Of Ashes and Rivers that Run to the Sea (17 page)

I can't work out if those two brahminy kites precipitated my leaving because I was seriously wanting to go, or if their song was giving me permission to spread my wings and fly away. I know my family will be fine when I'm gone but I'm afraid I won't be because I've never learnt how to let go very well. I know I won't be leaving them forever but the idea of going at all sits in my heart like a stone. But I've given it a go and to stay would be deluding myself. I know I need excitement and new things to stimulate my senses and I'll go mad here.

Mummy is really cool about it when I try to explain to her that I can't live here forever because I'm not wired that way but I think she's already worked that out or some bloody bird has told her. My brothers are a different story though and they shed real tears which makes me shed real
tears as well, lots of them, and it's then that I decide I will live in Darwin so I am close by. My aunties cry as well and my sister-girls and everyone else too. They all hug me and shake my hand and I just keep crying and don't say anything because all my words have dried up. And somewhere inside me, in that place where I work things out, I've realised that mummy wasn't being mean to me when she left me to fend for myself in the mangroves and when she tried to show me how to hunt and cook or snapped at me when I grumbled about getting dirty. She has been the best teacher I've ever had. Maybe she has been hoping that my blackfella instincts would wake up and stir like some sleeping dinosaur but I don't think they have. And I'm fine with that because I've got others things to help me make it in this world, like my city knowledge and an education, and I'm a survivor. Despite my whinging I stuck it out and came out the other side intact.

My last night at the club is a rambunctious affair with lots of beer drunk and sloppy kisses given. There are no fights for a change but it's all over too soon and then we are weaving our way back across the oval and then down Munkara Street to home. We sit around and talk for a while and I feel true love between us all, my mum and my brothers and my extended family. There is a real sense of togetherness and I wonder briefly why I feel this now that I'm going. It is so Zen – now I don't crave it it's all mine. When it's bedtime I lie down with mummy and tell JJ
and Lorraine they can have my bed. I want to know the sweetness again of how it feels to be snuggled up safe and sound with my mum. I want to imagine what it was like before I was taken away and everything changed. My mum knows this and holds me tight and I sleep like a baby.

And then the day dawns and I feel as light as a feather. I'm as excited as hell about my new life in Darwin and can hardly wait to get on the plane. At the airport mummy holds my hand. I regret for a moment the years we didn't have together but we can't change our destiny and despite everything I'm still happy with what I got because during this time I have discovered a most amazing thing. The languages of those who came before me. They are a direct link to this land and to my own flesh and blood because our words tie us all together in a way that nothing else can. The words that our ancestors spoke hundreds of years ago and we are still speaking today are in my head and on my tongue and are part of every cell in my body. They are still there in the place where I was born and those words will be around long after I have passed into the next world. It doesn't matter that I can't hunt or kill things or survive alone in the bush because through the power of our words I still belong.

And after the plane takes off for Darwin I look out the window and see the islands falling away behind me and it takes me back to that memory of all those years ago when I was a little kid in a big plane looking out the window and
seeing the lush green vegetation surrounded by brilliant blue ocean shrinking into the distance. Like then I am heading off to an uncertain future but there is a difference this time because my heart is bursting with hope not fear and I know I will be able to conquer anything. I scan the waters hoping to catch a glimpse of just one teensy whale who might have taken a wrong turn but there is nothing, just beautiful blue ocean with silver tips glinting in the sunlight.

It's a pity we can't remember anything from when we're babies because I know my mum would have been beautiful and the sky would have been so much bluer and the cuddles and kisses when I was being handed around would have been magic. I wish I could remember floating around the billabong in my coolamon looking at the sky listening to the women's voices and the songs of the birds while my mum dug up water-lily bulbs to eat.

But I don't have those memories because they belong to my mum, not me, and I only know about them because she told me these things the night before I left Nguiu. The very first memory I have is being held in my mother's arms while I looked at a wooden building over her left shoulder. I must have been about two and I still wonder why my brain chose that image and not the scent of the bush when
it rained or the black cockatoos floating across the sky like burnt leaves. The discovery as I walked along the beach at Nguiu twenty-five years later that the building wasn't a figment of my imagination as I had wondered and was in fact the church on Bathurst Island made me realise the amazing capacity of our minds. Without my memories I would have been adrift. They anchored me to solid ground.

