Gabriella came back. Another school holiday. She saw her home, the camp. The river. Ocean. It was the same. Oh, maybe a couple of new houses being built, some new white faces; the builders settling into the community and elbowing a place for themselves. Their white faces, those elbows, various white appendages; like ephemeral bush flowers.
‘I see now. I see it’s a funny place. It’s how people would like to think of Aboriginal people. Still some hunting, still bush tucker, some dancing, some art. Even a mission, a mission still with power. Clout.
‘And then there’s this gambling, and drinking, and fighting. Kids running wild, and sleeping with dogs. The huts, and the campfires in the yard.
‘I reckon the people, the government and the bureaucrats, the white mums and dads battling with their mortgages, the sports coaches and the teachers, all the wide world want to see the Aboriginal people like this. But wanting to be helped, wanting to better themselves. Able to be helped even.
‘I’m thinking. People been talking to me. There’s Aboriginal people everywhere you know. Even like you, paler. We are all different, but the same. Something the same in us all, that’s what they say. Not many Aboriginal people live like this here. Only couple hundred here, little places like this. But in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, you know, there’s many. Not maybe like us here, but started off in this way, sometime. We like the forgotten tribe of chosen ones, eh?
‘Trouble is, even if I want it, I don’t feel like all them others, not just because we’re Aboriginal...’
‘No. What about feeling, “kin”, identifying with a subset ... like some people you click with? But what do we share, or have in common? Is it a something, a spirituality or a creativity, a propensity to...’
‘But then there’s not just Aboriginal people in there...’
‘Yeah. I know, but I mean, maybe it’s been kept alive more...’
But. But maybe we gotta be the same so’s we can make people remember that we belong here. And we got something to tell. Here first. For a long time. This whole big Australia land binds us. And we fragments of a great...
A Dreamt time. A maybe rented time. A time the fabric of which is tom and rent and now not holding together, like a torn flag fluttering.
Like a magic carpet falling.
But we never had.
‘It’s like political, isn’t it? Make people remember, face up, know...’
Remember? Billy does. Father and uncles and all coming home happy drunk one 1967 day, laughing and singing in the backyard and they burnt all the fence pickets on the fire and the fames leapt danced flickered across the neighbour’s face which was like a pale moon rising, frowning, over the skeleton fence. Next day Billy’s father, giving him boxing lessons so he could fight back anybody, told Billy he was Aboriginal. That’s why Nana looked different like that and you could see it and she was taken away from her home a place a special land somewhere up north and he should be proud of this part of us that makes him what he is.
And he was. He was proud. That little Billy was proud at home and he told himself it was like being an American Indian on the movies. Part Cheyenne, or Sioux. But he went quiet with this information like a Featherfoot scouting because too much noise may bring trouble and you never can trust.
He has been quiet.
Gabriella has been looking at him. Her face is very serious and gentle, and Billy feels grateful, even before she speaks.
‘You writing up the old people stories yet? You’re the man for that all right. Billy, you’re the man for that.’