by Patti Miller
I felt a pang of envy. I would have liked to have been given a star-name.
I considered for a moment. Maybe I didn’t know Wayne well enough to say it, but then I decided to try it. ‘It’s like a birth canal, this place – a womb and birth canal.’
Wayne flashed me a look of such amazed appreciation that I glowed foolishly.
‘That’s right,’ he said.
He probably hadn’t believed I’d got anything, and maybe I hadn’t, but I could imagine children gazing at the night sky and the handing on of knowledge and the mystery of being in a vast universe.
‘I want to come back here one time at night,’ I said. ‘Would that be all right?’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
I imagined finding my star and then wondered if it would have to be pointed out to me by someone else. I wouldn’t be game to come along on my own anyway. Tim might come with me. He loved the night sky; he studied astronomy and the physics of night light and had painted the dark many times. It was not blackness to him, but alive with absorbed and reflected light.
We drove a bit further out along Bushrangers Creek towards the farm and then in through a gate with a notice saying trespassers will be prosecuted. We jolted along a washed out road then got out to clamber up Irribung as Wayne called it. The ground was rocky underfoot and we had to watch our step. From the top, near the steel girders of a communications tower, we could see Wellington lying seemingly peaceful below and then as far as the eye could see, the patchwork of farmland, and in the far distance, blue hills. Wayne pointed out the Warrumbungle Ranges, faintly blue in the far distance.
He said that you could see Baiame’s footprints from up here but I couldn’t see anything. It didn’t really matter. We were on top of a high hill and the wind was blowing through us. I felt my rib cage expand and my bones lighten with the peculiar joy of high places. We all stood looking over Wiradjuri country, breathing the cool air and feeling the wide sky.
33
What Happens in Wellington
It was only a few weeks later, February, when I was back up in Wellington. It was very hot and dry again, the beginning of another year of drought. The few good rainfalls the previous year had run into the gullies and evaporated and there was a feeling that the dry spell was going to last for months.
At my mother’s place I knocked on the door, but she didn’t answer. I let myself in. She was sleeping in her chair curled to one side, saliva dribbling a little from her lips. Cushions had been pushed down one side of the chair but she had slid forward and down, her back curled like a foetus. The ordinary pain of her mortality slid sharply into me, a fish hook of loss, and I wanted to shake her, wake her and make her stand up and stride briskly out the door. I carefully took a hanky out of her pocket.
‘Hallo, Mum. I’m here.’
She woke easily and I dabbed the corner of her mouth and then made a cup of tea. Afterwards I watered the petunias and pansies that my younger sister, Mary, had planted for her in large blue pots. They were drooping in the dry heat.
In the afternoon I went to the Wellington Times office to check the articles Lee and Wayne had mentioned. They both told their stories with such conviction that I was inclined to believe them without question, but I still needed to have printed versions. I stepped into the office and both felt and heard the noisy air-conditioning. There was a friendly-looking blonde woman behind the counter.
‘Oh, hello. You’re Terry’s sister, aren’t you?’
I nodded, incredulous, as the middle-aged woman dissolved into the girl who had lived over the road from my grandmother. My brother had played cricket with her brother. In this town, more than I had ever thought, I was not just recognisable as someone’s sister, cousin, daughter, neighbour, niece, but I, in turn, recognised sisters, cousins, nieces, children. I fitted into the ordinary neighbourly layers of history and connection. I realised with some surprise that it gave me pleasure.
She photocopied the articles for me and I answered her questions about the family. We didn’t know each other, we had not even played together as children, but we knew each other’s families in detail.
As I stepped back into the street, the heat hit with the same force as the sudden blast on opening an oven door.
‘Hot enough for you?’ said the man coming in.
‘Just about,’ I said.
I headed down to the swimming pool to do some laps. Despite the heat and the fact that it was still school holidays, there was only a handful of people there, mostly Aboriginal kids. It had been that way for a few years now. When I was a child in the sixties, the pool was always packed all summer. Perhaps the white families all had air-conditioning and their own swimming pools now.
I did my laps slowly and felt nervous when a group of Aboriginal kids moved into the lane I was using. There were about six or seven of them, teenagers, bigger than I am, lazily throwing a ball between themselves. They had started off on the other side of the pool but when I finished one of my slow laps, there they were in my lane. I couldn’t tell if it was deliberate or not. My dogged, ungainly, middle-aged lapping could easily have inspired the desire to disrupt – it would only be natural. I swam around them.
On the next lap they had spread out into two lanes. I caught my breath, splashed towards them, and then swam around them again. Their gaze followed my trajectory and when I reached the end there was a burst of laughter – which may have had nothing to do with me. It was probably just the drift of their ball throwing and their conversation that led them across the pool. Any threat was probably in my imagination. That’s what happens in Wellington.
When I arrived back at my mother’s, still with wet hair, I phoned Rose for the third time since I’d arrived. By now I thought I was just being dutiful and was hoping she wouldn’t be home. She answered just as I was about to hang up. With only a brief to and fro, she agreed to see me for tea at ten thirty the next morning.
‘I’ll bring the cake,’ I said, trying to hide my exultation. So, I had wanted to talk to her after all.
