So our new lives began like children who have just taken their first steps. We were in a new world and needed to learn many things: a new language, where foods came from, what was dangerous and what was not. All the rules for living.
But even the rules for learning were different. We had to observe and follow. Listen and learn. If we made a mistake we were sometimes beaten over the head. If we got something right it might evoke laughter, or it might evoke nothing.
At first it was Tarheto who taught us the most. He had become firm friends with another boy, Garrgiil, and together they took it upon themselves to instruct us. They would come intermittently to visit all the survivors and were able to tell us news of the others—generally how poorly they were doing in their learning of the language and so on.
Garrgiil became very skilled in instruction, and we would not have survived so well without him. I’m quite sure we would have died without Bama help—as we may have died had we come ashore with more weapons and men and been less helpless and seen as a threat.
So, we tried our best to understand their simple stories of the land and how the animals and plants behaved, that all their small children knew. They told us that the men had their own rules and stories, and women had their own that we would not be privy to. We learned how the many scars on the abdomens and arms of the men were made and their importance to one’s initiation, how proud the Bama were of these scars and thought them a sign of beauty.
It was frustrating that every single new word was so hard for us to learn to say properly, while the Bama seemed to have a natural ability to learn English words and pronounce them with ease. My first word was yugu-minhdhil for fire. Then buurraay for water. Budaaya to eat. Chuchala to drink. Yaajil to cook. Dagaaya to sit down. Dhadaa to go. And many words had an accompanying hand sign.
So much to learn.
Even the seasons and the weather had to be learned. The trees were their calendar—telling times of the year by flowerings.
After several weeks of starting to understand something of how the people gathered their food from the land, the wet season arrived. Then everything changed again. The people abandoned the lands they were living on and moved further inland to damp caves, where they sat out the rain and food became scarcer.
Tarheto and Garrgiil did not visit during the wet and I was left on my own with the Captain. He slept for long periods and when he woke would wander around as if searching for something while calling out a mix of words that sounded as much gibberish to me as they probably sounded to the Bama. And he would draw maps in the dirt. Intricate sketches of the coastlines he had mapped.
The Bama paid no heed to his speech, but would pay great attention to his drawings, and debate at length what they might mean.
The caves the Bama used for the wet season had many paintings in them, of animals generally, drawn with crude similarities to the beasts of the land, but it took me many years to understand the deeper significance of these pictures. As it took many years to understand more of the Bama language beyond the simple words.
I was quicker to learn what was safe to be eaten in this land. I was surprised to discover such a diversity of foods had been all around us, and it was our ignorance that had left us starving in a land of plenty. To us the only foods were those we were familiar with, the plants we could equate to cabbage leaves, or fruits we could recognise as close to plums and berries. Banks and Solander had been our guides in all plant foods, of course, and if they said that a plant bore a certain resemblance to a Cycas circinalis or a Glycine rosea, we trusted they both knew what they were talking about.
But the Bama ate things we had rejected, such as yams, which they cooked on slow fires. Our way of cooking them too fast had made them inedible. Similarly, cycad nuts had given us diarrhoea and vomiting because we did not know how to cook them sufficiently; we learned they needed to be pounded with stones and then put into string bags and soaked in water for five nights, to wash out the poisons. And there were things we had never considered, such as the larvae within ants’ nests.
The Bama taught us to eat the cheese-smelling plant before it became ripe and started to stink. They showed us how to extract nectar from flowers and mix it with water to make a sweet drink that imbued one with more energy, and to dig out the hearts of many plants, including the juubi palm or the dawal. We sampled some things we had never tried, such as dilby, which tasted like a bitter custard apple, and we even learned which tree bark was used to make a body paste to attract and excite women. Though I never chose to try that one.
The menu for the Bama was dictated by which animals were fat for eating and which plants were flowering or fruiting—bearing in mind that there were tabu seasons when some animals and plants should not be eaten, instead preserved for future hunting. And understanding the land helped in the hunting and gathering. I had to learn how a good hunter follows bees to find honey, and can see in the water what was a fish or a shark.
I found it quite an irony that I was becoming a skilled botanist, having derided the botanists in our party so often, now learning the names of the many plants and what fruits they bore, or what medicinal properties they contained. I learned which trees marked the changing of seasons or the availability of game through their flowering, and which trees bore fruit, which were used for making tools and in which ones different animals might be found.