I have no memories of the wonderful man Casmir who, like my mother, didn't want to marry his ‘promised' either, but he wanted my mum, the cute little thing that she was, and I was part of the package. And because my mum's pregnancy had come to the attention of Native Affairs, and the mission at Bathurst Island didn't seem to like single men wandering around the place, someone made the decision to marry them off. It was arranged that they would be married at the Daly River Mission before being sent to Nguiu where Casmir was from and where they would spend the rest of their lives. Back in those days the fate of people like my mum and Casmir were decided by governments and missions with no mind to whether the poor buggers were complete strangers or if they liked each other. Marriages weren't made in heaven, they were made by the stroke of a pen by a government official. Thankfully Casmir was a good man.

On that last night in Nguiu as we snuggled together on her bed mummy told me about how we lived in a tin shack
right next to the beach when I was a baby. She said they would regularly hear the sound of clanging corrugated iron only to rush outside to see one of the shacks fallen down with the inhabitants ensconced within. If any feet or any other limbs were protruding from underneath everyone would stand around pointing at them and hooting with laughter. Thankfully there were no injuries and the poor buggers whose house had fallen on their heads would have a good laugh about it as well, then the onlookers would give them a hand to reconstruct the debris.

My mum herself was guilty of knocking down a wall of their shack when she was chasing a rat and bumped the offending wall with her arse as she bent over to crack the furry little miscreant over the head. She never lived that one down. But as we know, my time there was short-lived as the mission waited for us to settle in and get nice and comfortable before taking me away and dumping me at the Garden Point Mission. By then my mum was pregnant with my brother Louis who thankfully would help to fill some of the empty space that I'd left behind.

I sometimes think of how I was taken from the loving arms of my mum and Casmir and given into the ‘care' of a paedophile and a violent abusive woman and I feel great big holes in my heart for what was lost. And then I tell myself to look on the bright side of things because I wouldn't be who I am if I hadn't lived the life I have. But it was still wrong and I know because of that there
are some dark places inside my soul that will forever be in the shadows and never see the sun, and parts of me that will never be right. But I can't mourn the losses, I can only count my blessings, because I only have one chance at this life.

It was only with the distance of Darwin that I realised most of the crappy stuff that had happened at Nguiu was probably my doing, not my family's. Despite the regular flare-ups my family were in complete harmony with each other and their environment and it was me who was the irritating piece of sandpaper that rubbed things up the wrong way. I was completely out of place there because I'd resisted everything I didn't understand instead of going with the flow and keeping an open mind. Knowing this now I'm amazed they hadn't taken me out bush, dumped me and then driven away without a backward glance. But they didn't.

My first job in Darwin was working as a field officer for Block 4, the Centre for Communicable Diseases based at the Royal Darwin Hospital, and it was while visiting
the clinic at Maningrida that I discovered that moving to Darwin hadn't put any distance between me and my family at all. I was working with Senior Health Worker Charlie Gunaburra when he asked me why I hadn't visited my family yet. Didn't know there were any here, I said, not expecting Tiwi people to be living at Maningrida, after all there was the language difference and a marked absence of Catholic clergy and their infrastructure.

‘I'll take you there after work,' he said with a look that told me there was no getting out of it while I inwardly fumed. I wasn't ready for this, I'd only just gotten away from the buggers and was enjoying not being humbugged. I was right, there were no Tiwis at Maningrida, just the discovery that my mum's family were spread right across the Top End and the adjacent islands and there were a heap living right there at Maningrida. On that first visit I met her brothers, my Uncles Jeffery, Wayne, David and Jacky. Before meeting my family at Nguiu I'd read that traditional Indigenous men were reserved and not in the habit of openly displaying their emotions. But that wasn't the case at Nguiu and it definitely wasn't the case at Maningrida either where my uncles hugged and kissed me and told me stories about when I was a baby.

‘First time you sat up,' said Uncle Jeffery, ‘was on the veranda of the Mainoru Station homestead, an you give me n old Sandy McKay the biggest grin then fell over.'

‘An you could yodel real good,' said Uncle Jacky. ‘When
you was cranky I could hear you screeching way over other side of camp.'

‘An you think every titty had milk in it, even mine,' said Uncle David while everyone laughed as I blushed in shame.

I also learnt that we had five family outstations called Bulungadhuru, Malyanganak, Borkjam, Angababirri and Kolibirradha. Although my uncles and their families had a house each at Maningrida they spent a lot of their time at their outstations in the dry season, hunting and doing ceremonial stuff. They sometimes stayed there in the wet as well but they had to make sure they had supplies to last a while as they were cut off by swollen rivers and swamps and billabongs that joined up when the rains came. They told me they used to pool their money and if they needed a tractor or supplies they were bought so the whole family benefited. But when grog and gunga started having an impact and some selfish ones were getting pissed and stoned and then expecting the others to support them, their community way of life fell apart.

