You can imagine; castrated, absorbed, buggered-up, striving to be more than a full stop, to sabotage my grandfather’s social experiment, to repopulate his family history ... Can you imagine how I felt, seeing these two women again? The girls—now women—the first two women, the only two women with whom I had...
Well, as Uncle Jack put it, ‘White seed in black ground. Black seed in white ground.’
Two women stepped from a car. Two children on the rear seat, turned to peer through the rear window. Two women, each side of the car, look at me.
Uncle Jack, the others, all watching.
Me.
Us.
I want to preserve the anonymity of those two women, in case my writing proves to be just another way in which I embarrass and discomfort people.
The two of them helped me grow from my bitter and isolated self; let me reconcile myself to what it means to be so strangely uplifted; one who hovers, and need only touch the ground lightly. They brought others to hear me sing, and it is not their fault if I am unable to bring together people from beyond our very small core.
They led me back to writing, after I had turned away from it because of the struggles with my grandfather’s words. They did not want to be central in such a story, which they understood must be about place, and what has grown from it. ‘Not us,’ they said. ‘Not yet. Our children, yes, but not us.’
And what did I want? What did I want, as I floated above the keyboard, my hands clumsily dancing with the alphabet? I wanted to make something of which both my children and ancestors can be proud.
The women and I ... This is no romance, it is not romantic love I speak. Negotiation, perhaps. We had shared experience, came to learn together. We shared responsibilities.
I think they saw I was harmless enough.
They smiled, laughed, teased me.
‘Looks like him, unna?’ One would say to the other, indicating one of the children. Or say, of a particular gesture or mannerism, ‘Who’s that remind you of?’
And in fact there were several children. Neither of the women would confirm if the children, or either of them, were mine. But it was obvious to me—even if remarkably coincidental—that the two I had first seen in the car were mine. I saw myself in both of them. And Uncle Jack told me I was right.
The women acknowledged that it was good for the kids to have a man around. Even such a man as myself.
I did not understand it myself at the time, but of course I was dependent upon them for some sense of a future, and of how I might simply be. I have no doubt that they were more pragmatic; I had a house, car, far more than I needed that way. Once they had adjusted to my one or two peculiar characteristics I was very easy to get along with. Was, in fact, very obliging. They sensed the measure of my dependence, and were flattered by it. So why shouldn’t they join my uncle and I as we slowly moved a little further, a little deeper into our family history.
But now—having written such a very little of my people, both before and behind me—I would show you a place.
I wanted to visit Dubitj Creek with the children. ‘Go alone,’ said the women. ‘No,’ they laughed at me, doing a duet:
‘Take the kids with you...’
‘We need a break.’
‘They’ll keep your feet on the ground.’
I was happy. Flattered, really.
Dubitj Creek is a national park, and we stayed in an approved camping spot. We walked a little, fished, read the plaque at the ruins of some homestead. We made a fire, sat around it in the chill night. This seems too simple, I know, but it is true. I felt at peace and as if belonging. I remembered places very like it, from my own childhood.
We slept among old and gnarled ti-trees. Magpies woke us in the morning, and danced away into a little clump of paperbarks which showed, in the way the flaking bark had not yet grown back over charred-black wood, the signs of past fire.
In the mornings the fine sand along the edge of the dune vegetation held the brushstrokes of sweeping grasses, and the delicate prints of small marsupials, reptiles and birds. The afternoon breeze lifted and swirled the same sand so that the creek and the base of the trees seemed indistinct and blurred as we approached them.
I was still a lightweight, but as I walked hand-in-hand with my young children, I noticed that my footprints in the sand were almost as deep as theirs.
There is a small granite headland which the sea wraps around, and banksia trees grow thickly on its slope. Fresh water seeps slowly from the granite, the south-west wind is kept away, and the banksia cones are like little heads looking out from between the serrated leaves.
When you’re on that slope, among the banksia trees, yours does not seem the only head sticking up and looking this way, that way, everyway.
I awoke under the stars, and heard the chill cry of a curlew.
We were about to leave Dubitj Creek, but suddenly jumped out of the car to take a last walk across the headland to a place the maps name Dolphin Cove.
We came to a line across the granite where the lichen had not grown and, our feet choosing the way, we followed it. There was no real reason.