‘Buy me some Madeira cake,’ said Rose.
‘Madeira cake? Okay then, I’ll see what I can find.’
After a few moments more of reassuring checks about the time and how to find her, I put the receiver down.
‘She wants Madeira cake,’ I said to my mother.
‘Then you had better go and find some,’ she said.
I tried Kimbell’s Bakery next to the lane Aunt Millie ran down to escape the police. It was closed. Then Woolworths – it had no Madeira cake. I started to drive back to the cabin. No, she had asked for Madeira, it was the least I could do. I stopped the car, turned around and drove to the ugly Bi-Lo where I found two types of Madeira, one with pink icing and one with lemon. I chose the lemon.
I set the alarm and next morning before dawn hauled myself groggily out of bed. It was going to be a scorcher. I planned to climb the hill out on Pete’s farm to look down on the bora ground before I visited Rose, which meant the car would be sitting out in the blinding heat quietly turning itself into a furnace. I put the cake in an Esky with an icepack and a bottle of water.
It was still before 6.30 am. I drove past the farm house without stopping. I had rung Pete the day before and told him I would tip-toe in and out before the heat and without waking anyone. There was a gate and a ramp just as I remembered, then a ramp with a barrier across which I didn’t recall. It didn’t seem I’d driven far enough, but I didn’t like to move the barrier.
I parked the car. The sacred hill rose to my right, but I was unsure whether it was the one overlooking the bora ground. Perhaps there was another one further around? I don’t know whether it was the early morning giving me the feeling of acting secretively, but I started to feel unsure. Should I be doing this at all? Climbing sacred hills? And worse, trying to see a male initiation site? But that was 200 years ago. It was just a pa
ddock along a river bank now. And none of the Wiradjuri I’d met knew or seemed greatly concerned about where it was anymore. Did that make any difference? I sat, arguing the case silently.
The sky was getting lighter. If I was going to do it I should start climbing. I jumped out of the car and headed up the hill. Immediately I thought I should turn back; the dried grass was thigh high, a veritable garden of snake nests, and I was foolishly dressed in shorts and thongs. It was my mother’s fiercest rule in summer: never walk through long grass and absolutely never ever without shoes and long trousers. I could only hope the snakes were still asleep. My eyes scanned the ground as I tried to pick my way through, walking on rocks and avoiding the thickest grass.
I clambered up alongside a fence for a while, my legs stretching out from rock to rock, then I climbed through it, avoiding the barbed wire along the top by holding it carefully up with one hand. On the other side I set off at a diagonal across and up the hill, high-stepping like an anxious horse through the long grass when I couldn’t go around it and feeling relieved each time I gained a rocky platform. I kept climbing steeply upwards for half an hour, the air still cool on my face.
I stopped two or three times then veered around the high rocks where Tim had said the churinga stone had been found. I could suddenly see another high hill, which had been hidden behind the first and looked very similar to it. I looked down towards the river to where it looped away behind the second hill. Below, not far from the river, was a derelict house I had passed with Tim in the car; I was obviously no further along than I had been that day months ago. Against my nature I had got up before dawn and climbed a steep hill, disobeying my mother and risking my life walking among snakes and I was on the wrong bloody hill.
If I believed in such things I would say the ancient spirits were showing me who was in charge. Whatever it was, I realised I didn’t actually care. I was even vaguely grateful. I had been saved from seeing what I shouldn’t. I sat down on a rock to look back over the landscape.
Although it was only twenty kilometres away as the crow flies from the farm where I spent my childhood, the land here was quite different. The hills were higher and steeper and overlapping each other into the distance, creating a landscape of drama and promise, especially as the first rays of sun hit the hill on the other side with a glancing wedge of light. I thought of Baron Rock behind the farm, the place where something might be discovered. I was up high with the eaglehawks again. The long grass glowed golden like a wheat field in a Sisley painting, a rich soft yellow, brightly lit. All around and over the broad arrow of gold lay the dreaming atmosphere of the bush, its unfathomable mystery. Native pines and eucalypts gathered on the hillsides, silvery grey and dark grey boulders leaned like dolmens, still and silent. It was so beautiful it hurt, and so secretive that I felt rebellious.
This place would not tell what it knew, not in a hundred years, but one day, I would come and sit and wait endlessly until it yielded.
34
Country Rose
Later in the morning, when the rest of the world was awake and going about its business, I headed out to the Common. It was quiet, not another car on the road. Lee had given me directions for finding Rose the day before – turn right through Nanima at the school, drive over the grid, then follow the side of the hill around until I saw the tin humpy. As I coasted down the hill into Nanima the settlement looked peaceful, almost asleep in the already hot sun. Although it was past the hour school went in, there were still a couple of kids straggling into the schoolyard. The first day back but summer and the river still beckoned. They looked at me, already bored. What was I doing here?
