only to light a cigarette between dealing her cards, or to get up and fill a red plastic cup with ice and water.

‘How long have you been here, Jean?’

‘A few months.’

‘Do you like it?’

‘Yeah.’ One, two, three, four, five. ‘Are you working here?’

‘No, I work in Melbourne.’

‘It’s cold down there.’

‘Freezing.’

‘Here it’s nice and warm.’

‘Hot. Not warm.’

‘No. Darwin’s hot,’ she corrected me. ‘Here’s warm.’

Our staccato conversation carried on, keeping time with Jean’s card-dealing. When I asked how old she was, Jean tucked her wavy, yellowing hair behind her ear and smiled. ‘I was born in 1950.’ It was the only time she had looked me in the eye, obviously proud of her longevity. For an Indigenous woman, sixty-three years of age is an achievement — only 3 per cent of the Indigenous population are sixty-five and over, compared to 14 per cent of the non-Indigenous population.

‘And do you like living here?’

‘Yeah. My family, my brothers, they live in Darwin. But they just want me to buy them cartons of beer. And cigarettes. But they don’t like Alpines.’ She pulled a packet of cigarettes from her pocket, her skirt a riot of colourful flowers, and tapped at the brand name with her long red nails. ‘Alpine.’ The snow-capped mountains perched incongruously above the weeping sores of a cancerous mouth, the graphic health-warning label turning my stomach. ‘I say to my brothers, well, you won’t want cigarettes now, will you?’ She winked at me, flashing a smile.

‘Sister, can I have a smoke?’ said another woman, taking a seat and tapping the table in front of me, blank-faced. ‘Can I, Sister?’

‘Sorry, I don’t have any cigarettes.’ I shrugged at the woman, who giggled. Her white hair was cropped close to her head, her eyes were yellow, and she had a hacking cough and an irresistible smile. I introduced myself and she whispered my name, repeating it to herself.

‘I’m Dorothy,’ she offered in return. ‘I got sick, in the chest. I was living at Garden Point, then the Sister brought me here, she looked after me.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘A long time. My daughters, they come and visit me. But they live in Darwin.’

‘How many children do you have?’

‘Three. But one married a white man.’

‘And do you have grandchildren, Dorothy?’

‘Yes. But my grandchildren, they married white men. Except for Nikita, she got no man. And she’s young.’

‘Maybe she’s waiting for someone special?’

‘Yeah.’ Dorothy let out a peal of laughter and then stopped suddenly, banging her forehead with the heel of her hand. ‘Sometimes I’m stupid here.’ Fishing a lighter and a cigarette out of her bag, she slowly lit her cigarette, hands stiff with arthritis.

‘Are you working here?’

‘No, I’m writing an essay. I want to ask you some questions for it.’

‘Ah, reading. My daughter can read.’ She shook her head. ‘But my head, sometimes it doesn’t work.’

‘How old are you, Dorothy?’

‘I don’t know.’ She took a drag on her cigarette and smiled. ‘I’m old. I’m old now.’

‘What is it like to be old?’

‘My brain is hurting … My mother died. I try to wake her up, but. She was old.’

‘So you’ve lived a long life, like your mother?’

‘Yes.’ Dorothy rummaged in her bag, cigarette hanging from her bottom lip. ‘My daughters, they married white men. Sometimes they come here and visit me. Sometimes nothing.’

‘Do people treat you well because you’re old?’ I asked, not wanting to get into a discussion about family race relations. ‘Do they respect their elders?’

‘But they hard, this mob.’ Dorothy shook her head and Jean paused in her card-playing, listening in.

‘Before they built this place, where did the old people live?’ I asked.

‘All the old lived with their family,’ said Jean. ‘But they get sick.’

‘My daughters, they live in Darwin. They come here. And then they go home.’

I thought about Dorothy’s daughters living in Darwin and wondered how much movement there is between the Tiwi Islands and the mainland. It’s said that in the distant past, Islanders paddled the fifty kilometres to Darwin in canoes, kidnapping women to take home with them. Today, a reinstated ferry service operates three times a week, making the islands less isolated, but Darwin still seems very far away. The staff at the aged-care residence are primarily fly-in, fly-out, working ten days in a row and then having four days off.

‘It’s not hard to get them, it’s hard to keep them for the long term,’ said Liz when I managed to grab some time with her to pepper her with questions. She had been in and out all morning, checking on the residents’ medication, making sure everyone who wanted to get to the funeral was able. ‘Mostly the older workers stay longer. We’ve had some wonderful young people here, but you know, they miss the social life — drinking with your buddies and stuff. Because we don’t have any alcohol. The club has some, but we don’t allow it on the premises at all.’

‘Do any of the staff live permanently on the island?’

