by Lorna Hendry
In the store, as I was paying for a huge freshly baked loaf of crusty white bread, still warm in its white paper bag, I saw a note stuck on the door. ‘Wanted: A couple to run the store and do general maintenance work. Accommodation supplied. Apply at the office.’
We took our bread and drove along a track over the sand dunes to the beach. Dunes lined the 8-kilometre length of the gently curved bay. Red cliffs in the distance gave way to white sand that slid into clear turquoise water. Apart from a few vehicle tracks and one tiny shelter made of timber and topped with palm fronds, there was no sign of anyone else. We sat on the sand, ripped the fresh bread apart with our hands and washed it down with warm cordial from the car. When the boys went for a swim, James and I stood on the beach and kept an eye out for crocodiles. The woman in the shop had said it was rare to see them in the bay and the glimpse we caught of something dark moving in the waves turned out to be a huge sea turtle. The boys ran in and out of the small waves, splashing and shouting.
‘Did you see the job ad in the shop?’ I asked James. He nodded slowly, still gazing out to sea.
Ten minutes later we were knocking on the door of the office.
The jobs came with a house. Caroline Sibosado, a stern Aboriginal woman in her sixties who was obviously the boss, offered to show it to us. She walked with us along the red sandy track behind the store to a yellow house beside the cemetery. From the outside, it looked like a tin shed but inside there was a kitchen, a bathroom and three bedrooms. It was fully furnished. It even had an air conditioner and a television.
It seemed rash to apply for the jobs on the spot, so we said we’d think about it and call in a day or two. Caroline walked us back to the office where she fished out an old business card and handed it over without another word.
Back at Middle Lagoon we talked about nothing else all night. I had no qualms at all and the boys were ecstatic. ‘We could see the school from the kitchen’, Dylan said. ‘We could be there in about half a second.’
Oscar had his sights on something else. ‘We can have our own rooms.’
James agonised over the decision. He felt a huge responsibility to the community of Imintji and the Wananami school. But most of the Imintji families had left and weren’t expected back until the next dry season, which was still six months away. I had no job and no real role to play apart from covering books in the school library.
The next morning I rang the Lombadina office and asked to speak to Caroline.
‘Mum’s not here. She’s gone to town.’
Suddenly terrified that we might miss out, I gabbled something about having been in the day before and the jobs and looking at the house and really wanting to apply.
‘Oh, yeah, she mentioned you. When do you want to start?’
We moved all our stuff into the yellow house a week later.
James surprised the boys when we arrived with a secret purchase he had made in Broome. They were ecstatic about the PlayStation, but they didn’t want to play with it right away. Instead, they each went into their own separate room, closed the doors and didn’t come out for hours.
Life at Lombadina had a new, more relaxed, routine. The boys now left home just before eight o’clock, walking in bare feet across the cemetery to the school. James and I wandered down to the office where I collected the shop keys and he hung around waiting for someone to decide what he had to do that day.
The office was the heart of the community and Lombadina, we had been told, was the jewel in the crown of the Indigenous communities in the Kimberley. When people found out that we lived there, they wanted to know what made it so different. As far as we could tell, the secret ingredient was the Sibosado family.
Caroline and her husband, Basil, had set up one of the first Indigenous tourism ventures on the Dampier Peninsula. Their aim was self-sufficiency, and no-one was allowed to live in Lombadina if they didn’t work. Their sons and daughters-in-law ran the office, the workshop, the tourism business and the employment office, and had road maintenance contracts with the local shire. They had just built a new conference centre and there were plans to grow commercial crops of a local fruit, gubinge, which has the world’s highest known concentrations of vitamin C.
We weren’t the only non-Indigenous people working at Lombadina – two older couples cleaned the tourist accommodation, and the current baker was a white-haired man who barely spoke a word to me for weeks. But everyone else was related to the Sibosado family.
