August and her aunt slept on and off until the sun rose, orange, red, pink over the ocean. The taste of salt filled the car. Seagulls swooped. Surfers in short-legged wetsuits hurried past the car towards the glassy water that peeled hollow off the beach and from the headland right into the yellow shore. They rolled the sleeping bags, locked the rental and walked south along the bike path. All the houses were quiet. Big houses, mansions with moneyed cars parked outside. In the backyards August saw swimming pools fenced in glass, pools five metres from the edge of the ocean. After a kilometre or so people appeared with their leashed dogs, teenagers unstacked identical chairs outside coffee shops and men and women began to run past them with rhythmic breath. At a small cove they rolled their tracksuit pants above their knees and waded into the lapping seawater silently. It was colder than Aunt Missy expected and she fled from the shoreline. They laughed and washed their feet by the bike path tap and on the return to the car, they both looked out to the wide sea.
‘Mob here must’ve ate plenty of fish,’ Missy said, nodding to the calm expanse of water, the slope to the rock pools, perfect for netting.
August hummed in response. They returned to the car and a few blocks from the beach, bought vegie sausage rolls at the first Vietnamese bakery they spotted. They followed directions for twenty minutes on Missy’s phone until they found the closest car park to the Historic Museum Australia. August took the handful of submission cards and slid them into her coat pocket.
A strong southerly wind blew through the grey, angular city. ‘They won’t just give them back, will they?’ August asked, as they crossed against the traffic lights.
‘Let’s see what’s there first. Maybe they’ll get us to fill out paperwork or something. I’m sure this happens all the time.’
‘Repatriation?’ August had seen it in a newspaper; shrunken skulls returned to Indigenous people two hundred years later. Or they’d wanted them returned. She couldn’t remember.
‘Where they give your family’s artefacts back?’ she asked.
‘Yep.’
‘Yeah, I’m sure with the evidence we’ve got – they won’t just keep them.’
They stood outside fifteen minutes before opening, and looked up at the building. It wasn’t Buckingham Palace huge, but it was a decent size. Six tall squared sandstone pillars tapered into careful angles, and then held up a great triangle of sandstone. In the flat rock beneath the triangle the word ‘MUSEUM’ sat lonesome. August figured when it was built they didn’t know exactly which type of museum it would eventually be. The building was as grand to Australian buildings as Southerly House had been to Prosperous. It was spectacular.
‘Looking at it won’t make it smaller,’ Missy said, one arm bracing her cardigan and handbag against her body while the other swept broadly towards the building, the arm saying let’s go.
August dug her hands into her pockets and together they crossed the park. They were the first people in line. Inside the air was pleasant, neither too warm nor too cool. It smelt of paper. Missy smoothed her grey untameable mane so August did the same to her own thick hair. They purchased two adult tickets and Missy checked her handbag and slid her telephone into August’s parka pocket, patted the sides of her cardigan where there were no pockets. Missy took her hand and squeezed it hard, looked at her with excited nervousness. They walked single file through the metal-detector doorframe.
The entrance was white and as wide as a petrol station. Arrows pointed in the direction they were supposed to follow. As they entered the first room they craned and looked at the entire ceiling hung with gum-tree cuttings, the sound of didgeridoo played from hidden speakers. They looked at tall carved and painted totem poles, bark canoes suspended over exhibit shelves, headdresses stitched with shells and wide colourful dot paintings. They approached each item both searching for the title of ‘Falstaff Collection’. August saw a piece of bark, smoothed and painted in a watery charcoal, then painted with a big fish that looked like a Murrumby cod, the colours were white and ochre. The section of the stomach was hatched, the fins were painted with the dominant spines only, as if the painting explained the way it moved. The parts of the fish that Poppy had taught them to eat were all painted white, and the bone structure was all exact. It was an X-ray of the fish, and reminded August of when Jedda had disappeared and how she began to see people and things the same way. Opposite there were tens of dillybags arranged horizontally, encased in glass. A massive scroll hung on the wall above, a painting on white parchment. It was of a blood-red crocodile with a snake body angled vertical to the sky and people seemed to be tumbling down the insides of the animal, some swimming towards the mouth, trying to escape. Six figures were painted on the outside of the animal, their hands near their faces as if telling the people trapped inside what to do. It made August tearful.
