Riding the Black Cockatoo

by John Danalis

  It is easy to get disorientated by the many arguments that attempt to justify the government-sanctioned policy of removal; quibbles over percentage points tend to squeeze out the human element of this national tragedy. If you really want to understand, find – and I promise you it won’t be difficult – an Indigenous person who has been forcibly removed from the arms of their mother. Sit down in front of him or her and listen to their story. And then make up your own mind.

  { 4 OCTOBER 2005 }

  ‘Hey, I’m comin’ up to Brisbane next Wednesday,’ Gary announced enthusiastically. ‘I’m bringing up a songman too. We’d like to do a proper handover ceremony at your parents’ place, nothing big, just a smoking ceremony to clear away any bad spirits and to say thanks.’

  ‘What’s a songman?’ I asked.

  ‘A cultural man,’ said Gary, ‘a keeper of our dances and songs.’

  A charge of excitement ran through me; all my boyhood Skippy fantasies were about to come true. I smiled like an idiot, picturing two painted-up Aborigines with didgeridoos dancing through smoke on my parents’ neatly mown lawn. Then reality shouldered its way back in and I thought of my father; a corroboree in the front yard, it was too weird to contemplate!

  ‘Gary, my dad is a lovely bloke, but I just think that would be too much for him.’

  Gary went quiet. I could feel his disappointment and wondered if he was offended.

  ‘Hey, why don’t we talk to people at the University,’ I suggested. ‘That's where it all started.’

  Gary liked the idea and suggested that we get some people from the local Indigenous community involved. After the call I buzzed about like a happy fool; then panic set in – I didn’t really know anyone in the local Aboriginal community! Mary was about to push me into the unknown, again.

  I searched through the University website for Craig's boss, the general manager of the Oodgeroo Unit. It was ten o’clock, but I knew I had to ride the momentum of Gary’s call. I punched in the number I’d found and it was answered on the third ring. I was relieved that I hadn’t woken Victor up, but he sounded very tired. He explained that he was on Mornington Island as part of a delegation trying to nut out ways to overcome some of the social problems that were tearing up local communities in the region. He patiently and silently listened to my story, just once exclaiming, ‘Jee-zus,’ when I told him that Mary had spent the last 40 years on my parents’ mantelpiece. I told him that two Wamba Wamba men were heading up to Brisbane the following week and were keen to hold a proper handover ceremony at the University. Victor muttered a little and there were lots of deep breaths. And then he thanked me and my family for what we were doing and explained that it was a lot to take in at such a late hour.

  ‘There’s a lot of organising to do,’ he said. ‘These Wamba fellas can’t just waltz into town and hold a ceremony without invitation. Our people need to be involved, there are protocols to be observed.’

  He explained that he’d had a couple of hard days and promised to get back to me just as soon as he’d digested what I’d told him.

  I put down the phone, feeling glad that I’d managed to get the ball rolling, but at the same time feeling as though I’d just assaulted someone. I emailed Gary, again apologising for my father’s refusal to meet with him; I wanted Gary to know that Dad was a good man. And then suddenly I thought of football. I’m not sure why, maybe because Gary lived in Victoria, the home of Australian Rules football. My father is a fanatical Essendon supporter – he receives a birthday card from the team each year and has a concrete garden gnome in a red-and-black jumper that he keeps in the house because it’s so special. At the end of my email I added a little joke, saying, ‘Don’t hold it against Dad, he’s an Essendon supporter, and we know what grumps they can be.’

  { 5 OCTOBER 2005 }

  I spread the Horton tribal map of Australia out on the table before my classmates and showed them Mary’s country. I was worried that this whole affair was distracting the class, but my lecturer was encouraging and everyone seemed imbued with the ‘Let’s get Mary home’ spirit. After class, I arrived home to find an email from Gary. At the end of his message there was a PS which read, ‘By the way, tell your old man that my son plays for the Bombers, number 42. See, we’ve got something in common after all.’ I stared at the email; the only thing missing was the theme music from The Twilight Zone.

  I phoned Dad and mentioned that there was going to be a handover ceremony at the University and that he and Mum would be most welcome to attend. Dad abruptly declined, saying he had an appointment in town that day. But now I had an ace up my sleeve. As casually as I could, I mentioned Gary’s son – number 42. Dad immediately knew who I was talking about.

  ‘That’s that young black rookie, Nathan, what’s his name—’

  ‘Lovett-Murray,’ I added.

  ‘That’s it!’ Dad always gets excited talking footy. ‘He’s fast too.’

  ‘Well, Gary is his father, he’s the bloke coming up from Victoria to collect Mary. He really wants to meet you, to say thanks.’

  There was silence on the phone.

  ‘Anyway, I’ll see you soon, Dad.’

  Dad just grunted, ‘Uhhh,’ not in an angry way, but rather as if his mind was elsewhere, as if he had become disoriented.

