searching, looking around – ngaa-bun-gaa-nha When I turned fifteen and was too old for the Boys’ Home I was a ward of the state still, working the local properties. At nineteen I was issued my dog tag. With it I could travel in a certain distance to work for meat and salt on the field or out mustering. I moved around far and wide looking for work, but I was looking mostly ngaa-bun-gaa-nha for home.
sea – murriyan We never went to the sea. All my adult life it seemed it was only the white families that went on holidays to the sea. Even with my ancestors we didn’t go to the beach; we did travel high above the seas, but I never felt the surf crash on my legs like I’ve seen on the TV. I’m going to leave the world having never gone to the sea, and that’s okay by me. There are plenty things I haven’t done, and it didn’t make my life any worse. I have never taken an aeroplane trip, I’ve never gone to another country overseas, not like August. I’ve never lain under the house or climbed on the roof of Prosperous, or seen an opera in real life or learnt to play a musical instrument. I can’t complain about this life – I’m a time traveller, after all. If I could have changed things, though, I would have. I would have been a boy with a sister and a mummy and maybe a daddy even, and we would have taken trips to the murriyan. As far as I time-travel, I never have come across my own mummy and daddy.
shadow, evil – nguru You can’t say much against the family – people get worried and threatened if you turn on the group. I reckon it’s because the group can’t afford to lose anyone else after everything that’s happened. So I never told Mary what we thought of Jimmy. Elsie ignored her intuition, and so we took in my sister Mary and always with her, little Jimmy too. I was blinded by wanting family more than goodness. What was wrong about Jimmy, I can’t quite put my finger on. He didn’t throw tantrums or things about, instead he harboured secrets and nursed great contempt for people wherever he went. He did grow up into a cunning sort of lad, always the right thing to say, always the right turn of phrase. I don’t know where he got all those things from because my sister had been nothing but good and hardworking. There was honour in how she lived and worked, putting food on the table is sometimes as loving as a person can manage, but love it is nonetheless. Well, we didn’t know, but he had a whirly-whirly inside him all along, the nguru and ngarran too.
sing – babirra There’s nothing to it, they said, just open up your mouth and your body follows. Well, it’s not that easy is it, not on the ear for anyone hanging around? Good thing about living at the foot of a field is you can walk enough paces and be pretty sure no-one’s going to hear you. Whenever I’ve cried in my life it’s always come when I start singing. I could never hold a tune but that isn’t the reason we try something, not perfection. Perfection is just someone’s little opinion at the end of the day, and there isn’t much that man makes that is perfect anyway. There’s a saying I’ve heard that wounds can only be healed by the one who inflicts the wound. I’d bet whoever first said that hadn’t had a good sing. Singing is a balm for the singer, and if the singer can hold pitch then it’s a balm for the listener too. Any song will do, the field doesn’t mind either way. Sometimes I’ll sing the worship songs when I’m lost, a little line will get into my head, ‘Oh Jesus, show me the way … we go down to the river to pray …’ I’ll be singing low or loud and kicking in the dirt, and the tears will just come when they are ready. Sometimes I’ll hear a chorus on the radio and it’ll be stuck in my head for weeks, and I’ll take it out to the field. Then the ghosts, the ancestors taught me songs too, and I’ll be sounding like something you’ve never heard before, low notes that start at the feet and the high ones that treble in the chest and make my heart tremble. Babirra is good, it’s food you can’t see but fills you up anyway.
soil, earth, dirt – manhang In the kitchen garden we grew hardy vegetables – potatoes, carrots, cassava, the cuttings we got from the Chinese merchant who’d come through Massacre and take orders, from mob around town mostly. Over the years that Prosperous had existed our people had gone without many things, but not us when Elsie and I lived here – we put everything into the soil, good manure, and turning, weeding it every day to grow our food. In the days when I was born there was less men around to work after the war, so the women worked just as hard. They used to grow corn in the summer rainfall, high stalks with husks the colour of butter. But they stopped getting that summer rain. I think the town looked to Jesus instead, when he said in John 7:37 If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. If they believed, if they had faith in the end of a drought, then Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water. But the water didn’t come back.
In the science books at the library in town is where I eventually read about the soil. Terrible plants grow around here too, foreign weeds. The worst was originally grown by a lady, Mrs Paterson, under the Hume Weir. In her innocent-looking cottage garden she planted a pretty purple flower and it soon spread like a certain death for grazing animals across the entire continent. That evil purple plant’s name is Paterson’s curse, and there’s no way around that bugger. There were others, there still are – capeweed, skeleton weed, wild radish, wild turnip, rye grass, wild oats, and now that cotton too – they all suck the good and the water from the already-dry ground. Nowadays something always in the way. Back then too, when soil had gone to acid and lime had to be shipped out and sent over the mountains to put some life back into this place. Over and over that cycle never ended – taking the good out of the soil and trying to put it back with chemicals. I read that inside the soil there are the same number of microbes as there are stars in the universe, and how if you farmed the soil you took the chance of rain away with the nutrients. Well, that blew my mind – just because we don’t know something, doesn’t mean we will always find out the answer. But I found it out. Once you find a piece of something you know about, afterwards you end up getting given more and more pieces of the puzzle everywhere you go. One thing comes and then the world tells you to look out for all the other missing information. Manhang – that’s where the body goes eventually, and everything else from the manhang to the stars is eternally alive with our spirits.