The Bama were also very strong on the need for one to share one’s catch. A good hunter was called walaan, and a poor or lazy hunter was called matharr. It was a significant thing and a source of pride to be called walaan.
I also quickly discovered there were no set meal times. Food was caught as it was needed, and many times I sat around the campfire in the morning wondering why no one was eating breakfast. Evening meals were more regular, though, because sitting around the campfire at night and discussing things was part of tribal life.
It took me a long time to understand the conversations, even though the way they argued or laughed or listened intently was as familiar to me as if I were watching people converse in a familiar tongue. But slowly I learned their words. Ngayu kalka gangurru-ga dambar—I throw a spear at the gangurru. Bayan nundu unanu, ngayu nama—I see the hut you will be sleeping in. Guugu Yimidhirr ngato merila, ngayu guugu mandenu—Teach me to speak Guugu Yimidhirr and I will learn.
There were some things I was slower to comprehend. Like the way that the Bama referred to location by directions. If I wanted to indicate a spear thrower or a stone that was on somebody’s left or right, I needed to say it was on their north or south side—which meant knowing where I was in relation to the points of the compass at all times. Even children could do it better than me, of course, but over time I became more aware of the land around me and how to position myself within the four quadrants of direction.
During the days, I observed, the men were almost never seen without a spear at hand—for hunting rather than for defence, though. And meat was cooked inside the ashes of a fire, rather than over it. Stone ovens were also sometimes used for cooking or for heating stones to cook fish, which were laid on the stones.
Fire—yugu-minhdhil—was very important to the Bama and was made by fitting a straight stick into a notch in a flat one and twirling it rapidly between the hands until the friction caused smoke and then ignited kindling placed by it. I tried this many times but found it most difficult to achieve and very tiring. I was a keener supporter of the practice of carrying fire, which was done by making a small nest of embers and tying it to a string and twirling it around to prevent it going out.
Fire was used for cooking, communicating, hunting insects out of a tree and even making things, such as getting the resin from a tree branch to bind spear heads and so on. And the land could be burned for many reasons, including to clear vegetation to attract animals to the regrowth. Fire also played a significant role in ceremonies—its uses were many and were tightly governed by lore, such as only a certain person being able to light a particular ceremonial fire.
To learn the knowledge of fire was to learn a whole other language.
The variety of fish the Bama ate was surprising, and included different types of oysters and shellfish found in lagoons, on rocks or in the mangroves. Fish included skate and types of rays that varied in their taste between veal and beef.
Of birds there were almost too many to count: grey pigeons with red beaks and reddish brown crests, at least two sorts of small doves, a pied-coloured hawk, large black cockatoos with scarlet and orange feathers on their tails, owls, gulls, shags and many other curious birds that I only knew by the Bama names, such as the gurruulga that laughed from the trees, the wuudil that walked with a strange head-bobbing fashion, wandaar the screeching white cockatoo, burriwi the tall ostrich-like bird. And so many others—garrgiil, wurrugu, buyi, wambal, dhamaarbina, daayba, juril-juril, mundurr, gumu, gaalbu, diwaan, dhuga, dhagaawu, dhiwaay, nguurrgu. Each with its own name and story about how it lived and where and when to best hunt it.
I even eventually came to see—and eat—that fast-hopping creature that had evaded us so often. It was known by many different names, depending on what type it was. Gangurru or dhulmbanu was the grey version of the animal. The smaller ones were the gadaar and the bawurr. A small variety that lived in the scrub was bibal, and the rat-like one was known as dyadyu. The larger red creature was nharrgali, the larger black variety was ngurrumugu and a female was walurr. There was also one called wudul.
They were all good eating.
It was an important part of Bama education, and ours, to learn the names and natures of each of the animals so we would know when it could be hunted or eaten.
But the bird that proved the most useful to us shipwreck survivors was our own young hawk, the boy Garrgiil. And as we learned from him, he learned from us. Though I wish I could say that everything we taught them was for their betterment, in the same way that what we learned from them was to us.
For as I got to know Garrgiil better I knew I had to teach him about the dangers of white men. For one day, more would surely come to the lands here, and the Bama would need to be ready for them.