By the time I opened the store, it was usually about a quarter past eight. In the morning, most of the customers were people who had driven from other communities or bush camps to visit the clinic. Sometimes there would be a few people sitting on the old metal school chairs outside but, unless they were tourists, no-one ever minded that I was late. We were all on Kimberley time.
After an initial flurry of purchases of iced coffee and smokes, the shop would be empty again. I filled the rusty pie warmer with pies and sausage rolls, turning it up to make sure the food was ready for smoko, then put on a thick jumper to go into the fridge to restock the drinks.
Three times a week, the baker stoked up the wood-fired oven next door and brought in trays of warm loaves in white paper bags. The loaves were huge, with crusts that varied from pale yellow to charcoal, and so soft that it was impossible to slice them neatly. Everyone in the community had a regular order and sometimes tourists who had worked out the system would ring and order the day before. I wrote names on the bags and then worked out how many were left to sell. On my first day, I had been told that the most important parts of my job were to make sure that everyone in the community got their bread and that the shop never ran out of Coke or Winfield Blue cigarettes.
One of the local women, Audrey, helped me in the store. Every day she came to work in one of a collection of baseball caps that she wore to keep her long grey hair out of her failing eyes. She had been waiting for over two years for an operation to remove the cataracts and she had to peer closely at the labels on the tins she was stacking to see what they held.
At first, when Audrey and I sat together outside the store, I would fill the space between us with small talk, irrelevant chatter and intrusive questions. Audrey just looked past me, into the distance. If I pressed her for a response she would mumble, ‘Don’t know ’bout that’, before moving away. When it finally dawned on me that Audrey never answered any of my questions, I stopped asking. Slowly, I learned to let a thought float through my mind without having to speak it out loud.
One afternoon a battered, red Volvo pulled up outside the store. A young man came in and after I served him I wandered outside. Bruce Wiggan, the man with the cowboy hat and plaits whom we had met at Ardyaloon the year before, was sitting next to Audrey.
‘You the new shop lady?’ he asked.
‘Yep.’ I sat beside him. ‘We’ve met before, actually. Last year.’
He looked me up and down and smiled. ‘I remember you. I always remember the pretty ladies!’
I tried to catch Audrey’s eye but she ignored me.
‘I was with my husband and my kids. You said you’d dreamed about us. Before you met us.’
His grin grew wider. ‘I still dreaming you! I dreamed about you last night. You and me. That was one nice dream!’
I shook my head, but I couldn’t help smiling. I knew he was teasing me, but a part of me also really believed that he had dreamed us. I didn’t think it was a coincidence that I was back here meeting Bruce again. I had also finally met Roma from Chile Creek. She had come into the shop to introduce herself and make sure I knew about her bread order. I still had that Chile Creek brochure, now torn and dirty, tucked into one of my books of maps. Every time I looked at it I remembered picking it up at Iga Warta, just over a year and a half ago.
‘Come over anytime’, Roma had said and, weirdly, that invitation also felt inevitable.
Despite being a lifelong atheist and sceptic, I had lately accepted – quite easily – many more inexplicable events than I
would have believed possible. I had mentioned to Nev once that we had been in places where I had felt incredibly uncomfortable and unwelcome. In Cape York, we had camped on a beautiful beach lined with coconut palms with crystal clear water and white sand. I hated it. I was on edge the whole time and I couldn’t eat or sleep for the three nights we were there. James and the boys couldn’t understand what my problem was.
‘Probably men’s country’, said Nev in such a matter-of-fact way that it immediately made perfect sense to me.
At Lombadina, we had been told which areas we shouldn’t go near. I had also been warned about nearby law grounds and told that the boys shouldn’t play there. Before we left Melbourne, I would have agreed that there were some places that had great cultural significance and had to be respected, but now I took these warnings as seriously as if I had been told not to let the boys run out onto a six-lane highway.