They told me I had a grandmother Nellie Cam Foo who lived at Bulman and she had a really bad temper but was the repository of all knowledge in the family and remembered every birth, death and scandal. And they pointed out that the last three toes on my right foot were shorter than the others, just like all of theirs. Despite being connected to my feet for the past twenty-nine years I had never noticed
this before and when I checked their feet and mine, it was true. Uncle Jeffery, who is an accomplished linguist, could also write back to front and upside down like me, maybe such a useless trait is genetic. He was a bit of a larrikin and I was immediately drawn to him and he is still the uncle I feel closest to.

When I was leaving they told me to go to Beswick to see my Grandfather Willy Martin first. ‘He is our father and uncle and the brother for your grandfather, and brother for Nellie and your other grandfather, Smiler.' When I got back to Darwin I restocked my supplies and headed straight for Beswick so I could find out more.

Beswick is situated in a really stupid place right next to the Waterhouse River – despite the countrymen who told the white know-it-alls that the area was flood-prone in the wet season they still went ahead and built the settlement there. So when the rains start and the rivers rise a bit more than expected everyone just goes out bush or to another community and leaves the place for the river to claim.

The day I arrived was nice and sunny so there was no fear of being flooded in and after getting directions from the council I headed for Grandfather Willy's place. He was sitting on his front veranda making a
yidaki
(didgeridoo) and after alighting from the car I sat down nearby and waited for him to speak, just as I had learnt from mummy. But he went on making his
yidaki
and then I started to worry that maybe I'd come at a bad time because although
I had no doubt that this man was my grandfather (he had three short toes as well) he wasn't being terribly talkative. He was constructing a mouthpiece for the
yidaki
by attaching some wax from a sugarbag nest, and you could tell he was real fussy too, the way he smoothed it and moulded it and wet his fingers and rubbed some more.

I tried to distract myself with watching clouds and thinking of what animals they looked like and smelling the air and trying to work out the different scents of the bush. But I'm not very good at being patient so I reached over and got myself a lump of beeswax and said, ‘Here, let me have a go,' and my grandfather twisted the
yidaki
around so I could reach it and together we smoothed and moulded and shaped that mouthpiece until it was perfect.

When it was finished some kid brought out tea for us both and I began telling my grandfather who I was but he put his hand up for silence. Of course he knew who I was. So we looked at the clouds a bit more and when we'd finished our tea we went into the bush where we walked around looking for hollow tree limbs that my grandfather could make into
yidaki
s. Listen, he'd say as he flicked the wood with his fingers, and I'd hold onto it and stick my ear next to it too, so I could feel and hear the resonance, this one next dry season, or this one ready to cut now.

I realised he could read my mind like mummy did when he told me to stop worrying about snakes. They know when you're thinking about them and they'll come
out, he said. As we'd passed through spear grass and over rocky outcrops my mind had been firmly fixed on death adders and king browns lurking ready to sink their fangs into my legs, so after that I tried not to think of what life-threatening creatures were hanging around.

Later, after he'd had an afternoon nap, we spoke about language and song and he told me there is magic and power in every word we speak so we have to choose words wisely and give them the respect they deserve or say nothing. When I asked him about my mum he stayed silent and everything felt heavy then and I knew it was a place I couldn't go. He had a number of wives and his last one Margaret told me afterwards about his affection for my mum and how hard it had been for him and his brother (my mum's father) to send her away because she'd broken the law by refusing her promised husband. But they were both senior law men and had to keep those laws strong even if that meant sending their daughter into exile.

After my visit to Grandfather Willy I wasted no time in getting to Nguiu to interrogate mummy. My plan was that I would ply her with beer and shame her into making admissions based on the evidence I had recently been given, but although she happily accepted the bribe she kept her mouth firmly shut. ‘I found out more about me as a baby from my uncles than I ever have from you,' I whinged, ‘and why didn't you tell me about all this before, why did I have to find out from other people?'

But it was when I said I'd visited grandfather Willy that she turned and looked at me with such anguish that it pierced right through the steel-reinforced concrete block that was my heart and on out the other side. And when I looked deep down into her eyes I saw the pain and sadness for her family and home she would never see again that had been locked away nice and tight where they couldn't bother her anymore so she could get on with her life at Nguiu. She never saw the sun rise or set in Arnhem Land again or the wet season storms riding the bluffs and valleys of the escarpment and emptying over the plains. She left behind the rock art galleries and waterholes and the burial places where her family bones had become brittle and turned to dust and were scattered by the winds. And she left behind her flesh and blood that had been one continuous line since the very beginning.

