afraid to speak – giya-rra-ya-rra My wife was waist-deep at the local pool when I fell in love with her. She was a warrior that day, and every day after. That was the day we met, and there she was. She arrived out at Tent Town with a busload of university students from the city one day when we were still handsome and young. She was one of the university teachers there and she said that they had come out to the countryside to talk to the Aborigine about human rights! Well! She was beautiful, and she was smart – so I listened right away. I myself was out there at Tent Town visiting some shearers who I was sent out to get for the week’s work at Prosperous – that was a hot week – must’ve been summer if we were shearing. So those university students were telling us about equal rights and this and that and I was listening. She and the others asked us what were some of the things in Massacre that we thought were discriminatory? Well, it didn’t take a minute for us to list this and that. ‘Look around’, I told her. I mentioned the pub and the schools and the fact we were separated and the fact there was no land around for us and that the kids weren’t allowed in the local swimming pool – not even in this heat, I said. Then her eyes widened and they all got so excited. ‘We’re taking the kids for a swim then!’ they said.
Lo and behold, about thirty kids were picked up and piled into the bus with all the university students and their cameraman too. Me, I was on the bus too, but I was just floating in there, floating after the woman I’d decided that I loved already. We arrived at the town swimming pool and those university students get the money out and hand it to each of the kids to go and buy their ticket. The kids smiled so big, never seen kids smiling like that before in my life, I reckon. We could smell the chlorine, see the pool through the turnstiles. We arrived at the ticket booth, and that was it, all over – ‘NO Aborigines,’ the pool attendant said, and pointed to the kids to look at the sign. I remember the kids just staring up at the painted letters like they’d been punched in the guts, like all the air and happy life got pushed out of them. Some of those kids started crying and I was mad at those university students. Why they had to come and shame the kids in front of everyone?
The students were arguing with the pool attendant, and then a big crowd of Massacre residents come gathering around saying, ‘Go home blackfellas, get, get out of town’. The university people, Elsie there too, were still arguing with the pool attendant and I was standing back, saying ‘There, there’ to the little ones, that I’d take them myself down the river when we got back to Tent Town.
Then the fight starts heading away from the pool attendant and it’s all around the bus, see. There’s a sort of play happening, a jostle for the stage and one of the university students was questioning a local lady wearing gloves in front of the cameraman, just beside me and the kids. The university student asked something like, ‘Ma’am, why do you not want the Aboriginal children of this town swimming in the pool?’ ‘They’re bad,’ she said, ‘they don’t belong here, should go back to their huts!’ she said. The university student asked her again, voice raised now, on the edge of a big argument, gesturing to the kids and me. ‘Don’t they look like good kids to you that just want to go for a swim and cool off, just like the privileged white children?’ she asked. ‘You don’t think they are good children?’ The woman couldn’t even look at those kids, she just raised her voice above the din and said, ‘Yeah, a good one’s a dead one.’
Well, I hustled the crying kids into the bus then, I didn’t want them hearing another thing. The fights continued outside and the camera kept rolling when there were conversations to film. Finally, persuaded by Elsie, and twisted by the arm seeing the video camera in their face, the kids were allowed to have a swim. Elsie jumped in too. I stood out and watched and dropped my hand into the pool and splashed a little. Elsie was laughing. Not an ounce of fear about her. She wasn’t ever giya-rra-ya-rra. She dried off and got dressed and I talked to her until she and the students left the pool, and she said they were going to many places after Massacre. ‘Causing trouble?’ I asked. ‘I hope so,’ she said, then winked at me and laughed.
She left after that, all the university students and the bus too. I said I’d stay on with the kids and we’d walk home later. Not a minute after the bus rolled out of the car park of the municipal pool did the attendant and his gang come and throw me and the kids out! Shame. They were happy enough though, those kids were. They dived in the clear cool water. It didn’t matter to them how long it lasted. It was that it happened, I’ve reckoned. And me, I became more afraid because they didn’t just despise me, but I realised when I was watching the children, hearing the things that children should never hear – that they despised our kids, too. Only part of me was happy, because Elsie happened to me, and I knew somehow that I’d be seeing her again soon.
Years later, even after those laws about the public pools and the cinema seating changed, I could still recognise that fear that people had towards us, that distrust they had of our kids, and since that day I saw Elsie at the galing I’ve been reminded time and again that people’s attitudes don’t change just because the law changes. I was afraid to speak for so long, for so much of my life, but I’m not anymore. I refuse to giya-rra-ya-rra!
alcohol, wine, strong drink – widyali, girrigirri One day you wake up and there’s the dry of the drought at your door. Then the great flood, playing tricks on your mind, and then the drought arrives again, the summer lengthened a month every year until we find ourselves where we are now. Nothing so sad as the skeleton of a bullock or a heifer in a field, its skin draped over it like a bedsheet. What a drought does to the mind is a cruel thing, and many men from the farms around here have found the only solution is wrapping their lips around the barrel of a shotgun. Divorce is now commonplace in an area where it wouldn’t have been thought of fifty years ago. There is a limit to better or worse, thick and thin – sometimes the thin gets to be completely out of sight. Sometimes it’s the boys off the farms, lost in the cities and there isn’t even anyone left to fight with, a person is left wrestling themselves. That’s when the widyali – poison in its own right, but balm in the mouth of poisoned spirits – looks like prayer. But tortured people and the drink is like throwing petrol into a fire – don’t do anything except make it worse. Won’t quench a drought, that widyali, won’t mend your heart either, won’t even let you forget about it, not for long. That poison is best given a wide berth – haven’t seen anything good come from it and the drugs all my long life.
all together in one place – ngumbaay-dyil To be isolated is to be unable to act. That’s what we were – isolated – from our family, from our language, from our cultural ways and from our land. And then we were taken ngumbaay-dyil. But it wasn’t really that we were together, it just looked humane, a face in a crowd. But we were brutalised, we turned on each other, we were isolated in our humiliation but we couldn’t leave neither. We were like roos in the headlights, the old people, my old mummy, me and my sisters, even my daughters, growing up around sad ghosts on the Mission. Having their own struggles. We weren’t really all together in one place, we weren’t residents in those places, us kids on our cots, we were criminals by birth, inmates since we could walk. Together and isolated at once.
always be, exist – ngiyawaygunhanha A person exists beyond the living and the dead, in the planes of time where gods roam, when they know the seen and unseen at once. That is to be ngiyawaygunhanha.