  { 6 OCTOBER 2005 }

  Pete and I have been friends for a long time; he earned the nickname Captain Cranky because he’s never afraid to challenge a point of view or to speak his mind. It’s an honest friendship! Pete is a mountain-bike race promoter and works from a rustic little shack in his back yard not far from my place. I’d called by to return some tools and had soon settled in for a chat. Pete asked me what I’d been up to, and for the next ten minutes listened – without saying a word – as I told him of Mary’s journey back to country. Pete barely batted an eyelid throughout the story, then when I finished he nonchalantly pointed to a rusted old sword hanging above a bookshelf.

  ‘Maybe that’s the weapon that did the deed,’ he said dryly.

  ‘Pete!’ I said, totally appalled. ‘Anyway, as if that dodgy old thing was ever drawn in anger. Where’d you get it, a fancy-dress shop?’

  ‘It’s a trooper’s sword,’ he said.

  ‘So what? It was probably just for ceremonial use.’

  ‘What do you think they used them for, cutting onions for the barbecue?’ Pete went on to tell the story behind the sword and how it was given to his father – at the time a fertiliser salesman – by an old farmer.

  ‘The farmer used it as wedge to keep the barn door open. When Dad asked about it the farmer said that it had been there ever since he could remember, but he’d been told it had lopped off a few heads when the land was being cleared.’

  Cleared; for some reason I’d always associated the term with trees and scrub. I knew there’d been a few massacres, but I’d imagined that most of the original inhabitants had just drifted away, beyond the ever-expanding line of development. My vivid imagination went into overdrive as I stared at the blunt relic.

  ‘Of course he might have been pulling the old man’s leg, you know what farmers are like. He gave it to Dad when he was transferred out of the district.’

  ‘Well, Mary died of syphilis,’ I said, for no particular reason; death by the sword or venereal disease, both were equally horrific ways for body and spirit to part ways.

  After my chat with Pete, I thought a lot about white family histories and wondered how many had similar stories, concealed by only a generation or two of dust?

  That night Dad phoned. After some smalltalk he asked me about the ceremony; where it was taking place, what time it was to start, how he and Mum could get there. He was playing it cool, and even though I could have leapt down the phone line and planted a kiss on his whiskery cheek, I kept my emotions in check too. He said it was the strangest thing, but in the latest Essendon supporters’ magazine there was a three-page article on Nathan Lovett-Murray (Gary’s son), and about the Indigenous development program the club runs.r />
  ‘Gary will be so pleased to meet you and Mum,’ I said.

  ‘I look forward to meeting him too,’ Dad replied.

  The power of football!

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  { 7 OCTOBER 2005 }

  The handover was only five days away and I was getting jittery. Gary phoned to discuss preparations; he was delighted at the news that Mum and Dad had agreed to come along. Before the call, I’d been reading about the importance Indigenous people place on totems, so I asked Gary what the Wamba Wamba totem was.

  ‘That’s a sad story, they’re extinct down here now,’ he said, and he did sound sad too. ‘Our totem’s the black cockatoo, the one with the red tail feathers.’

  I don’t have much hair on my head, but the little bit I have stood on end!

  ‘We call him Wiran,’ Gary went on, ‘but he’s been gone a long time, when the trees were cleared he went too.’

  ‘I saw him, I mean I saw one, last Sunday, on Mount Coot-tha,’ I stammered. ‘I’ve never seen one before, and I’ve been riding through that bush for years.’

  ‘Did he go like this?’ Gary asked, his voice bright again. ‘Ka-rak, ka-rak!’

  ‘That’s him! That’s the call! He was looking right at me, calling just like that, he was strong, beautiful—’ The words were rushing out of my mouth.

  Gary laughed, but he didn’t seem at all surprised. ‘He was just watching over you, to make sure everything’s okay.’

  ‘What, like a guardian?’

  ‘That’s it. This is a powerful business, brother, a powerful business. Tell you what, if you can find some of those feathers for the ceremony, it’d be the icing on the cake.’ And then he was gone, his parting words – which sounded more like an order than a request – echoing around my head like stones in a tin drum. The phone cord slipped through my hand, each coil passing slowly between my fingers like worry beads until the handset beep-beeped at my feet. Where on earth was I going to find black cockatoo feathers? I pictured myself crawling through the scrub at Mount Coot-tha, and for one silly second considered taking a drive in the country to look for some road-killed crow whose feathers I could doctor with red paint. Maybe the Queensland Museum would lend me one or two; surely they’d have some.

  I ran an internet search on black cockatoos and found a scientific journal article on the plight of the species in the southern parts of Australia. The main reason for the bird’s disappearance was loss of habitat. Over four million gum trees were chopped down along the Riverine reaches of the Murray River between the mid-1800s and mid-1900s: four million redgums that had provided fruit and nesting hollows for black cockatoos and many other species, sawn into railway sleepers or shipped abroad to shingle the streets of London. Then there were whole forests devastated by the weirs and levees that were constructed all along the Murray, ending the annual floods on which the plains relied for renewal. I scrolled through the article, with its photos, tables and graphs, and there at the end was a colour photograph of a single feather. Then it hit me, of course – the headdress that the Wik women had displayed at the writers festival! I don’t know why it took me so long to figure it out. I suppose my mind was overloaded, trying to stay on this weird and wonderful wave that was sweeping Mary homeward. Again I wondered, was the headdress made from the feathers of a black cockatoo, and if it was – and if I could contact the women – would they let me borrow it? It was a week since the festival. Had they returned home to Wik country already?

