Unaware of the stir they had caused among the station people, the travellers went on with their business of cooking and eating the dead bullock. Sated with meat, they made a camp nearby and went to sleep.
Next morning, early, after another feed of bullock meat, Ngarta and Jurnpija went down to a creek not far from the bore. They sat in the shade near the water, watching the water run, and talking. Meanwhile, a group of station people was approaching. The two girls looked round and saw the people in the distance, heading towards them. They jumped up and ran away as fast as they could. They went east, making straight for the hill called Mijalpari, where they could hide. Their companions had already seen the crowd and taken off ahead of the girls.
Ngarta and Jurnpija followed the others. They ran and ran, all the way back to Julie Yard. There everyone stopped and drank plenty of water to cool down. Thinking they were safe now, the men went off to kill another bullock. They found one some distance from the bore. They speared it, then set to work cutting it up. They didn’t know that the station people were still after them, some in motorcars, others following on foot. They knew nothing of cars and the speed at which they can travel, even on rough terrain.
Near Julie Yard runs a creek, with shade trees growing along the bank. Ngarta and Jurnpija went off again together to sit by the creek. At that time of year, water was running in it. The two girls sat talking and watching the water flow, unaware of the station people who were coming up behind them. ‘We didn’t take notice of the birds,’ said Ngarta later, laughing at her own deafness to the warning signals given by the screaming cockatoos. Suddenly, they sensed a movement and turned round, but it was too late. People were all around them, black people and white. Amongst them was a policeman. He and some of the others grabbed the two girls, throwing their arms around them to hold them captive before they could get away.
As on the earlier occasion, the rest of the group from the desert had seen the station party coming up, and had taken off. Only Ngarta and Jurnpija were captured. The station mob yelled after the runaways, telling them to come back, trying to reassure them. The policeman put Ngarta and Jurnpija in the police car, where they sat waiting, speechless with fear. Eventually the other desert people let themselves be talked into coming back. They were all loaded into vehicles and taken to the station homestead.
People kept asking the girls questions, but Ngarta couldn’t understand what they were saying. Then someone heard Ngarta talking to Jurnpija and said, ‘Do you speak Walmajarri?’ ‘Yes,’ said Ngarta, glad to hear one of the strangers speaking her own language.
The kartiya gave each of the girls an orange. They had never seen an orange before. ‘Don’t eat it!’ whispered Jurnpija. ‘It might be poison. Just hold on to it.’ The other people urged the girls to eat the fruit. ‘That’s good food, from kartiya,’ they told them. But Ngarta didn’t believe them. She and Jurnpija held on to their oranges all the way to the station, then threw them away.
At the station they looked around in amazement at all the buildings and gates and fences — there were so many things they had never seen before. The policeman took their photographs. Then the kartiya locked all the children in a house in case they tried to run away again.
Trixie Long was Ngarta’s aunty. She had gone to live at Christmas Creek before Ngarta was born, but she knew Ngarta’s mother and the rest of her family. The kartiya sent for Trixie Long and told her to talk to the girls. She asked Ngarta about her mother and Pijaji’s mother and the other people she had known. Ngarta told her everything that had happened.
All the children were kept locked up at night, but let out during the day. ‘They took us to the bathroom and washed us and combed out our hair and gave us our first clothes. We kept on wearing clothes after that. They locked us up every night, and we sat outside every daytime. Dinner time they brought us fruit and told us, “This is kartiya food, children.” They showed us and we learned. When we got used to it, we ate it.’ When they had all settled down, the girls went to live in the station camp with Trixie Long. ‘They took us to the river now, and showed us.’
The two murderers were sent to prison, but not for their worst crimes. ‘They took the two men to jail then, for killing that bullock. We never told the police they killed all those people. We didn’t know English.’
Ngarta’s closest relatives were living on Cherrabun Station. They soon heard the news that the last small band of desert people had arrived at Christmas Creek. At the first opportunity, Ngarta’s sister Jukuna came to see her. She came by tractor with her husband Pijaji, his cousin-brother Munangu, and other people from Cherrabun. They reached Christmas Creek in the early morning.
