Riding the Black Cockatoo (4 page)
I drifted around downstairs, eyes and fingers flitting through the pool room, the workshop, my brother’s old bedroom stacked high with things that had not yet made the skip or the local auction centre. The auction centre! In a recent effort to de-clutter the house and to appease my mother, Dad had been taking stuff there by the ute-load . . . Surely not! They wouldn’t accept a human skull, would they?
I went back into the lounge room and flopped into my father’s lounge chair. It sat dead square in front of the wall unit; the best seat in the house for watching the telly. The cat glided between my legs, her appreciative purring the only sound as I wondered out loud, ‘Where?
Where
could Mary be?’
In the distance a rubbish truck emptied wheelie bins in quick, cacophonous crashes of falling beer bottles and the dull thuds of rubbish bags. ‘Oh god, not the wheelie bin, not that!’ I imagined Mary lost forever in landfill, entombed in maggoty meat scraps, festering nappies and all the never-to-break-down plastic refuse that makes up twenty-first-century waste.
Family homes are like time machines; just the hint of an odour, the groan of a loose floorboard, the slant of morning sunshine through half-opened drapes can peel away years, even decades. I gazed down at the lounge-room floor and pictured my brother and me sprawled out on the carpet with pillows and blankets watching Saturday-morning TV. I drifted back even further, remembering Neil Armstrong’s first step into moon dust; I remember the big fuss being made by the adults in the room and being told it was too bad that I wouldn’t remember the moment. I was three years old and I remember it all. The whole world was space-crazy; perhaps that is why we were disdainful of Indigenous culture. Now we were hurtling through space, did we see boomerangs as an embarrassing reminder of our origins?
I grew up on a cultural combo of American and Japanese cartoons and Australian children’s television drama. All the shows were great, but there was
one
show that every young kid rushed home from school for:
Skippy the Bush
Kangaroo
, the hit children’s afternoon television show from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Skippy was the star of the show, but it was his partner in adventure, the gumleaf-blowing Sonny Hammond, that every little boy wanted to be. Sonny had the biggest back yard in Australia; the fictional Waratah National Park where he lived a Boy’s Own life with his park-ranger father Matt Hammond, brother Mark, and the daring chopper pilot Jerry. Sonny wasn’t even encumbered with a mother telling him to be home for dinner or rousing on him for messing up his signature red-and-white-striped shirt. Together Sonny and Skippy hopped and clambered through bushland, rafted across shark-filled inlets, and roamed through hidden valleys and into the imagination of many an Australian boy and girl. And it was in one of these hidden valleys that Sonny and Skippy stumbled upon Tara.
Tara looked as though he’d just jumped off the two-dollar coin. He was as black as black could be, with wiry white hair and a sinewy grace. There was a lovely economy to his movements and he spoke like a sage. He was the cliché native Australian, but he was a magnificent cliché all the same. Tara was the last of a clan that had been relocated from its tribal country decades before. When Sonny and Skippy stumbled into the Hidden Valley – accessible only through a spooky secret cave – they found Tara living as his ancestors had, in a simple humpy high on an escarpment from where he could survey the valley below; a valley that provided sustenance for his belly and his spirit. Tara’s only concession to the twentieth century was a discreet pair of red underpants – it was a children’s show after all. Sonny was besotted with Tara – and what ten-year-old wouldn’t be? The pair threw boomerangs, hunted for bush tucker and chilled out on the escarpment as fluffy white clouds rolled overhead. One lazy afternoon as the two sat enjoying the silence, Sonny turned to his friend. ‘You’re like Skippy, Tara, happy and free. You do whatever you please. I bet there are a lot of people that would like to change places with you.’
The boy had a point – Tara’s life did have a certain Robinson Crusoe appeal to it – but in reality Sonny’s words were no more than a scriptwriter’s pipedream. In the 1970s, as now, you would have been hard pressed to find too many White Australians willing to trade places with an Aboriginal person.
No episode of
Skippy
was complete without nailbiting drama, and halfway into the show it came from the sky. On a routine air patrol over the park, Jerry decided to look for Sonny in the Hidden Valley. As the helicopter blades thrashed at the air over Tara’s campsite, the terrified elder became convinced that the horrendous hovering noisemaker was the ‘spirit of death’. Tara ordered his young friend to leave the valley so that he could prepare to join his ancestors. ‘Time for Tara to die, leave this place of death.’
‘Please, Tara, please don’t die. We’re not going to let you die,’ Sonny pleaded, tears streaming down his freckled cheeks.
That afternoon, little kids all around Australia repeated Sonny’s words like a mantra: ‘Please, Tara, please don’t die!’
And then, something
truly
terrible happened. Three little words crawled across the screen: ‘To be continued . . .’
The Tara episode was just too big to fit neatly into a half-hour slot, and had been split into two halves. The words
To be continued
could be a devastating thing for a child of seven. That evening as I slurped milk from my Skippy mug and picked listlessly at the dinner on my Skippy plate, I stared blankly into the lime-green geometric kitchen wallpaper, pondering Tara’s fate. As I lay in bed under the subtropical sky, my sweaty head tossed and turned on my Skippy pillowcase. The next day, there was a palpable sense of tension in the schoolyard. By four o’clock, the streets, playgrounds and back yards that usually resonated to the sounds of bicycle bells and cricket bat thwacks fell silent. Every little Australian knew that in Aboriginal culture ‘pointing the bone’ was an act of sorcery, a curse that brought about certain death. I’m sure my little brother wasn’t the only bullied child to point a half-gnawed chop bone at an annoying older sibling and announce, ‘That’s it, you’re dead.’ But this was the real deal; Tara had effectively pointed the bone at himself and was halfway back to the Dreamtime. Only Sonny and Skippy could save him. It was absolutely gripping stuff, and we were all as gripped as gripped could be!