FOURTEEN
It was ten minutes’ drive along the highway into town. August slowed momentarily at the only rest area, it was unoccupied, but her eyes flicked there out of habit. We had looked there for Jedda – a shoe, a scrap of dress, a scruff of hair. Nothing was found, not the jelly sandals Jedda was wearing that day, not her school uniform either. August was distracted by the side of the road as she drove, distracted by roadkill and the shreds of tyre treads scattered there, by the knot in her guts. She thought, in a panic, to pull over suddenly, to sort through the wallaby bones and black rubber for something. Imagined kicking through the rubbish and finding a girl’s pelvis simply overlooked. She didn’t pull over though. I’m not mad, she told herself. That’s a crazy-person thing to do, and then she wondered what difference it would make anyway, the discovery of Jedda, her in bones, bones no longer pecked by crows. There wouldn’t be any comfort for everything they’d lost.
In her mouth she tasted the sulphur sickness of the passing world outside the window, her thoughts jumped to her books back in England – the ones she loved, that would calm her in this state: Khayyam, Yeats, Plath, Borges, Rumi. She’d traced the words of the poet Tagore, when he wrote that Every child is born with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man. ‘But what does it mean,’ she asked aloud to the road, ‘when a child is taken away?’ She knew it was man that was to blame. She knew she was to blame. She couldn’t quiet her mind. ‘Happy thoughts,’ she said aloud, and all the bad memories jumbled together instead without chronological order. Think happy thoughts, she willed like sparking a flare from a dark ship.
Locusts’ bodies splattered against the windshield. She saw them as myth animals, X-ray prawn appendages, dragonfly wings, edible to humans and toads.
Locusts? They never used to come this far south. After the dam they did though. Yes, they did then, she answered h
erself. The dam couldn’t stop the river completely, it just controlled it. Nothing could completely stop the river. The river bends time, what happened at the river goes on for us forever. Forever?
August and Jedda would trace their journey, their girlish fingers against the thick glass of the TV screen, down the east of the country, heading towards Massacre. They used to draw crayon pictures of the cane toads following the locusts. The toads were slower, never quite catching up. The locusts would arrive, and eat and leave, and the toads would come after. Those toads had looked around with baffled, rumbling stomachs and gobbled up the native mice and the blue-tongued lizards instead. August remembered that. Remembered how they had to coax the dogs up inside, the working dogs who loved nothing more than catching toads and inadvertently poisoning their own rumbling stomachs. The country, after all, was an experiment of survival of the fittest, of the unravelling. Darwin was even the name of a town in the north. Think happy thoughts.
Flame trees were turning in the hot wind as she passed High Street and ventured instead down to Vegemite Valley where no kids were playing on the streets. August passed Aunt Mary’s house, where she had brought up her son, and where her door remained open for the priest always. She drove at a crawl, looked into the open wounds of the cousins and second cousins and wayward schoolmates’ homes that she recognised. She saw no-one. She passed a house decorated with wind chimes and hanging plants that had a LOCK THE GATES sign perched ahead of the drawn front-window curtain. She pulled up at the curb to make out the small print that ran at the bottom of the sign: fuck off rinepalm. She had the unnerving feeling of being watched and glanced over at the neighbouring house, and indeed a shadow of a person, someone she vaguely recognised from school, was standing at the window. The man’s face was stony. Suddenly he was joined by another man at the window and she watched as they watched her.
She didn’t feel like the angry teenager who ran away, the one people noticed, but a sad shell of a woman, looked through. Like her mother. She locked the door, began to turn the car around, intimidated but unafraid, and ventured back into High Street where only people she didn’t recognise at all congregated. She wanted to keep driving past the new coffee-shop seating spilt under huge umbrellas onto the footpath, past the pram babies and toddlers and their parents, the shops that had filled in where space used to be. Wanted to drive past the department store and its extended window displays that had spread an entire block. Neither the coffee shop nor the department store was wrapped in green mesh. August drove past the original cream sandstone buildings where old signage was still painted above the new pharmacy. Next to it was the real-estate agency and a for sale sign hung in its window. Above the real-estate agency, a ghost sign was painted in a font from an earlier era: FARM & STATION SUPPLIES: WE STOCK – IRON. LIME. CEMENT. BARBED WIRE. FENCING. IRON GATES. ETC. The new shops and the old rubbed shoulders, as if hope and despair played a fouled hand on the same table.
