Two Sisters

by Ngarta Jinny Brent

  My husband was very weak, so one of the family had to carry him on his back to another camp, away from the place where his father had died. A day later we set off for the south under cover of darkness, because we didn’t want our relatives to try to stop us from going. We were heading back to our home in the desert. My husband was weak so we walked slowly. We took the two orphans, Pali and Nyija, with us, and we made our first camp at a sandhill along the way.

  In the morning my husband was hungry and said to the boy, ‘I’ll take you hunting. You can find me a crab.’ Pijaji was still feeling a bit weak.

  ‘Okay,’ Nyija said. They found a crab hole.

  ‘Put your hand into the hole,’ Pijaji told Nyija. The boy put his hand in the hole and felt around till a crab bit his hand.

  ‘Ouch, it’s bitten me and it hurts!’ His hand was bleeding. Then Pijaji started pulling a whole lot of crabs from the mud. They cooked them and ate them.

  Some of our relatives, a man and three women, had followed us from Cherrabun, and they arrived at the sandhill where we were camping. One of the women was sick. She was the sister of Nyija’s mother, so he called her ‘mother’. The next day we said to them, ‘We’re heading south now, are you coming with us?’

  The sick woman replied, ‘No, leave us here. I’m staying here.’

  Nyija said, ‘No we’ll take you along with us, Mummy.’

  ‘No, if I go I might get worse along the way,’ she said.

  The little boy cried for his mother to come with us, but she couldn’t.

  We kept going south, and in the late afternoon we reached Jukurirri. We sat down there in the shade and I cooked a goanna I had caught. Then my husband saw a small crow sitting on the branch of a tree. He said to Nyija, ‘Kill that crow for me son.’ The boy ran over to the tree. ‘Climb up the tree and kill the crow,’ Pijaji told him. Nyija got a stick, climbed the tree and killed the crow. After it was cooked, they ate it between them.

  While we were there, my husband said to the boy, ‘Son, we’re going to take you back south to the jila country. Living in this station country has made me sick.’

  The boy said, ‘No, I can’t go to the south, it’s too far for me.’

  Nyija went off to tell another man who was camped at that place, whom Nyija called ‘father’. He said to him, ‘Father, those two are going to take me with them when they go south back to their country.’

  The old man didn’t say anything. The boy kept on telling him, ‘Those two are going to take me to the desert with them.’

  Then the old man spoke. ‘No. None of you should go. You must stay here. Pijaji might get sick again along the way.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll tell him,’ said the boy.

  When he saw Pijaji, he said, ‘My father says we mustn’t go back to the desert.’

  Pijaji said, ‘Why did you have to tell him? We really wanted to take you.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said the boy.

  Then Pijaji said, ‘All right, we’ll stay here in the station country.’

  After that we set off eastwards to a place called Luck Bore. On the way my husband and the boy found some watermelon. They ate a lot of small ones that weren’t ripe, then they found some big ripe ones and ate those too.

  We turned south and came to the camp for the workers at Luck Bore. My older sister who had left the desert to walk to the cattle station before me, was among them. The next morning we joined the workers from Luck Bore on the station truck and went to Suzie Bore. We began working with the group already there, and worked right through to the hot season. While we were there my sister became very sick and died. I was grief-stricken, hitting my head in sorrow for her. Soon after that we returned to Cherrabun and I cried for my sister with my relatives there.

  The wet season came and we climbed onto the back of the station truck to go to the races at Fitzroy Crossing for the first time. Barney Lawford drove the truck. In the town the white people from the stations had set up their camp on the bank of the Fitzroy River, and we Aboriginal people were camped down on the sand below. There were lots of us there from Cherrabun, Gogo, and Christmas Creek stations. In the morning we went to see the horses racing with both Aboriginal and white riders.

  One morning, a white woman came along to our camp. She had been watching our children swimming in the river, but they saw her and ran away frightened. She asked me, ‘Whose are these children?’ I said nothing as I didn’t understand English. My aunty, Pingarri’s mother, came to my aid, and said to the woman, ‘They are children from Cherrabun Station.’

  ‘Are they yours?’

  ‘No, they are Jukuna’s,’ she said, nodding in my direction. ‘She is looking after them.’

  The woman said to me, ‘May I take the children and put them into school?’

  I didn’t say a word. Then the woman went away to talk to someone else. Pingarri’s mother asked me, ‘Do you want to send your children to school?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’ll talk to my husband,’ I said.

  I found him and said, ‘A white woman has asked me if I want to send our children to school. Shall we send our children to school?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘They might take them away away from us to another place. We’ll look after them ourselves. Hide them so that she can’t see them.’ I hid them behind a paperbark tree near the river until the woman had gone.

  It was also at that races time that I heard God’s good news. It was a group of Aboriginal Christian leaders who told us. Their names were Limerick Malyapuka, Bandy Brown, Jack Jinakarli and Banjo Wirrinmara. It set me thinking, ‘This seems like a good message they are telling us.’ When the races had finished we went back to Cherrabun.