As the sun slowly set on Tara’s life, Sonny desperately rummaged through the old man’s few belongings and discovered a medal and citation for bravery. As a younger man, Tara had heroically saved a small boy from drowning, and that small boy had grown up to become a powerful dignitary. Upon hearing of Tara’s plight, the well-heeled dignitary organised the airlift of a songman and a full troupe of dancers from Tara’s far-flung Akara tribe to be by their fading tribesman’s side.
Skippy the Bush Kangaroo
had never seen anything like it, and neither had we; a dozen painted-up full-blood Aborigines (in underpants) dancing in jerky supernatural movements. The continual drone of the didgeridoo and the clack-clack of clapsticks echoed throughout the Hidden Valley and through Australian lounge rooms from coast to coast. The ceremony ran uninterrupted for ten mesmerising minutes. The dancers jerked slowly around an unconscious Tara, tension building, until at last his eyes flickered open and he slowly rose, joining his tribesmen in their otherworldly dance. And so the ending was a happy one; Tara was saved and allowed to stay on in the park, and Australian children were treated to an extended encounter – however artificial – with Indigenous Australia. At the end of the show, after some well-intentioned dialogue about black and white having much to learn from each other, Tara pronounced that ‘Tara has many friends.’
I’m sure that at that moment every child watching wanted a friend just like Tara; a friend to reveal to them the mysterious secrets of the country in which they lived. For most of us, however, there would be no Tara to show us the ropes, and besides, we would soon be too distracted growing up into busy white Australians to remember or care.
I returned from my memories, rose and opened the centre TV cupboard of the wall unit again. Inside, stacked high, were videotape towers of AFL football games – Essendon games mostly, and a smattering of finals matches. I poked my head into the cupboard for a closer look. As my nostrils registered the faint, lingering whiff of burnt-out Rank Arena valves, I accidentally brought down a teetering pile of videos. There he was, Mary, upside-down in the far back corner of the TV cupboard – how uncomfortable he looked. Gently taking the skull from the cupboard, I returned to my father’s chair. I put him to my nose and inhaled (don’t be shocked, we were old friends). My grown-up fingers reconnected with him, tracing the little cracks that ran like the rivers of a faded atlas. The temple – the area known in spirituality as the third eye – was corroded by the syphilis that would have gnawed away at Mary’s sanity and spirit.
Placing two fingers into the base of the skull, I recalled how once my entire hand and wrist could fit inside this space; I remembered the way I once wiggled my index and pinkie fingers through the eye sockets like graveyard worms. My fingers glided over the dry interior; once there was fluid here, and a brain floating in a continuous synaptic lightning storm that swept this way and that over a landscape of consciousness. Hunger and contentment, triumph and disappointment, wonder and awareness, every thought and feeling; they had all resided there in that cavity. My fingers felt like a stranger’s legs, tiptoeing about in a long-deserted house, wondering at the private dramas and dreams which had once played out inside.
How yellow it had gone. Dad used to lacquer the skull every so often to prevent the bone from crumbling away into chalk and, I suspect, because he enjoyed lacquering things. After Mary was given to him, he had glued the lower jaw into position with Araldite and fixed a matchbox-sized block of wood to the base of the skull to prevent it from tipping over backwards. The teeth – except for one at the front – were all accounted for and in remarkably good condition – testimony, no doubt, to a cola- and chip-free diet. There had been the odd occasion in the 40 years that Mary sat on the shelf, firm-jawed and resolute, when some joker – usually when my parents were hosting a party – had placed a cigarette into the gap left by the missing tooth. And there were a few occasions when my younger brother Guy and I would test the nerves of the neighbourhood kids by placing a small pocket torch inside Mary so that the eye cavities and the slight gaps between his teeth glowed with an otherworldly radiance. We had the ultimate jack-o’-lantern. Although we sometimes revelled in the macabre weirdness of living with a skull on the mantelpiece, we always handled Mary with care. Apart from the occasional cigarette, Mary was never mocked or ridiculed; he became part of our landscape. It seemed no different to having my grandmother’s ashes on display next to my grandfather’s false teeth and a dried-up block of his favourite chewing tobacco (which we did!). There was a twisted yet sweet form of suburban ancestor worship going on in our house, and in a weird way Mary had come along for the ride.
My rational self knew the skull was as empty as the abandoned shell of a hermit crab, yet my heart told me otherwise; I felt
something
, but whatever it was, the harder I tried to see it – to understand it – the further I pushed it away; it was as elusive as mist. I tried to send some positive thoughts to the bones in my lap, something profound, but it was a strain to think; I wondered if I was losing my mind, yet at the same time there was a rare and unfamiliar calmness about my thoughts suggesting I ride this ripple that seemed to swell with each passing moment. I put Mary back with the tapes – the right way up this time – and jiggled him about a little to make him more comfortable. Then the words came, three simple words: ‘You’re going home.’
{ 19 SEPTEMBER 2005 }
Missed my morning lecture, again. Interpersonal Relationships 101, not exactly the most captivating of subjects, but it would take me twelve credit points closer to a degree I should have finished years ago. And besides, I’d decided that some of my own interpersonal relationship skills could do with a bit of an overhaul. In a sunny corner of the library I scanned the weekend papers before attempting the set readings from my textbook. Mary was never far from my thoughts and there was a notion forming in the back of my brain that perhaps I could approach the University for help.