She wanted to keep driving, but couldn’t. Couldn’t see her mother in perpetual detention. She mulled it over. What if she didn’t recognise me, was happy without me, was a disappointment, had never got better, but worse? She turned the ignition off opposite the green median strip that split High Street into east and west. That hadn’t changed, the divide had always been there, but she’d never noticed it before: in the centre was the sole statue of Massacre. A soldier in metal regalia, draped in ammunition and slouch-hatted, leant against his gun. The butt steeped in a tussock of watered grass that was a brilliant green, nothing like the pale green that spread in the rest of Massacre. A council gardener, at that very moment, lowered his hedge-trimmers to the base of the weapon, and snipped in ceremony around the edge of bronze.
There was something graceful about the council worker, everything respectful about his manner around the statue – it was something in his likeness to the soldier, muscular and youthful, that caught August’s attention. The bronze statue was puffed at the chest, certain in his stare into the northern middle distance. She knew that for some young people anything is something to look forward to.
She spotted a roller door being pulled against the shopfront and dashed from the car to catch the pharmacy before it closed for lunch. She took the cheapest toothbrush and scanned the ceilings for fire stains. There wasn’t a lick of black smoke anywhere, the entire ceiling was tiled in light boxes, the walls fresh with paint and the shelves stocked full with medicines and snack food. Last time Eddie and Joey were there too, but only Joey had been caught when the place was alight. She rubbed the thought out as she paid and took the pharmacy bag in her fist.
Around the corner she looked for a weatherboard house painted black, red, yellow on the suburban street. It was still there. Aside from out at Prosperous, the Aboriginal Medical Centre and Land Council chambers was where August had spent most of her childhood – doing after-school painting in the garage with the other kids, getting cavities filled and teeth pulled or a doctor’s note for being too sad to go to school. They all gathered there for gossip, all the Aboriginal residents of the Plains, the Gibsons, Coes and Grants from the Valley. Each of the families came together there in refuge, standing around the barbecue, laying almost-burnt sausages diagonally onto slices of white bread lined with sauce. They played Aussie Rules football, and everyone jumped high into the air to mark the ball, cheer, kick, tumble. She wondered if someone there knew about the mining on the farm, or knew about what was happening to them – the Gondis at the old Mish. Maybe someone was there to tell her what a good man her grandfather was, ‘What a respectable man, an honourable man’, they used to say. She peered through the dimmed windows. Empty. Every last piece of furniture in there was gone, gutted from the walls to the floors. Packawayable Place. As she adjusted her eyes she could see herself, but a different person – as a child on the street in the window’s reflection, as if her younger self were catching a glimpse of a person that she would one day become. The girl looked disappointed because, August thought, it was too late, she’d already become the thing. Think happy thoughts.
‘August?’
In the windows’ reflection she made out Alena Dimitri’s full mane of curls. She’d been neither friend nor enemy, just another student at the high school. Alena rushed towards her as quickly as she could wobble, thrusting her hand and ring finger at August and telling her she’d just married James, the Gadden boy. ‘Just last weekend!’ she beamed. ‘Haven’t seen you in ages!’
It was true, they hadn’t seen each other since August walked out of the school between classes in the middle of term. After that Alena and most of the other eighth-graders swapped rumours about what had happened to August Gondiwindi. The unlikeliest scenario was more or less accepted as truth – that she’d run away to join a circus, freak that she was. Alena looked at her now with a little leftover pity, and a certain anxiety as if the tragedy of a Gondiwindi might be a contagious thing.
‘How are you?’ August asked, taking her offered hand and dropping it. Looking at the full stomach between them, she imagined the baby, saw the curved spine, an X-ray innocently bobbing in fluid.
Alena rubbed her bump, cradled it like a watermelon. ‘Hanging in there – and you, you’re back?’
‘Visiting,’ August said, looking at Alena’s face instead.
‘What a relief! This town’s a dump.’
‘More than before?’
‘This place has been scrubbed off any tourist detours, that’s for sure.’
‘So you’re Mrs Gadden, aye? – they still do flashy racecars?’ August said, looking pointedly at her ring, smiling.
‘Do you know what makes money in this town now? Nothing except once a year when they export the sheep. That’s it, races don’t make anything. Everyone’s hanging for the mine.’
‘You know about the mine?’ August stopped smiling.
‘I know it’s out your way, isn’t it?’
‘On the farm, yeah.’
‘Something crazy, want to know something crazy? I was just thinkin
g about you yesterday!’
‘Really?’
‘Got time for a coffee?’ she threw her thumb to the wide cafe.
‘I can’t, sorry,’ August said. ‘Jet lag.’ Then, showing some remnants of manners, she asked, ‘What’ve you been up to?’
‘Just teaching until maternity leave, I’m assistant teacher at the public school – six-year-olds, mostly – first grade,’ she smoothed the fabric of her dress over the watermelon again. ‘That’s when I was thinking of you, at school yesterday.’
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