Yellow-tailed black cockatoo – bilirr Bil-irr is rolled at the end, the most musical part of any word is the ‘rr’ – I can’t think of any words in Australia like that, but if I was in Scotland then I could, they don’t speak with flat tongues there. Bilirr – it’s a trilled sound with the tongue vibrating close to the teeth. The bilirr is a magnificent bird, strong, eagle-wise. Black as a fire pit, the yellow feathers in the tail visible in flight. I saw the yellow-tailed black cockatoo all my life. All the Gondiwindi loved bilirr. Before Prosperous Farm my mummy was living in Tent Town four miles downstream, where she birthed me there on the flat warm sand, below the caw of bilirr.
After Tent Town was flattened and the Mission turned into the Station, and me and all the other kids were taken away, I remember walking out onto the landing of the Boys’ Home, standing under the sign that used to hang outside – Think White. Act White. Be White. I was looking at the blue sky and down again. When I looked down into the valley I saw a woman walk towards me and she walked right through the stock wire fencing that ringed the entire home.
I walked down on the grass to her and said, ‘Good day.’
The spirit woman was empty-handed and showed me her hands, she looked like my mummy a little, and she said, ‘Wanga-dyung.’
‘What’s that mean?’
She said, ‘It means lost, but not lost always.’
I said okay, and she told me to practise it. I recorded it in my mind as my first-ever time travel because the sky, when I turned back to enter the home not ten paces, was grey and hung low. The woman was gone, just a bilirr remained on the fence. I knew it could have never been cloudless just a few seconds before, and at that moment I realised I’d gone, not the world.
yet, if, then, when, at the time – yandu The first time I heard yandu, it was run on with a jumble of others, it was like spotting the meat in a soup of words, and lifting it out to look at it. My ancestors were coming to the Boys’ Home every day by then. A mob of them, old and young too, even little kids would arrive by the outhouse, any place – by my pillow when it was time for bed or even when it was time to make the bed in the morning. They’d look at me and wave, call me out to the river. The river would just appear wherever we were. Then we’d walk about and talk about this and that, and those ancestors were speaking English to me as well, so they could translate everything too. In the night there’d be a fire made, sometimes corroboree, and a big feed of kangaroo tail cooked on the hot coals or eels from the river cooked on the hot coals too. So it was around the campfire that I learned that word yandu – everyone was telling stories about this animal and that animal and this fella over here and that woman there, there were plenty of jokes and lots of laughter. My great-great-great-grandfather was there, and he’d do lots of the talking. I started to hear the music of the sentences, the pause, the d sounds bumping in his mouth. Most of the time around the fire with everyone else there I couldn’t get a word in edgeways, but when I did, when I could find that word yandu I waited for the first pause in his storytelling, and when it came I said, ‘Yandu,’ and he said, ‘When what?’ ‘Yandu,’ I said again, wanting him to tell me the meaning – and he just put his arm around me, laughing and patting me. He said, ‘Yandu, son, is the glue of your stories.’ I remember that.
yield, bend the feet, tread, as in walking, also long, tall – baayanha Yield itself is a funny word – yield in English is the reaping, the things that man can take from the land, the thing he’s waited for and gets to claim. A wheat yield. In my language it’s the things you give to, the movement, the space between things. It’s also the action made by Baiame because sorrow, old age and pain bend and yield. The bodies of the ones that had passed were buried with every joint bent, even if the bones had to be broken. I think it was a bend in humiliation just like we bend at our knees and bow our heads. Bend, yield – baayanha.
younger sister – minhi I went mustering when the droughts hit again and again and the skeleton weed took two years of crops and there was no work on any station for us. I loved mustering, being high there in the saddle, wearing the ten-gallon stetson, relying on my stockhorse, leading the herd to water. They were fine years and I made friends for the first time in my life. There was so much I wanted to be talking about with people. I asked a roving man from our neck of the woods about his family, how his family were my relatives. He turned away threading the stirrups against his horse, sick and tired of my chit-chat. I learnt that a lot of men on the farm and out bush like to focus on an animal or an engine to hide their faces before they tell their truths. ‘The family trees of people like us are just bushes now, aren’t they?’ he said. ‘Someone has been trimming them good.’ I wouldn’t ever forget these words because they sounded like sad poems. And I guess that’s a true thing, because all the years I’ve lived I’ve lost so many parts of the people that make me up. My mummy, my daddy, my cousins, and my younger sister, my minhi. When I was little and in the Boys’ Home I never forgot our people on the river. It seemed every night the moon came to the dormitory window to remind me of my family. I’d think of my minhi across the country in the Girls’ Home and my urine would run like quicksilver over the hessian cots, onto the stone floors to wake my schoolmates. I was just three years old after all. I never forgot her. She was just a baby, Mary was, when we were both taken away; that’s a sad story with a happy ending because we found each other again. She is different from me, we don’t hug each other and be affectionate like I’d want to be. But we got to be brother and sister again, which is special. I got to be the older brother again, and she got to be my minhi.