At the entrance to one room a sign read: Warning to Aboriginaland Torres Strait visitors, this room contains images of deceased persons. A group of schoolkids hustled past them into the room without glancing at the notice.
‘Do you want to go in?’ August whispered to her aunt.
They both leant forward and took a tiny peek into the room. August saw a huge picture of Aboriginal men in a black-and-white photograph, with chains tied around their necks, staring into the unseen lens. They leant out, upright.
‘Nah,’ Missy answered, shaking off a little shiver. August thought about the Reverend for the umpteenth time, imagining him in a black-and-white image on their field. Was he good? she thought.
They returned to following the main arrows. There were touchscreens and plastercast caves to sit inside. August watched a video filmed in the 1960s of a group of women sitting cross-legged making a bark painting. These were real Aborigines – not like Aunty and her, she thought.
They walked so slowly, even when groups of schoolchildren bustled about them and hustled through the rooms saying cool and weird every few steps. ‘Weekday,’ August whispered to Aunty, but she didn’t take any notice. Hanging across a wall was a beautifully stitched possum-skin cloak about two metres wide and tall. On the skin side it had been intricately painted with people dancing, and birds’ necks stretching upwards, kangaroos whose bodies looked curved, as if they were still in the womb.
‘Here, take a photo of that,’ Missy whispered. She stood beside it. ‘Just get my hand, I’ll tell you when the coast is clear … now.’
August looked at the screen as she tapped the camera icon. Missy’s raised fist was barely in the frame.
‘It’s okay?’ August asked, and showed her the photo she’d taken.
‘Yeah.’ She pushed August’s hand down to hide the phone.
There were documents under glass cases. Large books, the first signatures of something, in calligraphy. August couldn’t read a thing.
There was a painted map of where the rivers were from. Missy arranged August to stand right ahead of it while again she stood beside it. August raised the phone.
‘Miss, no photos in here.’ The security guard held his hand out and stormed towards Aunty’s phone in August’s hands.
‘This is a painting of our country and I’m her elder, so I’m giving her cultural permission to take a photo – okay, Mister?’ Missy was rude without meaning to be and up until that point August’d thought she understood city museum manners.
‘That’s your warning, no photos,’ he repeated, and flexed his neck as if it were more threatening than his face.
‘Sorry,’ August offered, and put the phone in her pocket as he continued his staring competition with Missy.
Right away Missy shuffled on, her gait was skittering, jagged. August watched her skip the display of clapping sticks. She strutted past other hip-high displays as if nothing could impress her. August caught up to her and they both looked into a low glass cabinet. There were nardoo stones sitting in the centre of grinding plates. August guessed most people thought they were rocks until they read the descriptions. Missy jabbed her finger at the glass. ‘Can you see through this?’ she asked August sternly.
‘Yes,’ August said tentatively. ‘It’s glass.’
‘Not that.’ She took a step back and now jabbed her finger at the air, pointing down. ‘This.’
‘No. It’s wood,’ August said with a low chuckle, just polite enough for a museum.
‘This is tokenism, man. Liberals trying to feel good.’
‘It’s appreciation for art, Aunty.’ August could see she was getting serious.
‘They should work out how many of us they murdered and have a museum of tanks of blood. There’d be signs that said Bloodshed – 1788 to Yesterday – Stay Tuned! That’s what a museum of “Indigenous Australia” should look like – that’s the one the white people get to visit, and then, okay, we have our own museum …’ her aunty’s argument was losing steam. Not because she wasn’t sincere, but because Poppy’s voice had begun whispering in Missy’s ear instead: You tell ’em, my daughter! Tell ’em when the explorers came looking flash in their coats and drill trousers, and on their big tired horses, they had shiny cherrywood-handled guns and moleskin leather shoes and had already invented wheels, whips and germ warfare.
Daughter, do you hear me?
Daughter, will you tell them?
Missy tried to ignore her dad, tried to find the things they’d come for, but Albert kept talking in her ear as she tried to find her way out of the maze of displays.
Here, in Sydney, the coast was getting crowded with them folks from overseas and they all needed more land to grow food, because they were real hungry folk too.
Missy went to walk past a display of weapons, but her father compelled her to stop.