No, I am too offhand. There is a reason. Lichen does not grow on that thin strip of granite, because it is the path where, again and again and again, our people walked across the granite. And where they walked, year after year after year, the lichen did not grow. Lichen, unlike the rock from which it grows, is a very fragile thing.
But, it is true, I only half thought this at the time.
We weaved through shrubs, to the other side of the hill and a small beach only a hundred or so metres long, between our hill and the next granite outcrop. The beach faced east; its sand was talcum white, and squeaked at us when we walked on it, and the ocean was broken into many small surfaces by the wind, broken grey, black, blue, green. Waves collapsed heavily on the steep, wet sand. I intended returning by walking around the headland on the rock which sloped into the sea. No sooner were we away from the beach than we were among precariously balanced brown granite boulders and irregular, massive sheets of stone strewn about as if thrown and broken by some powerful force.
There were small crevices and caves, their entrances as smooth as skin. The rock sloped quickly to where the ocean must have been very deep, because its level merely rose and fell smoothly up the slope of rock as each swell swept past.
Something on the edge of my vision attracted me. Further around the rocks, a bird, hovering. A grey and brown bird, mottled and immature, it hung in the air, intent on something below it and, constantly adjusting itself, remained in position despite the blustering, shifting and buckling air which it rode.
I walked on that smooth and sloping rock. The sea on my right; to my left, massive boulders and shards of rock with small and wiry coastal scrub sprouting in every tiny place where there was a little soil, sun, and shelter from the wind. Even then I felt something particular about the place, reminding me of something, somewhere, some other occasion.
I stopped to wait for my children, and always there was that bird; dipping, rising, but remaining.
‘That bird wants us,’ I said. Was I talking to myself, or my children? Was I talking in such a way? ‘That bird is trying to tell us something.’
My children were tired. I wanted to comfort them.
Another bird; did it appear from nowhere, or suddenly swoop up, as if out of the sea; as if out of the hole left when the sea recedes as it sometimes does where there is deep water beside sloping rock, and a powerful swell running?
It was a white bird with bright red at its beak. Mollyhawk, I called it. An adult. Flying low at the edge of the rock, its wing beats regular and powerful, it arrowed straight to where the younger bird was hovering, and then arced up to join it.
I looked to my children, and—oh, this was sudden, not at all a gradual or patient uplift—I was the one poised, balanced, hovering on shifting currents and—looking down upon my family approaching from across the vast distances my vision could cover—I was the one to show them where and who we are.
Uplifted, I was as I have always been; must be. From me came that long cry which has made so many shiver, and think of death.
And should you ever hear this, or see it ... Well, yes, it is terrifying. Uncomfortable. It is the sort of thing it is easier to avoid.
I told Uncle Jack and the others of what had happened, and as I was speaking I found myself suddenly aware of how they listened. How they looked at me so closely, so attentive as I spoke.
‘Those birds. That was the spirit in the land talking to you. Birds, animals, anything can do it. That is what Aboriginal people see.’
He and the women began encouraging friends and family to visit us. We lit a fire, and people would make themselves comfortable, and I would walk in that strange way I have to the fire, float above it, and ... sing.
Now, it may not be for me to put a name to myself, to who or what I am. Call me one of whatever you will of these; Wadjari, Kwetjman, Mirning, Runaways, Southern People, Coastal People, Shell People, Ngadju, Nunga, Nyungar, Noongar, Nyungah, Nyoongar...
If I am one of the Runaways, then it means to runaway as in to withdraw. If one of the Shell People...
A mollusc withdraws inside itself, and stays there, until it is safe again. So we ran away inside ourselves to wait; we withdrew. And a shell cannot always tell what life it holds.
Periwinkle, mollusc, abalone ... Shells grip granite rocks. It is hard to get those things away from the rocks and sea. It is very hard to get at them. Soaked in salt water, dried in the sun, the waves pounding again and again.
One of the shell people. One of those hard, and eroding slowly to the ridge of itself, eroding to the ridge on the sand dunes. Further back is where the plants grow. Here, there is white sand, granite, ocean. Here the shells stubbornly cling, birds hover, and the dolphins—like old dogs—herd the ailing sea-things into shore.