‘Some do. Helen, who’s on the next shift, her husband works at the Shire. And we’ve got three Indigenous ladies who come in, theoretically, five days a week — one comes in five days a week, the others, you know, whenever they can get away … they’re great when they get here. And we have a position for a yardsman here, for an Indigenous person too, but we haven’t been able to get one recently.’

‘It’s a relaxed atmosphere here. It doesn’t seem as rushed as other aged-care facilities I’ve been to.’

‘Well, it’s partly the heat!’ Liz laughed. ‘You can’t do much in it. It’s not something you get used to. I mean, yeah, you cope with it, but you still notice it. You never not notice the heat.’

Liz, who has always worked in aged care, had been managing Mulakunya for twelve months. Prior to that she was working on communities in the Kimberley and at Wadeye, formerly known as Port Keats, in the Northern Territory.

‘Before that I would have argued that I knew Aboriginal people,’ said Liz, raising her brows. ‘I would have argued that there were very few full-blood Aboriginal people left in Australia — I would have argued that point.’ She shook her head at the recollection. ‘And then I went out to Port Keats, where there are two thousand black, black, black Aboriginal people, and I got the shock of my life.’ Her emphasis on ‘black’ was like a child climbing a staircase, each reiteration of the word emphasised over the last. ‘I didn’t know those places existed. I was a country girl, but I had no idea; it was a real eye-opener for me. The good and the bad.’

How could you not know? I thought, sitting there in Liz’s air-conditioned office. In that moment, it seemed so naive — to have thought such things, let alone be saying them to me now. But who did I think I was? I was visiting here for a day, buoyed by a self-serving interest in writing an essay. Curious about how older people lived and why they were so often cut off from contemporary society. Liz was working here, living this life.

The divide between Indigenous and white Australia was so theoretical to me that I could look upon it from afar, as though I had no part to play. I remembered a night awhile ago, sitting outside Tiamo’s restaurant on Lygon Street in Melbourne, catching up with my friend Paul, who was not long back from a holiday. He’d been up the coast of Western Australia, to the Kimberley, and then to visit a friend in Tennant Creek. Sitting there with our plates of pasta and tumblers of wine, he told me about the casual racism he observed in some of the small outback towns: the service-station owner who served whites firsts, the pubs with their separate drinking sections. He found the whole experience abhorrent, and in his garrulous way he recreated for me the scenes of his futile interjections on behalf of Aboriginal people, laughing at his bleeding heart but wanting to explain how much he cared.

A woman interrupted him from the next table. ‘Excuse me, that’s our life you’re talking about.’

‘Sorry?’ Paul was flustered, caught in good humour.

‘That’s our life. That you’re sitting here discussing over dinner. Me, my husband, our kids.’ The woman indicated her family, who were sitting around their own table full of garlic bread and pasta. ‘We used to live in Tennant Creek. I grew up there and I probably know the people you’re talking about. Now, I know you’re not saying anything bad, but think of how it feels to us. We come here, enjoying our holiday in Melbourne, and we have to listen to you white people talking about us blackfellas.’

‘I didn’t mean any offence.’ The panic in Paul’s voice appeared as a deep blush climbing his neck, mortification dripping onto the table. I sat opposite, frozen, wishing I was any place else.

‘I know you didn’t, and I wasn’t going to say anything. But you know, you talk so loud and it’s all just a story to you. But it’s not like that to us.’

She turned back to her table, her daughters looking deep into their plates, teenage embarrassment at their mother’s behaviour. Chastised, Paul and I talked quietly about something else, apologising again when we left.

In the office on Bathurst Island, Liz spread her hands, palms up. ‘The good: the cultural. Very rich in that area,’ she said. ‘Fairly rich here, nothing in Darwin. The culture has just gone. Every time I drive ’round Darwin I think, they’re struggling, and they’re going to struggle for a lot of years while they’re living in an urban situation. They just can’t assimilate, I don’t think. Whereas out here people get a chance to live pretty much to their own way.’

My hackles went up at the mention of assimilation. But that’s really what Australia has been trying for, under whatever necessarily sensitive name the times demanded. The results have been devastating, and they continue to emerge. Those who were removed from their families as children, members of the Stolen Generations, are more likely to have a disability or a long-term health condition, and to report twice the amount of drug and alcohol use than others from their generation who stayed with their families. As well as long-term health effects, drug and alcohol usage has led to a high number of head injuries and a high rate of cognitive damage, with Indigenous people twenty-one times more likely to suffer an acquired brain injury than non-Indigenous people.

One of the ways this damage has materialised is in the prevalence of dementia among Aboriginal Australians, which research conducted in the Kimberley found present at a rate 5.2 times greater than in the wider Australian population. While the causes of Alzheimer’s disease are unknown, a number of risk factors have been identified, and they are all ones that occur disproportionately frequently in the Indigenous population: high blood pressure, low levels of physical activity, diabetes, past head injuries, high cholesterol, and having had a parent with the disease.

