It’s a peculiar weekend, and we are out of sorts with each other. There are seven of us in a four-bedroom holiday beach house; you’d think it would work, but it doesn’t. Glenn wants a room by himself, I won’t let any of the men share a room with the teenage girl, there are two double beds but only one couple, and the only person I’ll agree to share a bed with is my teenage son, who’s not too happy about that. Someone ends up on the couch as a result of all this. Also, we seem to be in the middle of suburbia, not on the beach at all, and there is some muttering about misleading real estate agents and other places that would have been better and why didn’t I check it out more thoroughly. I am slightly sick and not in the mood for rituals, beaches, or other people.
Cathryn insists we make masks. It is approaching Samhain and we have come away for a weekend together, choosing this location down the coast for its proximity to the bora ring. It’s almost always me who insists we do things so I am astounded and impressed that it’s Cathryn, but I don’t feel remotely like making a mask, not one bit. I feel cross and headachy, and the task of dealing with cardboard and paint to try to work a concept into a wearable mask seems far too great and awkward for me. At Cathryn’s coaxing I agree to sit in the room where the masks are being made and eventually, of course, it wears off on me and I concede that I will have to make a mask; we are all making them for the ritual next week.
I’m currently holding the direction for Samhain. I want my mask to be an animal or a bird; nonhuman, anyway. But I also want it to be simple, stark; almost violent with impact. I sketch a few ideas idly, then I’m suddenly gripped. There’s a piece of very heavy black cardboard, white on the inside, far too thick to fold or shape, and I’ve suddenly seen how it can be transformed into a bird’s beak by cutting out a V and sewing the edges together, forcing the rest of the shape to bend in response. There’s some thick glittery gold thread: I seize it and the cardboard and a cutting blade and find a skewer to make holes for sewing, and I wrestle and pierce and yank the thread, forcing it into the shape I’ve seen. I end up with a ferociously piercing triangular-shaped black bird mask. I paint simple eyes on it, but I see where I’m going by looking down, since the mask sits on top of my head. I’m enormously pleased with it and even help make another one so there can be a pair of these almost cockatoos, almost ravens.
That evening we drive to the bora ring. It’s a full moon and the sky is clear. It’s deserted and seems even emptier than in daytime, as if the winds blowing over it are the winds of tens of thousands of years and we are in no particular time at all, certainly not a special or momentous time. And we are no particular people at all, certainly not special people. Usually this is one of the aspects I like about this place, the reminder of the immensity of time in the bora ring and of imminent mortality in the cemetery before it, but at night it is more disconcerting. We haven’t devised a ritual; usually when we visit these places we let the mood dictate, the place offer its own suggestions, and that results in very simple, almost emblematic rituals. And we’ve been here as a group before but never at night and never with the full moon.
We park the car a little way away and walk over towards the bora ring, not directly beside it and certainly not in it, but nearby. We’ve brought a drum, and we begin to sing and drum. It is a simple ritual and perhaps doesn’t meet our expectations. There’s too much discussion, not enough focus, and we don’t have a plan, so in the end it is mainly the fact of us being there in the moonlight. As we finish the police drive up; a nearby resident has alerted them to our drumming, but once they see how few we are, they’re disinterested.
I pick up some twigs thick with gum leaves to jam into the masks and form the crests of these black birds I’ve summoned out from between the worlds. Creatures of night, of the air, of movement between one place and the next. And I’ve always seen this stand of very young gum trees as guardians, current reminders of the ancient landscape when this was not paddocks and roads and houses but rises and dips in the living land, folded truths settling upon one another around and around the ages. I notice they’ve been allowed to grow—or been planted, even, in the west—so the setting sun cuts through them in stripes and shadows across the bora ring. I think of them as holding a promise that we’re returning to a time when we remember the sacred—not remember it as history but as the living now. The gum leaves are a memento of this world, a symbol of the South-West, a whisper on the wind.