  I knew that one of the women, Fiona, had been published by the same publishing house that had released one of my stories. I looked up my editor’s home phone number in the directory. It was a Saturday night and getting late but I decided to throw the dice again before I had the chance to talk myself out of it. I phoned Leonie, and explained rather breathlessly that I needed to get in touch with Fiona and Auntie Alyson. Leonie read out the number in her filofax and explained that Fiona was living in Brisbane and that Auntie Alyson might be still with her. Within a few minutes of remembering the headdress, I had Fiona’s phone number in my hand.

  Fiona was having a pleasant evening with her family in front of the television when I phoned her. I introduced myself and explained that I had attended her talk at the writers festival and told her how I had been mesmerised by the headdress. Then I mentioned that I had grown up with an Aboriginal skull on my family mantelpiece. She groaned, as though I had reached down the telephone line and punched her in the stomach. Her reaction must have alarmed her family because the volume of the television in the background suddenly dropped and I heard a concerned voice ask, ‘What’s wrong?’ I continued, Fiona punctuating my story with gasps and exclamations of bewilderment. I felt as though I was bludgeoning her. I finished my story by going through all of the coincidences: the black cockatoo at Mount Coot-tha, the headdress, the lost Wamba Wamba totem and Gary’s request that I find some feathers. There was a long silence, and then she said, ‘So, are you asking me if you can borrow the headdress?’

  ‘Fiona,’ I stammered, ‘I’m not sure why I’m talking to you, I’m not even sure they are the right feathers, and I don’t even know if they’re yours – I suppose Auntie Alyson has taken them back to Wik country.’

  ‘My sister has gone, but the headdress is mine, I’m looking at it right now.’ Her voice was measured and calm. There was a short silence before she continued, ‘And because you have told me this story, I am obliged to let you have the headdress. When would you like to collect it?’

  { 9 OCTOBER 2005 }

  Fiona lived on the far side of Brisbane, across the river which divides the city and close enough to Moreton Bay to smell the ocean. My four-year-old-daughter Bianca was in the car with me. I was a nervous wreck and I suppose I took Bianca along as a security blanket; to demonstrate that I was a good father and not the skull-cradling ghoul I felt like. I was too uptight to consult the street directory; I knew where the suburb was and for some unfathomable reason I imagined that my own intuition would lead me to the correct street. I became hopelessly lost, and even after checking the directory I overshot the turnoff to Fiona’s street by kilometres. I suppose I was nervous about stepping through the door of an Aboriginal home for the first time in my life. Would it be a rundown place with broken windows and a yard full of car bodies and yapping dogs, the classic media cliché that’s rolled out every other night on television? But no, that wouldn’t have worried me; I knew that Fiona was a strong and gifted woman, a fellow writer, a dancer and actor. I wouldn’t have cared if she’d lived in a tent. Perhaps that was what I was afraid of, meeting an Indigenous woman who positively radiated her culture, a culture that mine had endeavoured to keep under its heel for the last 200 years.

  When I scribbled down the street name Fiona had given me – Cook Street – I hadn’t given it any thought. But as I got closer I noticed that all the surrounding streets bore the names of famous British explorers: Wentworth, Blaxland, Cunningham, Leichhardt; men whose expeditions opened the country up to waves of settlers who in turn pushed the original inhabitants from their homelands. Fiona’s home was halfway down Cook Street – named after the legendary English seafarer who’d claimed her ancestors’ country for the British Empire. And just in case anyone missed the obvious connection, her street was flanked by signposts which read James, Endeavour and Banks. For the first time in my life I felt the power of name, what it must be like to be constantly reminded – even in subtle and unintentional ways like this – that your land has been conquered, and that you, a descendant of the original owners, are now part of a minority, an ‘Other’. I wondered if Fiona felt a pang of discomfort or resentment whenever she wrote out her address, or was she used to it. I decided not to ask; I’d stepped on enough sensibilities lately.

  Bianca and I pulled into the driveway of a neat little brick house. Why did I make the mental note that it was neat ? Had my conditioning been so thorough that anything other than a clapped-out, corrugated-iron cliché would come as a surprise? Had the me
dia done that good a job on me? Good god, was I carrying around some baggage!

  Fiona’s two youngest daughters spilled out of the house; they held back for a moment, trying to look shy, but once they saw Bianca their smiles lit up like sunbeams. Fiona followed, looking a little hesitant, but after sizing me up for a moment invited us in. Inside the lounge room it was all perfectly ‘normal’: Australia’s Funniest Home Videos was playing softly on the television set, Fiona’s eldest daughter gossiped to a friend on the phone, a computer workstation sat in a corner overflowing with folders. But there was a strong cultural presence here too: the walls were covered with Indigenous paintings and prints, Aboriginal handicrafts and books dotted the bookshelves, and family smiled proudly in traditional dress from framed photographs. Everywhere the colours of the land dominated – natural yellows, ochres, reds – colours of country that brought the outside inside. It was much more than neat; here was a home that straddled two worlds. And there, high on the bookshelf, was perched the black cockatoo headdress.