I bumped over the grid and was on the Common at last. I slowed down, feeling as if some revelatory moment ought to happen. I couldn’t think what, but after all this time, some epiphany should arrive. The land was different again here; rolling hills sloping down to river flats dotted with eucalypts and wattles, and closer to the river, willows and she-oaks. The yellow grasses were thick and long, native rye with green splashes of exotic clover and lucerne, evidence of dark river loam and a bit of moisture in the soil. It probably didn’t look much different from the way it looked in 1867 when my great-great-great-grandfather Patrick Reidy and his Town Common Committee first commandeered it.
I saw a low shack made of tin in a fenced paddock and pulled over. A woman appeared in the shade of the trees around the shack and waved me on, indicating that I follow the road as it turned up the hill. I continued on around the back to a wide gate and parked in the small shade of a sapling gum. The woman opened the gate and waited under the overhanging peppertree as I got out of the car with my books and papers. I went around to the boot, got the cake out of the Esky then walked towards her. It seemed perfectly ordinary and comfortable to be meeting Rose at last.
We looked at each other, a moment of mutual appraisal, then said each other’s names. Just to be sure. In those first few moments with her, I had an overwhelming impression, not of ego or self-aggrandisement, but of a great weariness. She was only a few years older than me, but she seemed utterly worn. She was short and stocky, her facial features heavy, wide nose and full lips, dark brown skin and beautiful thick dark hair, pinned up because of the heat I supposed. I wondered what she saw – a freckle-faced white woman, her skin flushed red and shiny, an eager, inquisitive look in her eye?
I handed her the cake, explaining that I hadn’t known what kind of Madeira to buy. She said there was only one kind. I said the Bi-Lo had one with pink icing and one with lemon and she said she didn’t eat icing anyway. Cake talk took us across the yard so that I had only an impression of sunburnt grass underfoot and gum saplings and fruit trees around us. I stood in the violent blinding heat outside the open door of the tin shack waiting to be invited in before realising I was expected to simply walk in. I stepped through ahead of Rose.
The quality of the heat changed immediately, becoming heavy and suffocating under the low corrugated iron roof and walls. The light was dim at first, coming in through a window facing towards the river flats, but I could see the room was made of bits and pieces of fibro and building board as well as tin. Hessian was pinned over part of the roof to make a ceiling, and there were wheat bags here and there on the floor. There were a table and chairs, a homemade side bench crowded with tins, food cartons and an electric jug and toaster, and a sink on brick pylons. By the sink, a garden tap came out of the earthen floor, and on the other side of the room a row of tools lay neatly on a shelf under the window. I thought of the hippy shack with the tarpaulin roof where I once lived as a young woman. Instead of pictures of mandalas and Indian gurus, there was a framed picture of a young and beautiful Elvis Presley in the corner. The shack had the same look of practical making-do with what could be found – except for a magnificent collection of Royal Doulton on shelves across one wall. It was the largest collection I had ever seen outside a shop: cups and saucers, a teapot, jugs, tureens, bowls, dinner plates, bread-and-butter plates, serving dishes; all roses and gilt and all covered in dust. I thought about how much it must have cost.
‘My mum has a cup and saucer of that pattern,’ I said.
‘I fell in love with Country Rose when I was sixteen. I first saw it when I went to Sydney.’
I hadn’t known that’s what the pattern was called but I nodded knowledgeably. I wondered if she liked it because of the name.
‘It’s lovely.’ I said. ‘Mum likes nice cups and saucers too, so we buy them, one at a time, for her birthday and Christmases.’ I was letting her know I was aware how much Royal Doulton cost and where the hell did she get the money.
‘My husband bought them for me. One at a time. Over twenty years.’ She was letting me know no-one could accuse her of spending funding grants on pricey china. There are things you don’t mention aloud if you are just sitting down to have a cup of tea with someone, but if you both know the rules you can cover a fair bit of ground anyway.
‘I’ve got a good bloke. I’m one of the lucky ones. He’s a good man.’
Her voice was stronger, stating a rare appreciation. I remembered that Gaynor and Joyce both thought her husband was aggressive, and I realised perhaps he was only defending Rose.
‘I’ve got a good one too,’ I offered.
She flashed me a look, both of us glad to have someone to share our good fortune with.
‘So he’s not here at the moment?’
‘He lives in town now. He stayed out here for a while, fixed lots of things, but if you’re not used to it, it’s too hard to live like this. I grew up like this. We had to bucket all the water from the river. I’ve got this tap now.’
I stood with her by the sink as she bent down to fill the kettle from the tap coming out of the ground. ‘When I was a kid we didn’t have running water either,’ I offered. ‘Just the tank outside. Then when I was about twelve, Dad put a tap in the kitchen. Only cold water though. Never any hot. Except for the chip heater in the bathroom, but we hardly ever used the bath because of the drought.’
‘Here. You take this knife and plate and cut up the cake.’
I cleared a space on the table and cut a slice for each of us. Rose brought the tea to the table, mine in a mug, hers in a gigantic glass tankard with five tea bags still dangling. No Royal Doulton for us. As Rose sat down she looked even more tired and her breath wheezed.
‘A bit of asthma from the summer grass?’ I said.
‘Dunno. A bit of emphysema, I reckon. Gave up smoking three or four months ago.’
Shit! She really wasn’t well. I wondered if I should be doing this.