And then I couldn't see because the tears that were flowing down her cheeks and onto her lap were flowing out of my eyes as well. For that second I had seen into the deepest part of my mum's soul and I felt like I had violated a sacred place. I felt so ashamed. And I decided after that it would probably be a good idea to keep my mouth shut because what Grandfather Willy had said about words made a lot more sense now. But after the rivers of tears had stopped flowing and we were recovering in that strange hollow space that happens after something profound has occurred my mum cleared her throat and tucked her hair
behind her ears and I knew she was going to tell me something important.

And so she told me that if we know how our life began we will know the track our life will follow. I digested this for a few minutes and thought of my promise to myself to stop talking too much and asking questions. But bad habits are hard to break, aren't they, so I took a breath and then asked her to tell me how and where my life began. But my mum, that person of infuriatingly few words, must have been over her quota that day and after dismissing me with an imperious wave of her hand she got up and left me to work it out for myself. And surprisingly I was fine with that. I was fine because after seeing the sadness leaking out of her I knew she was actually quite fragile under that tough skin and it wouldn't be right to bother her about this stuff anymore. To find out about the past I would go to my Nanna Nellie who my uncles said always had plenty to say. I knew that if anyone knew about my beginnings she would.

Despite being warned about Nanna Nellie and her temperamental ways I felt an instant affinity with her. I had made the trip to Bulman unannounced and considering how my family seemed to be able to read my mind I was not surprised to find her sitting on the veranda waiting for me with her husband Tex Cam Foo, the man who a few years later would confess to being my father. ‘We were just talking about you the other day,' said Nanna
and she bustled off to make some tea while Tex elaborated on the more ferocious aspects of the blue heeler sniffing around my legs before asking after mummy's health. She's real good, I said as I tried not to show fear and waited for the dog to stop sniffing and piss off. After walking behind my chair and shoving its nose up my arse and having a big snuffle it wandered off and lay down on the veranda to sleep.

Nanna made her tea strong and black just like mummy liked to, and just like with mummy I guessed I was expected to drink it all down without complaining. She called Tex ‘old man' which I thought was quite funny considering she wasn't exactly a spring chicken herself. He was a lovely-natured man and very good-looking and from the stories I've heard about him since, I understand he was quite the ladies' man when he was young. His mum was a Ngalakan woman from Roper River way and his dad was Chinese. His dad was originally an Ah Toy but the old bloke got the shits with his family and changed his surname to his maternal mother's of Cam Foo.

My nanna and Tex had a lovely energy between them that comes when two people spend so much of their lives together although it was plain to see that Nanna wore the pants. Their house was built of stone and was on a hill just outside of Bulman and it was on that veranda that Nanna and I slept together with the dog at our feet while Tex slept inside. On that first night and the
following nights too I watched the morning star rise over the rocky bluffs and trees in the hours before dawn and listened to the mopokes. There was something surreal about that place, like you could feel the beating heart of the earth.

I loved being with Nanna, she was bold and fearless and when she made up her mind about something, no one and nothing stood in her way. Like the weather, if she said we needed some rain today, we would get rain. If she said we needed some sunshine, we got sunshine. And when I asked my Aunty Dorothy about how she could do that she said that when it comes to Nanna you don't ask questions.

Nanna told me that we were Remburranga and had lived in Central Arnhem Land forever so we have a special connection with this land where the Mainoru River meanders on through the centre of Arnhem Land until it meets the Wilton River. Together they journey on to join the Roper River and like three friends they keep each other company through rocky gorges and over sandbars and river crossings, sustaining life along the way until they reach the sea in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Even though our crooked little river has mingled with the other two, we know that it's still there even as it flows into the salt water and then into the oceans of the world. And we know that it will come back to us again in the wet season when the clouds build up and the skies open and the rains become one with our river again.

My nanna loved my mum and missed her terribly when she left to marry Casmir and live at Nguiu. She told me how my mum was raised in our traditional way and saw a white person for the first time when she was eight years old and how her father, my grandfather, was the famous medicine man ‘Bad Medicine' who had had a book written about him by Vic Hall back in the forties. In the book Bad Medicine was portrayed as an evil man because he authorised the killings of men who had broken the traditional laws. But in real life although he did authorise these killings he was a kind and gentle man who was held in high regard by all. And when I was a tiny baby he would hold me and sing to me and blow into my ears and onto my eyes so that I would be able to ‘hear' and ‘see' things that lived in the spirit world.