play – girinya When we were boys at the Home we played cricket, handball, marbles, leapfrog, and spear games. We made the spears with bulrush reeds or maybal sticks that we’d run against stones to sharpen and tie little stones with string that we’d unravel from our blankets. One boy would act out the kangaroo and the other boy would do the throwing. We’d hide our toy spears under the stairs out the back where we lined up with our hands on our hearts to sing ‘God Save the Queen’. Nothing is ever terrible all the time, even during the worst time. When you’re a kid you always find a way to play, girinya.
platypus – biladurang There’s a story about biladurang and how that platypus came to be only in this country – but it starts with a little duck called Gaygar. Once, long ago, Gaygar disobeyed her elders, disrespected the values of her family and she left the safe lake and began to swim into the creek away from her family into waters that ducks weren’t supposed to go. There she was captured by a water rat called Bigun and he kept her up at a creek for a whole season. When she escaped back to the lake, all the ducks had their babies, and Gaygar had hers too. When her family saw Gaygar’s young they shook their heads and told Gaygar she had to leave, otherwise bad things would happen to her family if she stayed. So Gaygar took her strange babies down through the water system, through the rivers and catchments. She finally found a spot where her young were happy. But it was too cold for Gaygar, since she didn’t have fur like her children. When Gaygar passed away, her babies stayed in the cool rivers, all webbed feet, billed and covered in fur. Biladurang.
plover bird – didadida I learnt this word at the Boys’ Home. Didadida! We’d scream it and run, swing the switches in the air to scare them back. Most people would agree the plover is the worst bird to ever live, worse than any vulture or magpie. Every Australian would know that, I’d bet. They’ll swoop at your face if you come near their nests, but even if you run away from the nest they’ll chase you on and on. The thing is, when I became a parent myself I thought about the didadida again and how they are just protecting their young. The didadida – it even sounds like a name the young chicks would give to their comforting parents.
policeman, policewoman – gandyan, gandyi I’ve met nice ones and I’ve met rotten ones. Problem with coming across a rotten gandyan is that they are armed, not just with guns – tasers these days, too. Pocket-electrocution that is. When I was a kid, everyone said, ‘Now wave at the policeman.’ I think when people put a cross on their wall, or pin a thing to their lapel, or a band on their arm – they are really saying, ‘Don’t shoot me.’ We’d wave at them the same way. I even taught the girls and the grandkids that, ‘Look there, wave to the police car!’ Of course it was different when I was alone and saw a gandyan – then I would become real invisible.
old man – dyirribang I was born in the middle of peace and war, right between the thought before the acts and the shadows that came after. When the soldiers who survived returned home the first time, they got given our land under lease, called Soldier Settler Allotments. Dyirribang Falstaff, that fella made a mistake, he got that land on the Homestead Lease on the vacated Station and failed to pay off the freehold. Failed to make the payments to make it his under Australian law forever. The Falstaffs never got to own the land, and the Gondiwindi never did too after that – the government owned it, ninety-nine years, enough time to tuck a mistake in the bedding of the next generation. Eddie will get to know the same feeling – being without a place or paddock to call home. That’s how the mine just slid right in here, slithered up like a snake – worse than a snake – ready to make a million, a billion or more for a couple of greedy mates.
magpie – garru, wibigang, dyirigang Garru is a messenger bird. They can be vicious like the plover but the ancestors said they brought spiritual messages, that the garru love to talk if you can make friends with them. So I tried that, and now they come down here into the garden when they aren’t nesting, and I’ll say garru nguyaguya milang mudyi – magpie, my beautiful friend – and he’ll be calm and gentle. He told me about his ancestor, the first magpie, and about how important it is to protect his babies from the goanna, that’s why he is the way he is, and I told him how I understood completely.
mailman, messenger (with a message stick) – dharrang-dharrang Julie at the local library – a wise and kind woman – unearthed pieces of my puzzle in the library catalogue that I wouldn’t have found otherwise, she gave them to me like a message stick from long ago. Those things she showed me helped me compile my dictionary, helped me put together the picture properly. Julie was my dharrang-dharrang.
marks or tracks, impressions of passing objects – murru This is the tracks the snakes, the goanna, the birds and us make as we crisscross the world. We all leave murru behind, so leave a gentle one.