‘Where’s my blind mother?’ asked Ngarta. Her own mother didn’t answer. But Ngarta kept asking, and in the end the older woman told her what had happened.
‘She is sick. She didn’t want to come with us.’
Ngarta knew what that meant — her blind mother had chosen to stay behind to die. Ngarta’s father and mother had finally given in to the blind woman’s wishes. During the night, while the children were asleep, they had led her away from the camping place and settled her under a tree on her own. They put a coolamon of water beside her and left her. In a few days, when the water ran out, she would die.
Now Ngarta started to cry. ‘Why did you leave her?’ she said. ‘I don’t want to leave my blind mother!’ But her mother told her to be quiet. It was as the younger woman had wished, and there was nothing to be done. Sorrowfully, they went on to the next waterhole.
At their next camping place they found their relatives from Japingka. Kurnti and Nyija were there with their father and mother and their father’s second wife, Paji. Ngarta’s father and mother told them what had happened to the blind woman and her son. Everyone was crying.
About a year after Ngarta lost her second mother, her father died. The whole family was on the way to a waterhole called Kayalajarti — Ngarta, her mother and father, her two sisters and her young brother. On the journey, their father became sick.
It was a hot day and the man was feeling weak; after a time he had to stop and rest. His wife told Ngarta to stay and look after her father while she went on to the next waterhole to fetch water. She set off with her two elder daughters, leaving Ngarta and her brother with their father in the shade of a tree.
When their father seemed to be asleep, Ngarta and her brother left him lying there and went to sit under a neighbouring tree to wait for their mother’s return. Suddenly, Ngarta heard her father call out, and she hurried over to him.
‘He called out, “Come and sit with me. I’m finished.”’ Ngarta sat down beside him, but when she spoke to her father again he didn’t answer. ‘Only those few words, he said. Then he died.’
Ngarta comforted her young brother until their mother and sisters came back carrying a coolamon of water. As soon as she saw her children’s faces their mother knew her husband had died. She put down the coolamon and cried aloud. Then she picked up a rock and struck herself on the head until blood ran. Her eldest daughter gently took the rock away from her to prevent her from hurting herself too badly. Everyone was crying.
Ngarta’s mother left her husband’s body where it lay, and took her children on to the next waterhole, called Lalka, where she knew she would find other relatives.
At Lalka, Ngarta’s uncles Kurnti and Nyija were camping with their family. Besides their father and their two mothers, their married sister Tawaya was there, with her husband, his second wife, and their children. It was almost the same group of people who had met them the year before, after Ngarta’s blind mother had died. Ngarta’s mother broke the news to them about her husband, and everyone cried in grief for him. For a time after that, all the relatives travelled together.
As a widow, Ngarta’s mother was jaminyjarti — that is, she fasted from certain kinds of meat. She could no longer eat the red meat of kangaroo or bandicoot, nor did she eat dingo or cat. She lived mainly on goannas, blue-tongue lizards and snakes, of which there were always plenty in the sandhills, as well as whatever plant foods were available.
All the relatives kept away from that part of the country where Ngarta’s father had died. They would not return to the places where he had been living as long as there remained any signs to remind them of him. Not until rain had fallen in the region would all the footprints he had left be obliterated from the sandhills; after that, they could go back.
For many months the family went on much as before. Ngarta’s mother moved around with Tawaya and her family; Kurnti and Nyija and their parents were usually nearby as well.
The family group was now quite large, and though they moved around the same country, they did not always travel together. After camping at one good waterhole for several days they would decide to move to another waterhole, perhaps two days’ journey away. To get there they could follow different routes, particularly after the rainy weather, when all the temporary waterholes had been refilled and there was an abundance of water and wildlife.
