August grabbed the box and the contents and together they fled outside.
‘I’m driving!’ August yelled over the whining burn of tin and oil. ‘Get off the ecstasy, Joey.’
‘Eat a fucking hamburger!’ he yelled back, entranced by the now-raging fire and stumbling to the car with the keys outstretched ahead of him. August took them from him.
She drove steadily as Joe directed her to Aunt Nicki’s place. She pulled up at the curb. It wasn’t much for a council worker: a simple brick house, it couldn’t have had more than two bedrooms. It was in the nice part of town, though, Minties area. August banged on the aluminium screen door; it shook in the frame. As she waited she turned to Joe in the car, he shook his head behind the wound-up window, lowered himself further into the seat. A light came on in the house, a head peeked through the curtain, then the rattle of a lock and chain.
Aunt Nicki popped her head through the gap in the door wearily.
‘Aunty, have you seen the dictionary Poppy was writing?’ August asked.
‘What?’
‘Did you bribe them with the dictionary? Did you say you’d make the Gondis claim Native Title if they didn’t give you some money? Or have you just kept it?’
‘Aug, it’s the middle of the night!’
‘I need to read what Poppy wrote please, Aunty. Please.’
Nicki narrowed her eyes, but her body had taken the blow. ‘I kept it to protect the family, my love.’
‘I promise you, Aunty, I’m so ruined – there’s nothing to protect anymore.’ August said, holding her chest, sincere.
‘It’s in the council office. Tomorrow we get it, okay? Goodnight, niece.’
She closed the door. Rattled the chain. Flicked off the light before August could tell her that Prosperous was aflame, that tomorrow wasn’t good enough. She flung herself back into the Mazda.
‘She’s been hiding it. I need to see it, Joey.’ August said as she drove out of the street.
‘What?’
She didn’t know where to start.
‘Poppy’s book he was writing. It might save the farm. I gotta read it now.’
‘Where is it?’
‘In the council office.’
She slowed at a corner, turned, sped up again.
‘I wanna see it now, sick of waiting forever!’ August yelled, and in that moment she felt devastated by all the years she’d wasted. August pushed the gear into fourth. Joey tightened the strap of his seatbelt.
‘I’m not doing anything illegal – I’m still on probation, cousin.’
August accelerated into the main street heading towards the council offices. She reassured him, exalted, ‘Gondis are born on probation, Joey.’
THIRTY-EIGHT
afraid to speak – giya-rra-ya-rra My wife was waist-deep at the local pool when I fell in love with her. She was a warrior that day, and every day after. That was the day we met, and there she was. She arrived out at Tent Town with a busload of university students from the city one day when we were still handsome and young. She was one of the university teachers there and she said that they had come out to the countryside to talk to the Aborigine about human rights! Well! She was beautiful, and she was smart – so I listened right away. I myself was out there at Tent Town visiting some shearers who I was sent out to get for the week’s work at Prosperous – that was a hot week – must’ve been summer if we were shearing. So those university students were telling us about equal rights and this and that and I was listening. She and the others asked us what were some of the things in Massacre that we thought were discriminatory? Well, it didn’t take a minute for us to list this and that. ‘Look around’, I told her. I mentioned the pub and the schools and the fact we were separated and the fact there was no land around for us and that the kids weren’t allowed in the local swimming pool – not even in this heat, I said. Then her eyes widened and they all got so excited. ‘We’re taking the kids for a swim then!’ they said.
Lo and behold, about thirty kids were picked up and piled into the bus with all the university students and their cameraman too. Me, I was on the bus too, but I was just floating in there, floating after the woman I’d decided that I loved already. We arrived at the town swimming pool and those university students get the money out and hand it to each of the kids to go and buy their ticket. The kids smiled so big, never seen kids smiling like that before in my life, I reckon. We could smell the chlorine, see the pool through the turnstiles. We arrived at the ticket booth, and that was it, all over – ‘NO Aborigines,’ the pool attendant said, and pointed to the kids to look at the sign. I remember the kids just staring up at the painted letters like they’d been punched in the guts, like all the air and happy life got pushed out of them. Some of those kids started crying and I was mad at those university students. Why they had to come and shame the kids in front of everyone?
The students were arguing with the pool attendant, and then a big crowd of Massacre residents come gathering around saying, ‘Go home blackfellas, get, get out of town’. The university people, Elsie there too, were still arguing with the pool attendant and I was standing back, saying ‘There, there’ to the little ones, that I’d take them myself down the river when we got back to Tent Town.
Then the fight starts heading away from the pool attendant and it’s all around the bus, see. There’s a sort of play happening, a jostle for the stage and one of the university students was questioning a local lady wearing gloves in front of the cameraman, just beside me and the kids. The university student asked something like, ‘Ma’am, why do you not want the Aboriginal children of this town swimming in the pool?’ ‘They’re bad,’ she said, ‘they don’t belong here, should go back to their huts!’ she said. The university student asked her again, voice raised now, on the edge of a big argument, gesturing to the kids and me. ‘Don’t they look like good kids to you that just want to go for a swim and cool off, just like the privileged white children?’ she asked. ‘You don’t think they are good children?’ The woman couldn’t even look at those kids, she just raised her voice above the din and said, ‘Yeah, a good one’s a dead one.’