Oscar and Dylan were having their own cultural learning experiences over at the school. Towards the end of our first week in Lombadina, one of the Aboriginal teacher aides came into the store. She leaned towards me as I worked out the cost of her purchases.
‘Where you lot from?’ she asked.
‘Down south. Melbourne.’
She paused. ‘So where’ve you been then?’
‘At Imintji, on the Gibb. We were there for six months.’
She smiled triumphantly. ‘I knew it! The minute I met them I said to myself, those little white boys, they been around Aboriginal people a lot.’
I was a bit embarrassed. ‘It was the Kriol, wasn’t it?’
A few months earlier I had been helping out in the library of the Wananami school, where the shelves were labelled both in English and the local dialect, Kriol, and the fiction collection was called ‘Liar Stories’. I thought I heard Dylan speaking in the lilting rhythm of the local kids so I went outside to check it was him. Standing beside the principal on the wide shaded verandah, I had cringed a little. ‘He’s picked the accent up pretty quickly’, I said apologetically.
Gary glanced at me with his usual serious look. ‘It’s a good thing. It means he’s settling in. Some white kids never do that; they hold back, don’t get involved.’
At Lombadina, where they weren’t the only non-Indigenous children, Oscar and Dylan’s Kriol disappeared pretty quickly, although I often heard Dylan using it as he played outside our house. He never spoke it with the Sibosado kids, though. They all spoke the Standard Australian English that was taught as a second language at school.
The boys also had to come to terms with the religion that was woven through the entire curriculum. James and I weren’t at all religious but this was a Catholic school and the teachers took their role as religious educators very seriously. In art, the kids drew pictures of Jesus; in music, they sang hymns and learned the art of liturgical dance. Word searches asked them to find ‘prayer’ and ‘worship’ and the concept of area was taught by getting them to write ‘Jesus loves me’ in block letters on graph paper and counting the number of squares inside the letters. For the most part our kids ignored it, but one afternoon Oscar had a few questions.
‘So, did you learn any Jesus stuff today?’ I had asked him over lunch. The community shut down every day from eleven until one o’clock, so we had made that our main meal and ate together at the yellow house.
‘Yes, Jesus washed the feet of the twelve apostles. He did it because … ummm …’
‘To show them he wasn’t better than them?’ I suggested.
‘Yes, that’s it. What’s an apostle?’
I struggled to get my definition right. ‘Someone who followed Jesus, who believed in what he was saying.’
‘So they were his friends?’
‘Yes, I guess so.’
‘Okay.’ He paused, his forehead furrowed. ‘So … why did he turn them into rocks then?’
He was thinking of the Twelve Apostles formations on the Great Ocean Road in Victoria. I had to pick James up off the floor, at the same time assuring Oscar that his dad wasn’t really laughing at him.
The busiest days in the shop were ‘doctor days’, when a doctor flew in from Derby to spend the day in the clinic. The nurses handled most of the medical issues the rest of the time, so it was them whom James went to when he developed a weeping, raised welt on his collarbone that refused to heal. He came into the store an hour later, pale and clammy, with a huge white bandage stuck to his chest.
‘She cut it open with a scalpel. She said it’s a boil.’
A few weeks later, Dylan complained of a sore knee. All we could see was a tiny red mark but James took him to the clinic anyway. Janice was the nurse on duty that day, and she sent them immediately up to Ardyaloon, where the doctor was running a clinic. Dylan had a boil deep under the skin that was dangerously close to his knee cap. If it couldn’t be treated with antibiotics and drawing cream he would have to go to Broome to have it opened surgically.
Boils, usually caused by infections in the hair follicle, were apparently very common in the Kimberley. The humidity made it hard to keep your skin clean and dry, and naturally occurring bacteria could easily find its way down the hair shaft and start causing trouble. More worryingly, enthusiastic treatment of skin infections with antibiotics in the 1980s meant that many Indigenous communities were now home to antibiotic-resistant strains of the bacteria. The recommended treatment now involved lancing and draining the boil. One doctor also told me that, particularly for fair-skinned people, it was possible that increased exposure to sunlight lowered the immune system and made you more susceptible to infections.