Look at the boomerang and the woomera, Missy! They shot and shattered our boomerang and our woomera! They didn’t just take our land with guns and bullets; there were other ways just as lethal – look, Missy. Look harder!
Her dad, Albert, was pestering her now, he was seizing the opportunity now that she stood in front of all the evidence.
They gave us blankets, Missy – they took the land that way too – with smallpox-infected blankets! They put arsenic in the flour, Missy! They divided us and ruled! They thought that us ‘Stone Age’ people needed to be exterminated come hell or high water.
Albert wasn’t finished but Missy dismissed him – she was sick to the guts, sick in that place.
‘Where’s our fucking artefacts, I need some fresh air!’ she said in a rush before storming down the remaining corridor, disappearing under an exit sign.
August thought to go after her, but didn’t. Her Aunt Missy needed a moment, to take a breath.
August liked the museum and was relieved to have some time alone. There was something satisfying about losing someone at a music concert or an art gallery, or a museum. She wasn’t obliged to turn to whoever she was with every two minutes and come up with new responses. Amazing. Beautiful. They weren’t the words for what she saw in the museum; the things she was looking at deserved words that, she thought, didn’t exist.
She continued through the exhibit, slowly and gravely. August stood in front of a yellow painting. All she saw was yellow ochre, a pattern that pulsated, as if it were a Magic Eye stereogram poster, and something hidden might suddenly become visible if she blurred her vision. She wanted to cry, she felt as she had at school, dumb at everything, trying three times as hard to problem-solve, trying three times as hard to make friends. But some things she didn’t know, because she was never taught. Everything hurt her head. It was as if she were walking through a cemetery, tombstones jutted. She’d realised then the purpose of their history class where they’d been mentioned like important footnotes, just like the purpose of the museum, how it felt like a nod – polite and reverent and doused in guilty wonder – of a time that had now passed. Past orpassed she thought as she followed the arrow to the archaeology collections.
August looked carefully into each display for Falstaff Collection labels but found none. She looped back again, staring into cabinets of wooden implements, stone pieces, bits of flint. Nothing was from their part of the river. She walked out of the exhibit to the information desk in the lobby. She spied Aunt Missy outside the museum glass doors on the entrance steps.
‘Hi,’ August said to the clerk at the information desk. She didn’t know quite where to start, it felt as if she were looking in the wrong place for answers. She asked about the artefacts, and took the handful of submission cards from her coat pocket and placed them on the counter. The clerk regarded the cards and recited them over the telephone and then led her down the hall, through code-secured doors and into the offices hidden out the back. August was introduced to a curator’s assistant and he introduced her to a researcher. The museum people located the artefacts on their database easily: they were currently in the collections, they said. They were helpful, kind even, and they handed August the forms she’d need to book a viewing.
August wanted to hand the papers back and to tell them everything, draw them close and whisper that their lives had turned out wrong, that she and her family were meant to be powerful, not broken, tell them that something bad happened before any of them was born. Tell them that something was stolen from a place inland, from the five hundred acres where her people lived. She wanted to tell them that the world was all askew and she thought it was because of the artefacts, that she thought they should understand it was all so urgent now, that they knew truths now, to tell them that she wasn’t extinct, that they didn’t need the exhibition after all. All the hidden pieces were being put back together, she wanted to say.
But she didn’t say any of those things. She thanked them, accepted the handshake, nodded as the door was held open for her, in and out of the climate-controlled space.
August exited the curated light and joined Aunt Missy outside. She wanted to go back to Massacre – the countryside had got into her skin again, so quickly, she thought.
‘Can we go home now?’ she asked.
‘What did the museum people say?’ Missy bit her fingernails.
‘We have to fill out these forms. I’ve got everything.’ August rustled the forms beside her. ‘We can do it back home, yeah?’
‘Can we go back inside? I really do want to see the artefacts,’ Aunt Missy said, sincere and contrite, with a softness in her face like a child.
‘They’re all packed away, Aunty – we have to apply with these papers to see them … but they said they normally have them on display all the time!’ August didn’t know why she lied to her. Would it be any consolation that more eyes flicked at them, that schoolchildren had said cool when they saw them? That they were labelled in a glass display or tagged and serial-numbered in a box on a shelf? She didn’t think so.