Kurnti’s mother might decide to take her two boys in one direction, stopping at a certain jumu on the way. Her husband, meanwhile, might set off in another direction with his younger wife, Paji. Tawaya and her husband would perhaps prefer to travel more directly to the new place, carrying water for the one dry camp they would have to make in between, while Ngarta’s mother might take a more roundabout way. Old people like Ngarta’s grandmother, who no longer had a spouse, usually travelled with their closest kin. Even so, they sometimes made independent decisions about the journey, as the old woman did the time she went with her granddaughter to Japingka.
By splitting up like this, people could take best advantage of the journey and of what the country had to offer. Each little group could hunt game and gather food in a different place. They cooked and ate some of what they caught along the way, and brought the rest to share with their relatives when they arrived at the new camping place.
There was nothing random or haphazard about these journeys. Ngarta’s mother might choose the more roundabout route, not because she liked to walk further, but because she knew a good place to find jurnta bulbs at that season of the year, or where a particular fruit would be ripening. In planning her journey she would keep uppermost in her mind the places where she could expect to find water. If she knew she would have to take her family through dry country where there were no waterholes, she always carried a heavy coolamon of water on her head.
Tawaya’s husband and her family, going ahead of everyone else, would dig out the jumu they called at on the way. Knowing others were coming behind them, they would leave a full drinking vessel ready for them at the waterhole, and perhaps gather extra firewood and leave that for them too. Then they kept on until they reached the next major meeting place.
If one group took a detour they hadn’t planned, or simply wanted to let the others know where they had got to, they lit a fire. The smoke from the various fires kept everyone in touch with everyone else, even over wide distances.
Tawaya’s husband Nguluk had a brother who sometimes travelled with Ngarta’s family. Ngarta called him ‘uncle’. After Ngarta’s father had been dead for nearly a year, it was this uncle who broke her mother’s fast. He took some kangaroo fat and rubbed it onto the widow’s lips. Then he gave her some meat from the same animal, which she ate. From then on, the widow no longer had to abstain from any kind of meat.
This same uncle of Ngarta’s travelled with his own wife to the jila Japingka. He left his wife at Japingka and headed back to Tapu on his own. Tawaya’s husband Nguluk went off hunting one day, and met his brother approaching Tapu. The two men stopped to greet one another and exchange news, then the brother went on to Tapu. Ngarta’s mother was still in camp. As he approached, the man called out, ‘I’ve come for you! When you were fasting for your husband, I gave you meat. Now you have to camp with me. You’re my wife!’ This was how he claimed Ngarta’s mother. That night, he and Ngarta’s mother slept in the same windbreak.
Next morning, when Ngarta saw Nguluk coming back from hunting, she went to meet him. ‘Uncle’s camping with my mother now,’ she told him.
After the wet, Ngarta’s new father went off on his own, south to Japingka to pick up his first wife. On the way back north he told her, ‘We’ll have to go to Tapu; I want to find my other wife.’
His first wife knew nothing of any other wife. She was furious. When she and her husband reached Tapu she was still angry, and started a fight with Ngarta’s mother. The two women fought with heavy hunting sticks, each submitting in turn to the blows of the other. The fight was bitter, and blood poured from the heads of both women. To stop them injuring
one another seriously, Kurnti’s second mother Paji intervened. She held back the elder wife to stop her from hitting Ngarta’s mother. But then the husband of the two women joined in to defend his new wife, and he dealt his first wife a number of blows. Now Paji had to come to her defence as well, and at last managed to restrain the angry husband.
Eventually, everyone settled down. The two women got used to one another and, having given vent to their feelings. they shared the same husband amicably from then on. The three lived together for about a year.
By this time, nearly everybody had left the desert.
During these early years of Ngarta’s life, people had been steadily leaving the sandhill country. As a little girl Ngarta had got to know many people besides her own close family — relatives and other people who came from different parts of the country to visit hers, then moved on. At ceremony times, crowds of visitors used to come together from near and far. Yet by the time Ngarta’s mother went to live with her second husband, only a few people were left.