After such a long time during which so much had happened, there was a lot to talk about, and many tears were shed over the people who had died. Then Jukuna introduced Ngarta to Munangu. He came from the same country as Jukuna’s own husband Pijaji, but his parents had taken him to Cherrabun when he was a small boy, and Ngarta didn’t know him. ‘They told me Munangu was my husband. They told Munangu to come and pick me up later. They said, “After Christmas, we’ll pick you up.”’
The Cherrabun group went on to a church meeting in Fitzroy Crossing, but Ngarta stayed at Christmas Creek. She worked at the station homestead, washing dishes.
When Ngarta had been living at Christmas Creek Station for about a year, her relatives from Cherrabun came back to fetch her. This time there was no tractor; they came on foot. With Jukuna and Pijaji came several other people on their annual holiday journey.
Ngarta didn’t tell the kartiya she was leaving to join her husband, in case they tried to stop her. She left with her relatives at night. ‘The Christmas Creek river was running. They came and picked me up, without asking the kartiya.’ When the kartiya found Ngarta missing, they sent a man to look for her. He knew where she had gone, but he went back and told the kartiya he had lost her tracks at the creek. ‘We crossed the river and went the other side,’ says Ngarta. ‘I went to Cherrabun with Hughie [Munangu] mob.’
* * *
*Kurrapa is a shortened form of Kurrapakuta, Pijaji’s nickname.
*Endowed with healing power, able to ‘sing’ or charm himself back to health.
EPILOGUE
It was in March 1961 when Ngarta arrived at Christmas Creek Station in the company of the two murderers and their family group. The West Australian reported that ‘two primitive desert natives, Teranji and Yowunda (sic)’ had been charged with killing cattle and remanded in custody for eight days. The report went on to say, ‘Among the party were some children whom local natives believe to have been stolen from other tribes.’ Nothing seems to have been done to follow up this allegation.
H.R. Tilbrook, District Native Welfare Officer in Derby at the time, reported that the party included two boys and five girls, ranging in age from five to fifteen. Ngarta and Jurnpija would have been the oldest of the girls. Tirinja was thought to be about 40 and Yawa 21.
The cattle killing charge against the men was reduced to ‘having been in possession of beef suspected of having been stolen’, for which, absurdly, Tirinja and Yawa were fined fifty pounds, in default of which they were to serve fifty days in prison.
There was a public outcry at the perceived unfairness of the sentences. The government received written protests from such bodies as the Union of Australian Women, the Joint Railway Unions Committee, the Amalgamated Engineering Union and the Federated Miscellaneous Workers’ Union. As a result of the negative publicity, the men were released in April and had ‘a happy reunion’ with their group.
When Tirinja and Yawa were released from prison, the two men went back to Christmas Creek Station, where they were put to work. In spite of everything, Pijaji’s sister Nyangarni remained married to Tirinja. She did this through custom or fear, not sentiment: ‘He was cheeky [cruel] one, that one.’ He was quick-tempered and used to hit Nyangarni: ‘After prison, he knock[ed] me [around].’
Winingali, a niece to Ngarta, was a girl at the time all
this took place, but she remembers Tirinja. She had left school and was back with her father, leading a bushman’s life, travelling around the fringes of the cattle stations, tracking and hunting. One law time, she and her father were standing on top of a rise when they saw a whole army of men walking towards Christmas Creek. The men were decked out for law business: painted in red ochre, wearing ceremonial headbands and carrying spears. They were from Balgo, Winingali’s father told her. They had old scores to settle with Tirinja.
As the men approached their hosts at Christmas Creek, Tirinja ran out from the waiting crowd. Shouting abuse at the visiting lawmen, he brandished his spears and yelled defiantly, ‘Yes, come and get me! Come and kill me!’
The men advanced, spears at the ready, but then the Christmas Creek people intervened. They moved in and surrounded Tirinja, protecting him with their bodies. Some of the men remonstrated with the new arrivals, telling them to spare the life of the guilty man. It is hard now to understand how anyone could have agreed to spare the two murderers, but it seems that Pijaiji, whose sister was now the wife of Tirinja, interceded for his brother-in-law, as he was obliged to do, and saved Tirinja’s life. Other men from Christmas Creek told the lawmen to use sorcery against the murderer: ‘Don’t kill him now; kill him later on, blackfella way.’