‘But it’s going to take time! We don’t have time!’ Missy said, frustrated.
August choked, tried not to cry. ‘They said it’s the only way.’
‘You sure you have all the things?’ she pointed to the papers.
‘I promise. To the airport?’ August put her arm around her.
‘Alright then,’ she said, deflated.
They dropped the rental off, ate McDonald’s fries at Terminal 2.
‘Botany Bay just down the road, August.’
‘From here?’
‘Yeah, just behind the airport.’
‘Where the First Fleet came?’
‘Yep.’ Aunty didn’t say anything more, she was too sad and too tired for anything else.
They took a train from the airport to the city and then out to Broken. They must have looked like the most despondent Aboriginal women in the entire world. They had run out of things to hope for. They had a destination, but it looked bleak from seats 18C and 18D.
Missy turned to August after some time and lamented, ‘It wouldn’t change a thing. The artefacts. People don’t care.’
‘Yes they do, Aunty,’ August said gently. ‘Otherwise they wouldn’t be in a museum.’
‘Nup. People need tin. People so scared of not having everything …’ she let out a big breath, ‘that our people are gunna have nothing.’ She closed her eyes as if that settled it.
After a while it sounded as if she were sleeping. August felt for Aunt Missy’s phone still in her pocket and took it out. In the search engine she typed tin mine and then clicked on images. Fourteen million entries popped up, the phone told her; six were displayed on the screen. August clicked on the first to enlarge it, it was a colour photo: blue sky, green grass ringed around a wide, deep hole that had stony-looking levels going down from the top, like seats in an ancient amphitheatre. She pressed the button at the top to lock the phone and put it back into her pocket.
August had always thought important events happened in every other country except for Australia. That the tremors of their small lives meant nothing. But at that moment, on a train going to the deep past and the place she knew best, she felt as if she’d awoken from a stony sleep to find herself standing on the edge of something larger than she’d ever been able to see before. After digesting all those schoolbook lies, after reading that Reverend’s letter, after walking the aisles of the museum, she knew that her life wasn’t like before. There was an expanse behind her, their lives meant something, their lives were huge. Thousands of years, she thought to herself. Slipped through the fingers of careless people. That’s what homogenised Massacre thought, that they were a careless people. Anyone watching the TV that week must’ve thought it – that Jedda was just a little brown girl gone missing from a messy brown family. Other people didn’t have lumps in their throat year in and out, century after century. They didn’t know what it was like to be torn apart.
They pulled into the station at a minute past midnight and began walking on the safe side of the railway strip, past the empty benches. August carried the rucksack and had both nylon sleeping bags draped around her neck – she imagined them like the possum-skin cloaks she’d seen at the museum. She felt for a moment as if she were a queen arriving for a coronation that she couldn’t live up to. Joey was standing on the platform, waiting.
‘You both look shattered.’
‘Exhausted, yep,’ August said, thrust back into the moment.
Missy nodded, glad to see her son again, to be home again.
Joey was jittery, he rubbed his palms together. ‘So … I’ve been with Nana all day. It’s a bit wild out there.’
‘What’s wild out where?’ Aunt Missy snapped.
‘Well, a little circus. Just a word of warning for when I drop you off, Aug.’
‘Spit it out!’ Aunty shouted.
‘They started clearing the trees yesterday arvo, knocked one of the sheds down and now the protesters are all over Prosperous. Chained themselves to everything.’ He started laughing then through a wide, dramatic mouth and clapped his hands together.
‘Oh my God’ was all Missy said, over and over, as they sped along the highway until they arrived at the turnoff of the Upper Massacre Plains road. As they drove down it, they could see an orange haze coming from Prosperous that blurred the usual stars on the horizon. ‘Oh my God.’
They drove on, it felt, in slow motion, finally steering through the arch of peppermint trees. And there they saw it all: the field ablaze, the silhouettes of people running and a few police cars parked beside Southerly, misery lights flashing in the maw of the dark. Aunt Missy said a final, foreboding, ‘Oh my God’ and the car turned right to Prosperous House. Lit by the field, standing on the verandah were Elsie and Aunt Mary who flagged them down as if Joey’s Mazda were a rescue ship and they were stranded in a sweep of wild ocean.