Well, I hustled the crying kids into the bus then, I didn’t want them hearing another thing. The fights continued outside and the camera kept rolling when there were conversations to film. Finally, persuaded by Elsie, and twisted by the arm seeing the video camera in their face, the kids were allowed to have a swim. Elsie jumped in too. I stood out and watched and dropped my hand into the pool and splashed a little. Elsie was laughing. Not an ounce of fear about her. She wasn’t ever giya-rra-ya-rra. She dried off and got dressed and I talked to her until she and the students left the pool, and she said they were going to many places after Massacre. ‘Causing trouble?’ I asked. ‘I hope so,’ she said, then winked at me and laughed.
She left after that, all the university students and the bus too. I said I’d stay on with the kids and we’d walk home later. Not a minute after the bus rolled out of the car park of the municipal pool did the attendant and his gang come and throw me and the kids out! Shame. They were happy enough though, those kids were. They dived in the clear cool water. It didn’t matter to them how long it lasted. It was that it happened, I’ve reckoned. And me, I became more afraid because they didn’t just despise me, but I realised when I was watching the children, hearing the things that children should never hear – that they despised our kids, too. Only part of me was happy, because Elsie happened to me, and I knew somehow that I’d be seeing her again soon.
Years later, even after those laws about the public pools and the cinema seating changed, I could still recognise that fear that people had towards us, that distrust they had of our kids, and since that day I saw Elsie at the galing I’ve been reminded time and again that people’s attitudes don’t change just because the law changes. I was afraid to speak for so long, for so much of my life, but I’m not anymore. I refuse to giya-rra-ya-rra!
alcohol, wine, strong drink – widyali, girrigirri One day yo
u wake up and there’s the dry of the drought at your door. Then the great flood, playing tricks on your mind, and then the drought arrives again, the summer lengthened a month every year until we find ourselves where we are now. Nothing so sad as the skeleton of a bullock or a heifer in a field, its skin draped over it like a bedsheet. What a drought does to the mind is a cruel thing, and many men from the farms around here have found the only solution is wrapping their lips around the barrel of a shotgun. Divorce is now commonplace in an area where it wouldn’t have been thought of fifty years ago. There is a limit to better or worse, thick and thin – sometimes the thin gets to be completely out of sight. Sometimes it’s the boys off the farms, lost in the cities and there isn’t even anyone left to fight with, a person is left wrestling themselves. That’s when the widyali – poison in its own right, but balm in the mouth of poisoned spirits – looks like prayer. But tortured people and the drink is like throwing petrol into a fire – don’t do anything except make it worse. Won’t quench a drought, that widyali, won’t mend your heart either, won’t even let you forget about it, not for long. That poison is best given a wide berth – haven’t seen anything good come from it and the drugs all my long life.
all together in one place – ngumbaay-dyil To be isolated is to be unable to act. That’s what we were – isolated – from our family, from our language, from our cultural ways and from our land. And then we were taken ngumbaay-dyil. But it wasn’t really that we were together, it just looked humane, a face in a crowd. But we were brutalised, we turned on each other, we were isolated in our humiliation but we couldn’t leave neither. We were like roos in the headlights, the old people, my old mummy, me and my sisters, even my daughters, growing up around sad ghosts on the Mission. Having their own struggles. We weren’t really all together in one place, we weren’t residents in those places, us kids on our cots, we were criminals by birth, inmates since we could walk. Together and isolated at once.
always be, exist – ngiyawaygunhanha A person exists beyond the living and the dead, in the planes of time where gods roam, when they know the seen and unseen at once. That is to be ngiyawaygunhanha.
THIRTY-NINE
August parked opposite the town council. Joey was yelling at her to get back into the car. She shut the driver’s door behind her. He leant his head out the passenger window. ‘If you’re not back in five minutes I’m leaving, just like you and fucking Eddie left me at the pharmacy!’ he jeered.
August got back into the car and shut the door. ‘I didn’t leave you that night,’ she said, searching his face.
‘Just joking, aye. Go on, do your crime, Gondi.’ He threw his hand towards the council building.
August rested her head against the seat, realising how tired she was, but tried again. ‘We were just off our heads, Joe. I’m sorry Eddie told you to keep watch. We were just kids.’
‘I know that, still don’t know what the hell we were doing there. Dumbasses.’ He looked out the passenger window, away from their talking.
After a minute of silence she asked him clearly, kindly, ‘What was it like?’
‘Crap.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault. I was a fucking troublemaker, I was.’
‘It was Eddie and my fault, it was us, not you.’ August took his hand. ‘I’m sorry, cousin.’
‘I forgive ya.’
‘Do you remember when Poppy put that sign outside Prosperous?’
August asked.
‘Back door?’ she caught him grin a little in the High Street light.
‘Nah, that was Nan. The other one.’
‘Nup.’
‘No Grog, No Cash, No Yarndi, No Good Times Here.’
Joe let out a single ha. ‘I remember now.’
‘’Member family got pissed off – said he was typecasting us?’