Known as Maruwajarti — the guilty one — amongst the Fitzroy Crossing people, Tirinja settled down happily enough to station life. Kartiya who remember him say he was a funny fellow, always laughing. Later, he left Christmas Creek and went to work on Leopold Station, where he eventually met his death in an extraordinary accident. It is said he was helping with work on a windmill, and had climbed onto a tank stand. The rods had been pulled up and one of them removed. He was leaning over to look down the borehole when the wind moved the sails of the mill. The exposed end of the rod came down on the back of the man’s head, knocking him down and killing him instantly.
Locally, it is said the fatal accident was the result of payback, that Tirinja had been sung by the old men in revenge for the many murders he had committed.
Nyangarni was not deeply moved by her husband’s death, but she observed the formalities: ‘I was in Derby Hospital when they told me my husband got killed. I cried a little bit and ate fish [as required by custom], that’s all. Then I went back to station and sat down [in sorry camp]. I gave out blankets at funeral. Then I went to station.’
The younger of the two guilty brothers, Yawa, disappeared from Christmas Creek Station not long after his elder brother’s death, leaving behind his blanket and other belongings. People say that he had been detailed to chop wood and had failed to work hard enough to satisfy the kartiya, who ‘growled’ at him and struck him. Yawa waited till the kartiya had gone. Then he put down his axe, walked into the scrub to pick up the spear and woomera he had stashed away, and left the station. According to Nyangarni, who was working on Christmas Creek Station at the time: ‘The other boy [Yawa] was working near the river. He left a sign — a cross on the ground — to tell people he was going back to desert, and he crossed the river. People cried for him.’
Alone and on foot Yawa headed south, back into the desert, and was never seen again. It is said he left no tracks.
In 1982, maybe twelve or fourteen years after Yawa disappeared, anthropologist Kim Akerman was on a field trip with some people from Yakayaka when they stopped to check on a soak. One of the party spotted a single set of human footprints, which everyone examined excitedly. They said the tracks were only one day old, and identified them as belonging to Yawa.
The following morning, after travelling into rocky country where there were many small caves, the people found evidence of recent habitation: charcoal, half-burnt sticks, flakes of stone. This, they said, was Yawa’s wet season camp. A day later, as if in verification, they found Yawa’s clear footprints preserved in dried mud, prints he had made when the claypans were full of water.
Later that morning they came upon a tree from which a large piece of bark had been removed from a thick curve in the trunk, in the shape of a deep coolamon. The men went to look around, and when they came back they told Kim that Yawa had cut the bark container to carry a large number of eggs he had taken from an emu’s nest to the east.
When the travellers got back to Balgo, there was some discussion as to whether a search party should be organised to find Yawa and bring him in. In the end, it was decided to leave him be. Yawa could not have failed to know that people had been around: he was on foot, never far away, and he would have seen their camp fires, heard their vehicles and seen their car tracks and their footprints. Some of the footprints would have been as familiar to Yawa as his were to the people looking for him. He could have shown himself to them at any time, but he chose to stay away.
He was not quite alone, however: wherever the man’s footprints went, they were accompanied by the tracks of a dog.
MY LIFE IN THE DESERT
When I was a child I lived in the sand dune country of the Great Sandy Desert to the south of Fitzroy Crossing. My father’s birthplace is near the waterhole called Wirtuka. My father got his name, Kirikarrajarti, right there. It’s a name that came from the ngarrangkarni. In the ngarrangkarni, two men came to Wirtuka and found the place overrun with possums. They were all fighting and biting each other, some up in the trees and others down in holes in the ground. As they fought they were hissing, ‘Kkir! Kkir!’ so the two men called the place Kirikarrajarti, because of the hissing noise the possums made. My father’s jarriny is the possum, and he is called Kirikarrajarti after this place where the possums were fighting.