Nguluk had travelled north as a young man to work for the kartiya, the white people who now lived in the riverside country and ran cattle and sheep on land that once belonged to the riverside people, where kangaroos and wallabies thrived. He had left his work and walked all the way back to the sandhills to visit relatives and to claim Tawaya as his wife. He took her with him to the station, but Nguluk never forgot his obligations to his wife’s family, and after a year or two the couple came back to the desert. It was while they were visiting that Ngarta’s mother became Nguluk’s brother’s wife.
Not long after that, Nguluk took his young family back to the cattle station, and with them went several other relatives, who were leaving the desert for the first time. Amongst them was Ngarta’s young uncle, Kurnti.
All through the sandhill country people were seized by a great impulse to travel north into what was now white people’s country. The more who left, the more there were who wanted to follow. Some left once, never to return. Others, like Nguluk, did come back from time to time, but not to stay.
A little while after Nguluk had left the desert, his brother decided to follow. He took his first wife with him, leaving Ngarta’s mother and her children behind at Japingka. ‘We’ll come back for you next year,’ he told them. But these were times of great change for the desert people, and he never came back. ‘He went to the station with his first wife. They never came back. They left us for good.’
Instead, more of Ngarta’s relatives went away until, at length, only a few people from her immediate family were still living in that whole region of desert. Almost all the men and youths had gone by now. Most of the marriageable girls had been claimed and taken away by their promised husbands. Only the old people remained, and the wives and children of the older men.
Kurnti came back with his nephew and age-mate, Minyiparnta. The youths made several journeys up and down between the desert and the station. At the end of their final visit, they prepared to travel back to the station taking some of the other people with them. Kurnti’s brother Nyija and his two mothers were among those to go.
The people who came back gave a warning to Ngarta’s mother and the others who were staying behind with her. News had reached the station of the two brothers from the east, Manyjilyjarra speakers, who were travelling through the almost abandoned sandhill regions, preying on the defenceless bands of women and children that remained. The two men were cruel and dangerous and should be avoided at all costs.
This was not the first time the people had heard about these men. These were the same brothers who had speared the old man to death a few years earlier, and taken away his young wife. Nothing had been heard of the brothers for a long time, but now it was clear they had continued with their murderous raids. No one knew where they might turn up next.
‘We’ll come back and fetch you,’ the young men promised the few who were staying behind. ‘Next year, we’ll come for you.’
Pijaji came back. He was betrothed to Ngarta’s sister, Jukuna. He brought with him a bag of flour, and blankets, carrying them on his shoulders. At first the desert people thought the flour was intended to be eaten dry. They put some on the fire, but it burnt up and disappeared. Then Pijaji sat down and showed them how to mix the flour with water and make it into damper. Jukuna ate the damper, but Ngarta didn’t like the look of it, and wouldn’t try it. ‘He brought that dry one too, dry bread. But I wouldn’t have it. Even the flour one, I just looked at it. Jukuna tried it. He gave some to me, but I didn’t like it. Only my grandmother and my mother and Jukuna ate it. I didn’t want to.’
Pijaji went back to the station. The next time he returned to the desert, he claimed Jukuna for his wife. This time he brought a metal billycan and some tea leaves, as well as more flour and blankets. He demonstrated how to make tea. Ngarta declined the tea, but this time she tried the damper, and found that she liked it.
Pijaji left once more, with his parents and his new young bride. Ngarta stayed behind with her mother and her grandmother. Still some of the old people could not bring themselves to leave their country, and her grandmother had injured her back falling out of a tree and was unable to make the long journey. ‘We’ll come back for you,’ Pijaji promised. ‘Next year, we’ll come back.’ No one knew it then, but it would be thirty years before he would see his country again.
In the whole of the Great Sandy Desert, only a handful of widely scattered groups of people still lived in their accustomed way. Everyone else had gone. In Ngarta’s country there remained just one small band of eight souls: Ngarta, her mother and grandmother, her young brother, Pijaji’s two sisters and his second mother and grandmother.