  I’ll tell you about something good that happened. Pijaji and I thought that our family, who we’d left in the desert, were no longer alive. So, we pushed the memory of them from our minds, and worked on the station without thinking about them very much. You can imagine my shock when my sister and sister-in-law arrived at Christmas Creek Station. When I heard the news I was overjoyed and we went over to see them and cry with them. This is what had happened to them.

  After we had left for the station country, it wasn’t long before those two killers came from the south. They had spears, fighting sticks, boomerangs and other weapons. At first they just took over the family without doing any harm to them. But as time went on, they became violent and started killing people. In the end, they killed everyone in the family except two. One of those spared was my young sister. She had been frightened and, one night, secretly walked away from the camp. She carefully kept to grass-covered ground so that she left no footprints. They didn’t find her.

  My sister lived by hunting around the many jila she knew. One day, when she was heading north after quite a while alone, she came to a jumu where there was water to drink. She was still there when Pijaji’s mother arrived, very weak from a spear wound. She had been with the family group when my sister ran away from the murderers. The next day they began walking north, but the old woman died before they had gone far. My sister returned to the jumu.

  Later she saw the two murderers with their families coming towards the jumu and said to herself, ‘I might as well give myself up.’ When the two men found her, they were ready to spear her. But my husband’s sister, who had been taken by one of the murderers for a wife, called out, ‘Don’t spear her, she’s my sister-in-law! Let her live. Don’t spear her. Have some pity and let her live.’ So they let her live and she joined up with the family.

  As they travelled on further north towards the stations, they heard cattle lowing in the distance. When they reached the bore called Parayipirri, they saw cattle everywhere. The two men said to the women and children, ‘Stand in a circle around the cattle and close in on them so we can spear them.’ But the women and children were too frightened to move. They had seen the big horns on those cattle. The two men got very angry with them for not doing what they were told, and whacked them all across the head.

  Early the next mo
rning they went back to the cattle and speared a bullock that was standing in the creek bed. They cooked it and ate the meat. Soon after that, men on horseback from the station galloped up and surrounded them. The people from the desert were frightened and crying. The stockmen took them all to Christmas Creek Station homestead and reported them to the manager. The two men were locked inside one of the buildings while the manager sent word for the police to come. They were taken to the jail in Fitzroy Crossing and kept there for a year.

  Back at the station the Aboriginal workers got the rest of the family together. ‘Where are you two from?’ they asked my sister and sister-in-law. My sister-in-law said that her father’s name was Maruwarnti and my sister told them her father’s name — Kirikarrajarti. They knew straight away who the girls were, but they didn’t know the others. These were the children of the two murderers and came from further south. Some of the old men at the station took the two men’s daughters as their wives. They all became workers at Christmas Creek Station.

  After we had been living at Cherrabun a good while people started talking about the station homestead. ‘It’s very close to the river and often gets flooded,’ they said. So the decision was made for the homestead to be moved south to a part of the station that was on dry ground at Jukurirri Bore. This became the New Cherrabun. We all shifted over there to work.

  While I was at New Cherrabun I had some of my children. My first and second sons were born there, on the station. The other two, a daughter then a son, were born in the hospital. They are all grown up now. A school was built at New Cherrabun, and we sent our elder sons and our daughter to the school when they were old enough.

  We stayed working at that station for many years. When Christians came and told us God’s good news, some of the men responded by leaving the law of the elders.

  One wet season holiday my husband and I, with a woman I call mother and her husband and sister-in-law, set off to walk into Fitzroy Crossing to the Bible school at the mission. We slept two nights on the way, and on the morning of the third day we woke to see Christmas Creek in full flood.

  One of our group, who has since passed away, said, ‘What are we going to do? The water in this creek is very high. We can’t swim across or we’ll be drowned in the deep water.’ Then he had an idea. ‘Bring all your swags here,’ he said. ‘We’ll tie them to sticks to make a kind of raft.’ We did this, then we women and children lay face down on top of the swags, while the men swam, pushing the raft across the river to the north bank.

  We walked on to Gogo Station where we spent the night with our relatives who were living there. The next morning we set off for Fitzroy Crossing. When we reached the south bank of the flooded Fitzroy River, we called out for the boat to come from the other side. We couldn’t cross the river when it was in flood. There was no bridge for vehicles to cross, only a concrete road through the bed of the river, and when the river was in flood, they used to take us across by boat. On the north bank of the river, the big truck from the mission was standing waiting for us and the driver took us north to the mission. There we settled down and stayed for the holidays.

  All of us were working happily at New Cherrabun until one day some of our people, who have since passed away, had a fight over something to do with the kitchen work. This made the manager angry and he gave us a hard time. Finally, the men said to one another, ‘Let’s go. Let’s leave this manager. He can do his own work.’

  Later, the manager paid us off with our rations. Some of the workers went into town in a truck to the races and stayed there. Others went on working on the station. The manager sent my husband and me and our children to Meda Station, near Derby, to work. Those who were left on New Cherrabun finally went to Fitzroy Crossing and stayed there, living in tents. The Kurnangki and Mindirardi communities didn’t exist in those days. At that time there were only two stores in the town — one at the mission and another at the hotel. Aboriginal people used to get a form from the welfare office on the east side of the town, and then they had to take it to the mission store and get theirrations with it.

