war –nadhadirrambanhi There was a big one here, that’s how the town got its name in the end. The war lasted one hundred years. Everyone was fighting that war, even the Ghan cameleers and train-track fettlers were there and fighting alongside the Gondiwindi. It all started when the Gondiwindi were sick of the settlers taking over their land, digging up their tubers, ruining the grazing work they’d done forever. The Gondiwindi were farmers see, farmers and fishermen and they cultivated the land here long before, they stayed even through the rare winters. They’d keep warm by turning their possum-skin cloaks inside out and rubbing the fat of the pelican on their skin.
So when the Gondiwindi were fed up, and hungry because their kangaroo wasn’t coming in their hunting ground anymore and because their lore said that even during change, the land still owned them. That they could use the land how they needed – they got into the cattle then. They rounded them up with their mutts and dingoes and chased the heifers until they became tired, until it became a hunt and they’d spear them. Must’ve been frightened, those cows, so it was a good thing they never ate the meat – would’ve been tough as a chop from the Boys’ Home. They ate the fat, and the liver and the marrow. The settlers got mighty angry that the wild Gondiwindi didn’t respect their new fences. Then came retaliation. Thousands died, even the Gondiwindi babies too. Well, the river ran with blood then, and the dirt turned forever from yellow to pink. Massacre Plains had been born and the Gondiwindi, looking down the eye of a gun’s barrel, were scared.
water – galing, guugu, ngadyang The Reverend wrote it in his journals as culleen – he was listening that fella, listening as close as he could. All my life I’ve been near the water, and we come from the water too, us people. First we were born from quartz crystal – that’s hard water, we are kin of the platypus, that’s the animal of the water, and then, my wife Elsie and I made Missy and Jolene and Nicki, born on the banks of the water, the Big Water – Murrumby.
a large waterhole, a watercourse downhill – nguluman There’s one near the property, just there at the corner of the wheatfield, a little shoot off the Murrumby. The waterhole never fills all the way anymore. If the river ever gets going, it’s only running a little, and the whole thing is never deep enough to fill the wetland and then trickle into the waterhole. They call that one Poisoned Waterhole Creek.
wattle flower, acacia tree – yulumbang The ancestors told me about all the plants and trees and how to use them. They told me that the plants were pregnant with seeds, that the plants were our mothers and so I was only to use them for the Gondiwindi, not for selling, just for living. Remember that, wherever you go and touch the trees and plants, they are sacred. The yulumbang is a great plant for lots of things, the green seeds can be roasted in their pods on the fire, then you eat them like you eat peas. If you roast them and make a paste it tastes like peanut butter. The light-coloured gum from the yulumbang can be sucked like a lollipop, but not the dark-coloured gum – that one is too bitter. The gum is called mawa.
weak, hungry, depressed – ngarran You should never say this word too loud because it’ll catch you hard. When you say the thing, sometimes you become the thing. August, when she arrived to live with us, would scream and weep, and yell out ‘I’m hungry’, but she was ngarran, she was all those things. I knew she had ngarran from this life and the past too. We’d say, Close the voice, because it’s telling you wrong. Anyone can say that, I’m not ngarran, because I’m in control – I can make it small and put it into the palm of my hand. I don’t think it always works, but it gives the spirit a chance to rest. In the end, ngarran is part of life – we can’t make it disappear, it doesn’t vanish overnight, but we can tell it to shush in the meantime.
well/to make well, to make good – maranirra If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to drop one. Mistakes were made and I want to make maranirra now. We should all make maranirra.
wheat – yura My entire life has been galing and yura. Even in the Boys’ Home we used to have to bless our meals, mostly served with johnnycakes, or dense bread. We’d recite ‘Blessed by God who is our bread, may all the world be clothed and fed’. I quite liked saying that aloud. Many people know the wheat firsthand, not just in this country. Every person knows bread one way or another. The Gondiwindi had their own flours, and they were meant especially for the body of the Gondiwindi. We have always worked in the wheatfields too, my daddy did, and his daddy too, and if the world ever stopped turning it’d be the last grain on earth, I reckon. Prosperous acres were fertile for the most part and although us mob lived on rich land – we never became rich.
where is your country? – dhaganhu ngurambang The question is not really about a place on the map. When our people say Where is your country they are asking something deeper. Who is your family? Who are you related to? Are we related? There’s a story I read about someone who wanted to build a map that was the scale 1:1 so that the map covered all the oceans and all the mountains and land at its true size. That made the girls laugh when I told them – imagine walking underneath and holding the thing above your head in the dark? That’s a little what a map does, takes the light out so you can’t see. The map isn’t the thing, this country is made of impossible distances, places you can only reach by time travel. By speaking our language, by singing the mountains into existence.
wooden dugout, or bark container or dish – guluman Elsie and me – we celebrated our marriage anniversary when the grandkids were little, Mary babysat. We took the Greyhound bus like they did in American blues songs. We went all the way to Alice Springs and then to Uluru – right in the middle of the country. We met some proper blackfellas out there, and there were women that were making their own guluman there too, and we bought one to bring home. It made me want to do things like that back at Prosperous. The guluman we brought back reminded me what the ancestors showed me and said, that our family had our own, used to carry fish to waterholes. Our people used to farm fish too! And after that trip, the guluman was a reminder of a bigger story of our people – how far we’d come that we could revisit ourselves, be proud of our culture again.
world, all over the world, everyplace – bangal-ngaara-ngaara Once, the ghosts came when I was meant to be doing chores, and away we went to shake a leg. I had never been to a dance in my life, I must have been about thirteen years old. All my family was at the corroboree and there they showed me the dance of the crow. We all danced and while we were dancing we flew into the sky, doing things that humans can’t do. We went bangal-ngaara-ngaara and the ancestor, my great-great-great-nanny was there, and she was teaching me about dying. We were flying and she said, ‘No-one ever dies.’ I said, ‘I’m sure they do because my daddy died.’ She took her claw then and ripped a feather off my wing and she said, ‘This is not you. If I rip all the feathers off you, it is not you.’ ‘What is me?’ I said, and she said, ‘You is only electricity and electricity cannot die. You go somewhere else, but your feather is not you.’ We went to a thousand and one places in our dance and she showed me that dust to dust is just where we are resting – in the ground some places, in the water other places, burnt in ashes other places – she just said, ‘They now soil, they now water, they now lightning.’ Afterwards we flew back to the fire. All my ancestors danced through night and we ate quandong fruit by the fire. It was sweet and I stayed awake a long time after dessert. But then it was time for bed and they took me back to the Boys’ Home. When I lay in bed that night I was very scared that I was going to die, that they showed me dying for a reason. But I didn’t die that night, I think they just wanted to tell me things, but not always in the way I thought. I realised I was just learning, it didn’t need to be in a special order, they just had me learn what I needed for all the days, not just the one I feared.