Liz leant back in her chair, pursing her lips. ‘I think the hardest part of working with Aboriginal people is …’ She stretched out the pause like a rubber band, searching for the right words, as I hoped our conversation wouldn’t snap. ‘It’s the blatancy of the family to …’ And she paused again, so careful. ‘To steal the money, to just take everything involved, no pretence.’ The words came out in a tumbled rush.

I had seen the signs posted up on the walls: No humbugging for cigarettes and money. I thought it was a warning to the residents not to hassle the staff who doled out the cigarettes and tobacco each morning and afternoon. But now I understood it was for the visitors, the family and friends. Later, when I went to the funeral, I would see a woman of about my age approach David, tapping him on the shoulder, holding out her hand. He would burrow in his shorts pocket and come up with the five slightly bent cigarettes that Clare had given him before he left the facility. The woman would pocket the cigarettes and turn on her heel, not a single word exchanged. David would see me watching and smile proudly: ‘That’s my daughter.’

‘It’s a cultural thing, the humbugging,’ said Liz. ‘They’ve all done it: they’ve all borrowed, they’ve all given away. And I don’t know whether us trying to say to the family, “This is her money, leave her,” whether it’s trying to change something, to our way of thinking. I don’t know; it’s really difficult, that question.’

Humbugging, or scrounging money from family members, was one of the reasons the Howard government gave for quarantining welfare payments under the 2007 intervention. At the time, Families, Community Services, and Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough asked one aged-care facility in Docker River, in the Northern Territory, why there were bars on the windows and was told it wasn’t to keep the elderly people in, but to keep their family members out. It’s elder abuse by another name, and it’s a problem that affects many older people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, the way their families seek to appropriate their belongings. Inheritance impatience, white people call it, complaining of their ‘boomerang children’ who return as adults to the family home.

‘We do it too,’ said Liz. ‘In exactly the same way. A few years ago, I can remember saying to one of the old people, “Don’t let her take your card,” because, you know, “Oh, Grandma, I want to borrow the keycard, I want to get some food.” And they give it to them and that’s five hundred dollars just wiped out. And you say to them, “There’s nothing left, nothing left on your card.” And they’re surprised. You tell them, “You can’t give your card to your family, or you lose it all.” But then I walk in the house and get a phone call from one of my sons: “Mum, can you lend me a thousand dollars?”’ Liz laughed, shaking her head at the irony. ‘And I’m all, “Yes, darling.” But it’s exactly the same thing.’

‘Is it a double standard?’

‘I suppose it just makes us angry here. You know, we had a lady — Dorothy, you were talking to her this morning — and her family decided they were going to take her home about a month ago.’

‘Her daughters in Darwin?’ I was pleased to be joining the dots, recalling how attached to her daughters Dorothy had seemed.

‘Yes, her daughters. Well, long story short, she had about eight hundred dollars on her keycard and of course we had to hand it over when we checked her out. Reluctantly. Because her daughters were very excited when they found out how much money she had. They took her to Darwin, then they took her back to Melville Island and left her there. On her own. They went to Darwin and spent up.’ Liz shook her head at me, still disbelieving. ‘They left her there alone. No food, nothing. That’s disgusting. And so we got a call and she ended up back here. We haven’t seen the daughters since.’

‘Does that kind of thing happen often?’

‘Often enough. They come and go — you know, if they want to go to Darwin and spend a month or two with family. Or we had one guy who went to Darwin to see his nephew in hospital and he was gone for a month in the long grass, as they say: drinking. And then he came back, and he’s happy to be back here. Didn’t suffer too many long-term, you know, serious effects. So they can come and go as they like. They can jump on the ferry that goes in three times a week, just here. Or they can also — we’ve got a few who just say, “I’m going out to my daughter’s for the weekend, up the road.” And we continue to deliver meals to them and medication and stuff.

‘It’s a wonderful thing ’cos these people get to live on their own country, in their own community, they don’t get sent to Darwin. Though it’s different too, because these people are all quite mobile. We don’t have any — I mean, if they got to the stage of being bedridden they’d almost certainly have to go to Darwin. And, unusually, we seem to have an equivalent amount of men and women.’

There appeared to be a lot that more mainstream aged-care facilities could take from a place like Mulakunya, and while Liz agreed, she was cautious about drawing too many conclusions, particularly because as a flexible aged-care service, the facility is only subjected to an audit every three years, which is a less consuming and regimental process than that conducted by the standards agency responsible for regular residential aged-care facilities.