  My husband and I worked at Meda Station for a time, then we went to Derby and settled down to work there for a good while. My job was washing clothes for the children who lived in the mission hostel. My husband worked on Yeeda Station just out of town. We were a long way from the country we knew, so later on we returned to Fitzroy Crossing to stay.

  In my early years, when I lived in the desert, I didn’t hear God. I wasn’t aware of him or his word. Now I listen to him. I was walking around aimlessly in the darkness, but he brought me into the light. God is precious to me. I can’t leave him. I have found something good for myself.

  Over the years I have done a lot of work related to my language, Walmajarri. I learned to read Walmajarri and I have learned to write it too. With other people I translated some parts of God’s word from English into Walmajarri. We carefully checked that work, then I read some of the translation onto cassettes. Those cassettes were sold to others so that they could hear God’s word.

  Another thing I did was teach some white people to speak a little Walmajarri. Later on I went to the adult education centre in Fitzroy Crossing, called Karrayili. There I began to learn English — writing and reading it, recognising the letters and words. Then I began painting pictures of my homeland on paper, the jila and the jumu, the rockholes and the sandhills. At first I painted small pictures and later on, large pictures. Over the last few years I have been painting very big pictures at the Mangkaja Arts Centre, some of which are sent away to the cities where people buy them.

  A few years ago I went a long way from home on a trip overseas to Lyon, in France. I went there to tell the story of the huge painting called Ngurrara that was being shown in Lyon. It is a painting of all the important waterholes of our homeland. A great number of us belonging to that land painted it to show the government when we asked them for Native Title to our country. This painting has been sent to many parts of the world for people to see. I was glad to go to Lyon because I like seeing places that I have never seen before.

  Now I teach children Walmajarri, and I really enjoy doing it. I teach them how to find bush foods and animals, and I teach them the names of the animals, such as goanna and fish. I teach them the names of the animals that live in the river country and that big goanna that belongs to the plains country. I also teach the children the names of other, smaller animals.

  Lately, I’ve been thinking deeply about this important idea of returning south to the country where I was born. At the same time, I’ve been listening to what the government is saying — that the country belongs to them. So we have been discussing the idea of moving down to our country to live there, in our homeland.

  Some of our people are saying that it is too far away from the town. Those of us who come from the desert say it is not far at all. Town people see our country as dry and waterless; to them it is just a lot of big sandhills and valleys. The desert people see it like this; yes there are high sandhills and valleys, but there are masses of food around the countless jila down there. There is no grog down there for people to drink, making them drunk and irresponsible. It’s a good place to live far away from these things. This is the kind of discussion the desert people are having with the town people.

  So I finish this short account of my life.

  Wirrikarijarti

  Jukuna Mona Chuguna, 2001

  A jila near Wayampajarti, where we used to stay right through the hot weather. There are turtujarti and kayala trees there.

  Mitarta

  Ngarta Jinny Bent, 2001

  A salt flat not far from Tapu, on the way to Wanyngurla.

  Wanyngurla

  Ngarta Jinny Bent, 2001

  There is water under the ground at Wanyngurla but it’s salty and we can’t drink it. It is a place where we camped during the wet season and through till the cold season. We got drinking water from a nearby soak. There are many jurnta growing in that area and we ate lots of them when we lived
there.

  Purtunjarti

  Jukuna Mona Chuguna, 2002

  A jumu. In the ngarrangkarni a young man drank water there. The young man changed into the turtujarti tree near the jumu.

  Tapu

  Jukuna Mona Chuguna, 2002

  We used to live at Tapu in the cold and hot seasons. There is good water and lots of shady trees. We had to dig deep to get this water. We used to get lots of food and meat when we stayed here.

  Pirrilanji

  Ngarta Jinny Bent, 2002

  This is the main place for the water serpent. In the Dreamtime it ate a man and vomited him back dead. From Wayampajarti we children used to visit this place and play there. Our mothers told us not to go there but we went anyway.

  Wayampajarti

  Jukuna Mona Chuguna and Ngarta Jinny Bent, 2000 (Painted during the Biennale de Lyon, France)

  Wayampajarti is a living water spring. The water serpent lives in this one. There is water here all year round. We dance and sing a corroboree about this place. My father and two other old men got this song and dance in a dream.

  Kurralykurraly

  Mona Chuguna, 2001

  We went to this jila in the hot season. Sometimes the water at Kurralykurraly is good and sometimes it is salty. Even when it’s salty we can still drink it. We used to get desert nuts and other food there. Animals used to come to drink and we would catch them for meat.

  Kurrjalpartu

  Ngarta Jinny Bent, 2001

  Kurrjalpartu is a place we used to live at during the cold season and through the hot season right up until the rains came. There was water available right through the hot weather.

  Tapu, a major jila in Jukuna and Ngarta’s country

  Jarrngajarti rockhole on Cherrabun Station

  Ngarta and Pat at Tapu, c1989