The ointment they gave us for Dylan looked like Vegemite and smelled worse. Over the next few days we smeared it on his knee and watched in amazement as a big red lump came up and formed a head, like a huge pimple. It finally burst, spewing out an astonishing amount of foul-smelling yellow pus and blood.
When a painful red lump came up on the side of my knee, I was ready for it. For a week I covered it in the black ointment and tried to draw it out with heat packs, but it got bigger and angrier until I had to give in and go to the clinic. Janice examined it and then asked the other nurse to come in and take a look. They prodded and pushed at it, ignoring my pitiful yelps.
‘I think it’s compacted’, said Janice.
‘What does that mean?’ I asked.
‘It means the head’s not going to come up on its own and you’re going to have to get it cut out’, said the other nurse, with just a hint of glee.
‘Here? Now?’ I asked, horrified.
‘No, I’m not touching that one’, said Janice. The other nurse looked a little disappointed. ‘You’ll have to see the doctor. He’ll be here tomorrow.’
The next day the doctor said, ‘That’s a good one. I could try and give you antibiotics, but the thing with boils is that they’re basically a big ball of infection. The antibiotics can’t get in and do their stuff. Really, the only way is to cut it out. I have to warn you, though, the local anaesthetic doesn’t work. The stuff inside the boil kind of neutralises it. I might be able to give you some pethidine, if that would help.’
‘I’ve never seen anything like it’, said James an hour later, after I had entertained the entire clinic, staff and patients alike, with pethidine-fuelled ravings. He had watched the whole procedure with voyeuristic fascination. ‘He scooped all this pus out with a thing that looked just like a teaspoon. And now there’s a hole in your leg. He put his little finger in to get the last of the pus out and it went in all the way to the second knuckle.’
That weekend, as I lay on the couch with a huge bandage on my leg and a package of codeine by my side, James and the boys built a tree house. It took all of Saturday and most of Sunday but, with the help of a small group of fascinated kids, it was finally finished.
One of the boys’ friends was a bit wary. ‘Lorna, I don’t think this is really very safe.’
‘It’s a tree house, Sebastian, it’s not supposed to be safe.’
It was actually very s
afe. After securing the platform with solid beams of wood that he bolted to large branches, James had made handrails around all the sides. To get to it, the kids climbed up a series of solid planks of wood, which were securely nailed to the sloping trunk of the tree to form steps. James and Dylan returned the unused wood to the tip and came back with a discarded tyre that made a perfect swing.
The boys and their friends spent hours devising lists of the people who would be allowed in the cubby. As more kids came to look, the rules for membership were loosened until it was declared that all the Lombadina kids had open access – even the girls.
That was Sunday. On Monday afternoon, one of the Lombadina kids raced into the shop.
‘Dylan fell out of the tree!’
I rang the office and asked them to find James, locked the shop and started running towards the house. It was hot and the track was covered in deep sand, making it impossible to run fast, and when I heard a high-pitched scream I felt as if I was living out my worst nightmare. James had made it there before me and had already picked Dylan up off the ground and put him in the car. He stopped to pick me up on the way to the clinic. As I jumped into the car, I caught a glimpse of Dylan’s arm cradled in his lap and I had to work hard to stop myself from turning away from him.
At the clinic we got a good look at what he’d done. His arm was broken in at least two places. It was shaped like an ‘S’.
‘That’s definitely a trip to Derby’, said Janice.
She put a needle into one of Dylan’s tiny veins and pumped morphine and fluids into him. The other nurse put a temporary slab of plaster under his broken arm and got him ready for the Royal Flying Doctor evacuation. At five o’clock, Dylan and I were at the airstrip and by six o’clock we were in Derby Hospital.