‘Indigenous people are different. Take, for example, teeth-cleaning or oral hygiene, which is one of the standards you have to keep up in a regular nursing home. Here, where people have their own preference, they have personal choice. So all we can say is, “Would you like to clean your teeth? Here’s the brush and toothpaste” — we supply all that stuff, and that’s really the end of it. If you choose not to clean your teeth, well, that’s that. And if you’ve been walking around with a really bad toothache, that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to go to the dentist when he comes. Some’ll just say, “No, no, it’s fine, just give me a couple of Panadol.”’ Liz laughed, shrugging her shoulders. ‘Yeah, so. Mainstream’s a little bit more regimented around those things; we just have to be a little bit more realistic. You just have to improvise all the time — if you don’t have a cook, you just make something yourself, that’s the way it is. If the toilet breaks down, we’re not going to get a plumber straight away so I just try and fix it myself, or make do.’

‘It’s not an easy job, is it?’

‘At the beginning, I thought, Ten days without a glass of wine?’ She shook her head in disbelief at the prospect. ‘And sometimes you just think, What the hell am I doing here, I’m too old for this! But then I think, No, it’s alright. Crazy. I get a good night’s sleep and I wake up feeling pretty good.’

The conversation with Liz demonstrated that there are no easy answers when it comes to aged care. The tension arising between what a resident wants and what others believe is best for them is only going to increase as more nursing homes throughout Australia are privatised by companies with agendas of profit, efficiency, and risk management. Mulakunya, existing outside of this paradigm, is designed for a way of life that may not suit all older people, but the attention paid to the needs of its residents and the efforts to ensure they remain part of their community while in care offers inspiration that mainstream services would do well to recognise.

‘I’m going to say goodbye to my grandson.’ David’s walker appeared by my side, and then David himself. ‘Do you want to see the singing and the dancing? Come.’

‘Is that okay?’

David nodded and we set off, not getting far before I remembered I hadn’t put on any sunscreen. David watched as I smeared the cream over my face, neck, and hands. ‘You’ll go red, then you’ll be brown.’

‘Not as brown as you.’

‘Ha!’ His laugh is a shout. ‘You would be lucky!’

‘It’s your grandson’s funeral?’ I asked as we set off again.

‘He’s my brother’s son.’

A nephew, I thought, clarifying in my mind. A few days later, back in Darwin, I caught up with my great-aunt Rose, my Nana’s youngest sister, who I hadn’t seen since I was a child.

‘I told her you were visiting,’ Rose said, about an Indigenous woman she worked with. ‘My grandniece, I said. But she interrupted me, she put me right straightaway — she’s your granddaughter, she told me. And I thought she hadn’t understood — I’m a nun, I reminded her. I don’t have any children; I’m not a grandmother. But she was adamant. “In our culture, we don’t have nieces and nephews. She’s your granddaughter.”’

‘I never thought I’d have a grandmother again,’ I told Rose, seeing my Nana standing there in front of me, in the guise of her younger sister. Nothing alike, and yet.

Rose laughed, giving my arm a gentle squeeze. ‘Well, I’ve not had a granddaughter before. It’s quite nice.’

David’s walker was hard to manoeuvre over the red sandy road, the wheels leaving deep furrows to frame his high-stepping feet. We found a spot in the shade, watching as the priests offered up their prayers, and two white men, proud but emotional, read through prepared eulogies and the apologies of a priest who could not be there.

When it was time for communion, the priests dispersed into the crowds, and David sent me hunting out one of them to bring back to him, where he perched on his walker.

‘And now the good bit,’ he told me, as the priests said their goodbyes, filing away like a queue of overgrown ducklings. The congregation went in the opposite direction, flocking towards the casket and piling it high with bouquets and strings of vividly coloured plastic flowers.

A group of dancers took to the sandy space around the casket, bare feet kicking up the blond sand, poles grasped high in hand. The call-and-response from the leader on the microphone was hypnotic, and most of those watching clapped along, ignoring the children who scampered about with bottles of water, and sausages in tomato sauce–soaked bread.

Each of the dances was different. Women in white skirts painted with blue patterns crowded the coffin and spread outwards, clutching their arms behind their backs.

‘They’re the mothers,’ said David. ‘Carrying the children.’

‘Why do some of the men have paint, but not all of them?’

‘Too hard, these days,’ said David. ‘Keep it simple.’

An argument erupted between two of the dancers — a scuffle for the microphone to lead the next song — and while their anger was dulled for me, lost in the mystery of an unfamiliar language, we all watched until eventually a man in a red loincloth, feathers in a band on his left arm, threw himself out of the crowd, head down and storming.

David followed the man’s path with his eyes.

‘I used to live just up there.’ He pointed at the banks of the strait. ‘When I was a kid we got a canoe and we came across from Melville and we lived right there. I’ve always lived around here.’

‘And is this where your funeral will be?’

David gave me a cracking smile, nodding his head. ‘Yes. Everyone will say goodbye to me.’