‘Nah. Did they?’ He looked at August.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I heard them talking like that. I was lying near the front door when it used to be open, it had a screen with metal diamond shapes and I was lying there playing with my eyes. Like, looking at the diamond shapes and then adjusting my vision and looking out to the acacia trees and then back and forth.’
‘You always were a little weirdo,’ Joe chuckled quietly.
‘I remember thinking that my eyes are special, I can make them do this wild blurring thing. I can see things how I want.’
‘And?’
‘And then I could hear everyone arguing out on the back deck about this sign. Arguing that they weren’t this and we weren’t that. Defending ourselves in our own home.’
‘Mmm?’ Joe said, waiting for August to get to the point.
‘I just remember thinking we should all lie here and see how cool our eyes are. I was hoping they could see what I saw.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Seeing two things at the same time. Here and there, close and far, now and before.’
‘Is this before Jed …?’
‘After,’ August said. ‘Poppy was so paranoid, wasn’t he?’
‘He was just protective.’
‘He was a didadida.’
‘I remember that word! What’s that?’ Joe asked.
‘Plover bird, I think.’
A minute of silence passed before Joey asked, ‘What’d Aunt Nicki do?’
‘She has a dictionary that Poppy wrote, and she hid it and maybe used it to get money from Rinepalm, but probably not. There’s something important in whatever Poppy wrote, though. I have to see it now.’ August said all this breezily, having calmed down.
‘Where is it?’
She pointed up to the council building. ‘Third floor.’
Joe got out of the car and closed the door behind him. August watched him through the windshield as he strode across the street.
She came to and jumped out after him. Pulled her hoodie over her head, and hissed to Joey, jogging to keep up, ‘How we gunna get to the third floor?’
She followed him around the back of the library. It was dark, no streetlights shone there. Joey dropped to the ground, fumbling in the raggedy grass.
He stood up with a dark mass in his hands.
‘Smash it,’ he said, and August saw his wild grin in the darkness. He took a few steps away from the library window.
‘Move back,’ he said.
August walked over to him and grabbed the rock. ‘I’ll do it. Let me – I’m not on probation.’
She stood there with the rock hiked on her shoulder, balancing it with both hands. She thought she was like Atlas then, holding the weight of their world. She hurled it at the window, it damaged the chook-wire-reinforced glass, but didn’t shatter it. She went and retrieved the rock. Joey checked the side of the building and nodded that the street was clear. Then August realised she wasn’t Atlas. She was Sisyphus. What good would it do to smash a window? Raid a council office? Look through an office of paper for a pile of paper? What was she thinking?
But August wasn’t thinking, she was feeling. She felt strong and powerful enough not to throw the rock. She turned and dumped the boulder behind her. ‘Poppy liked the library,’ she said.
Joey broke into a loud, bellowing laugh, enunciating ‘Ah ah ha ha ah.’
‘Should we go back to Prosperous?’ August asked.
‘Let me throw it.’ He picked up the boulder.
She grabbed it from him, like she wanted to grab it from Jedda long ago. ‘We can’t, Joe! We’ll talk to your mum tomorrow, we’ll get her to talk to Aunty. We can’t smash the library.’
‘It’s just a window.’
‘Yeah, I know, but Poppy loved this place. Wherever he is right now he’s shaking his head at us.’
He was still then, and quiet, as if Poppy had himself arrived and told him to quit disturbing the peace.
‘We go back to Prosperous,’ August suggested.
He shrugged. ‘And after that?’
‘We stop the mine.’ The words came out of her mouth as
if they were the first sure things she’d ever said.
‘Yeah. Let’s go.’
They walked back to the Mazda.
‘Reckon we’re too old for crime?’ August asked.
‘Nah, it’s just we’d definitely do the time.’ He clapped his hands together, wide-mouthed and proud of the rhyme.
August turned and parked outside the driveway. From high up in their seats they inspected the field: the flames had been mostly doused but the fire still smouldered in places; a paddy wagon was being fed with a handful of protesters.
‘We can stay in Prosperous.’ August angled the car towards the house.
‘Yeah, it’s fine now,’ Joey laughed. ‘Just a little grass back-burn, aye.’
They brought doonas and pillows from the attic room, made a camp on the verandah and fell into the down in their day clothes. They looked out to the now-contained fire.
‘How was the city?’ Joe asked, his face subtly lit, propped on his elbows.
August was propped on her elbows too, looking out. ‘Did your mum tell you why we went?’
‘Nan said to return your hire car. You’re staying?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, and looked over to Southerly. The house lights were dark. ‘And …’
They faced each other, their heads on the pillows, but August couldn’t make out Joe’s face. She could only hear his slow, deep breathing in her direction.
‘There’s Gondiwindi artefacts in the city, at a museum. We went to see them.’
‘Yeah?’ Joey was speaking in sleepy, slurred words already. ‘Hah?’
He was silent.
August closed her eyes and dreamt of drenched England. A market erected at the dawn stillness, in the centre of the stone-bed street. Children skipping. Every ripe memory of an imagined childhood played like a reeling colour film, plump shining vegetables, sick-sweet fruits.
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