yarran tree, spearwood tree, or hickory acacia – yarrany The dictionary is not just words – there are little stories in those pages too. After years with the second great book I figured out the best way to read it. First time, I went in like reading the Bible, front to back. Aa words first – there you find Aaron, and him in the Book of Exodus, brother of Moses, founder of Jewish priesthood. Aardvark – that animal with a tube nose that eats the ants of Africa. There are abbreviations too, like AA, Alcoholics Anonymous – where people go to heal from the bottle. That punched me in the guts. My mummy, she said, ‘The Aborigine is a pity, my son.’ She said everyone was always insulted by her no matter what she did, so she let herself do the most insulting thing she could think of – take the poison they brought with them and go to town.
You could keep reading the dictionary that way – front to back, straight as a dart – or you can get to aardvark and then skip to Africa, then skip to continent, then skip to nations, then skip to colonialism, then skip over to empire, then skip back to apartheid in the A section – that happened in South Africa. Another story.
When I was on the letter W in the Oxford English Dictionary, wiray would be in that section, it means ‘no’. Wiray wasn’t there though, but I thought I’d make it there. Wheat was there, but when I skipped ahead not our word for wheat – not yura. So I thought I’d make my own list of words. We don’t have a Z word in our alphabet, I reckon, so I thought I’d start backwards, a nod to the backwards whitefella world I grew up in, start at Y – yarrany. So that is the once upon a time for you. Say it – yarrany, it is our word for spearwood tree: and from it I once made a spear in order to kill a man.