My mother came from another group of people, who belonged to Japirnka waterhole. When my parents had been together for a while, I was conceived, and my jarriny comes from near the jila Mantarta. Near Mantarta is a smooth sandhill called Lantimangu. It’s a place where spirit children live. When a husband and wife walk near there, one of the spirits thinks, ‘I’ll go to them. I’ll make them a mother and father.’ One time my parents got a lot of edible gum from turtujarti trees that were growing all around there, on the flat down from Lantimangu. That night my father had a dream and saw a child standing behind him, but when he turned around it disappeared. Next day he said to his wife, ‘This gum might be the jarriny for our baby.’ He had a feeling about it. Then my mother knew she was expecting me, and so my spirit comes from that sandhill called Lantimangu.
There was a really bad spirit child living at Lantimangu. He was my spirit brother. He threw a fighting stick at my grandmother and hit her on the back because she was digging up a root vegetable from his place. He snatched the roots from her and left her there on the ground, crippled.
My mother’s father also came from the Japirnka waterhole, but his wife, my grandmother, was from Mayililiny waterhole, to the east, near the Canning Stock Route. My grandfather travelled over there and brought her back to be his wife. My father’s mother belonged to Tapu and Wayampajarti, two waterholes north of Japirnka.
My mother had four children, three girls and a boy. My father had two other wives besides my mother. His second wife, who was my mother’s sister, had three boys and a girl. My father’s third wife had a girl and a boy. All ten of us had the same father.
Our regular journeys for hunting and collecting food took us around the country to the north and to the south of Mantarta waterhole. Although Mantarta is a jila, there is no kalpurtu living in it.
When I grew older I learnt to kill animals to eat. I killed dragon lizards, the thorny devil, the crest-tailed marsupial mouse and the dunnart. I cooked them myself and ate them. Sometimes my grandmother or older sister would kill a blue-tongue lizard or a great desert skink for me.
After the wet season, we’d leave Mantarta and hunt and gather around the freshly watered country. As we travelled we drank water from pools on the swampy ground, then we returned to Mantarta. We hunted and gathered west of Mantarta, getting water from the jumu Nyalmiwurtu, Lirrilirriwurtu, Yirrjin, Warntiripajarra and Pirnturr. These were jumu
we drank from as we travelled about after the wet season.
One hot season before I was born, my father’s mother, Kurnmarnu, died. She was travelling with my mother and father and my older sister. They took her to the jumu Warntiripajarra, but found that the water had dried up. They were in the middle of nowhere, a long way from water. My grandmother was too weak to travel on to the next waterhole, so they left her in the shade with a little water in a coolamon. Then they covered her up with damp sand from under the tree to keep her cool, and went on to the nearest jila, Warnti. Warnti is a long way from Warntiripajarra, and they walked all night. Other relatives were there already.
My mother filled a coolamon with water and carried it all the way back to her mother-in-law, but when she got there she found that Kurnmarnu was already dead, lying there in the shade where they had left her. She had died of heat and thirst.
In her grief, my mother hit herself on the head with a rock, making her head bleed. I think she covered her mother-in-law’s head with leaves, then she came back and joined the others at Warnti. Everyone cried for my grandmother.
Our journeys also took us to quite a few jila south of Mantarta — Wirtuka, Paparta, Mukurruwurtu, Warnti and Japirnka. In the cold weather, we travelled north to other jila. We went to Walypa, then to Wayampajarti, Wirrikarrijarti, Kurralykurraly and to Wanyngurla. At Wanyngurla there were a lot of jurnta to gather and eat. We also went to Tapu, then Kurrjalpartu, Wiliyi and Kayalajarti.
Following the rainy season and right through into the cold season we gathered many different grass seeds to eat. These are the names of the grasses: nyarrjarti, puturu, ngujarna, nyalmi, manyal, jiningka, purrjaru and karlji. We call this kind of food puluru. We also gathered jurnta. Another food we gathered in that season was the nectar from various hakea and grevillea blossoms. We used to suck the nectar from the flowers or soak the flowers in water to make a sweet drink.
Two Sisters Page 4