This small group of women, girls and a boy had the whole country to themselves. With so few people to feed, they could afford to stay around the same area for much longer than they would normally have done. They did not need to travel far with each season to find new stocks of food. Besides, they were waiting for their relatives to come back and pick them up.
For a time they waited at Kunajarti, a jila to the north of their country, with good shade trees standing on a sandhill not far from the water. They lived mainly on goannas and snakes and the many different fruits and seeds of the desert. Occasionally they killed a dingo, a fox or a cat.
‘They said they would come back for us. They left us when I was a little girl; I couldn’t kill anything — pussycat or goanna — I only killed lizards, and that mountain devil. Well, they never came back. We stayed a long time at Kunajarti, killing lizards, waiting for Kurrapa* to come back. He went in the cold weather, and we waited two or three years.’
Eventually, tired of hanging around the same place and perhaps despairing of their relatives ever coming back for them, the group moved from Kunajarti back to Tapu, and stayed there for a while. Then they went on to Ngijilngijil, and back to Kunajarti, staying within this restricted range while they still hoped for the others to return.
Meanwhile, Ngarta was growing up. When Jukuna left with her new husband, Ngarta was still only hunting small game, such as dragon and blue-tongue lizards. As time went on she became more skilled. She learned to track and dig goannas from their burrows, and to catch snakes using just a stick and her bare hands.
One day Ngarta tracked a fox. She went hunting in the morning with her mother, leaving her grandmother at Kunajarti. Later in the day she left her mother at dinner camp and went off on her own. She found the fresh tracks of a fox and followed them right up to the fox’s den, but it heard her coming and took off through the spinifex. Ngarta followed it for a long way. ‘I chased him all around the place. Hot day. I got knock-up chasing the fox. And the fox got knock-up too.’ Tired and thirsty, she kept on. The fox, which had to keep moving instead of being able to lie up in its burrow during the heat of the day, was slowing down. It circled around and, when it was getting near the end of its strength, ran back and hid in its burrow. Ngarta followed the fox back to its hole and knew she had it trapped. She dug away the sand with
her wooden digging stick, called a kana, until she could reach the fox. Then she hit it on the back of the neck with her kana and killed it. This was the first time she had ever killed a fox. She pulled the body out of the burrow and lifted it onto her shoulders, then started heading back to camp.
By the time Ngarta was in sight of her camp, it was late in the afternoon. Her mother had got back already and was worried that Ngarta had been away so long; she had been looking and calling out for her. From the top of a sandhill she saw her daughter coming along slowly, carrying the fox. Tired out after her long chase, Ngarta climbed up the slope to the shade tree where her family had their camp. Her grandmother was there, waiting for her. ‘My grandmother cried for me: first time I killed a fox.’
Another time, when the family was camping at Tapu, Ngarta killed her first cat. She was out hunting with her dog Jaya when she came across the tracks of some kittens. She looked around in the grass until she found three little kittens hiding. She bent down to pick them up. At that moment the mother cat came to the attack. She flew at Ngarta, scratching her arms, then ran up Ngarta’s side onto her head, still scratching and biting. Ngarta managed to shake her off, and Jaya chased the cat into the undergrowth and caught her. There was a noisy struggle, and Ngarta finished off the cat with her hunting stick and carried it back to camp. ‘I’ve still got the scar from where that cat scratched me.’
Ngarta’s grandmother used to worry about her walking so far in the heat. ‘You must be careful,’ she said. ‘Don’t walk so far. You might get burnt by the sun, or die of thirst.’ But she was always proud when she saw her granddaughter coming home from a successful hunt.
The little group lived like this happily enough for a couple of years. They didn’t see anyone else in all that time and, but for the knowledge that their relatives were living on a cattle station far to the north, they might have been the last people in the world. Life went on in its age-old pattern: food gathering and hunting, drawing water, making or improvising tools, cooking, camping, firing the country, telling stories around the fire. Everything was the same, yet nothing was the same now that they were on their own.
Two Sisters Page 2