by Lorna Hendry
I had already been told there was no surgeon in Derby or Broome that day. The nurse said that the doctor would probably try to align the bones by manipulation. The X-ray process was horribly painful. I told Dylan he was allowed to say the worst words he knew if it made him feel better, but he wouldn’t do it. When the doctor went behind the screen to look at the result, he said some of those words for him. Dylan had broken both bones completely off his wrist and also snapped the end of one of them. The loose bone was floating around at right angles to the others. All the doctor could do was straighten the bones as much as possible to prevent damage to his nerves and muscles and relieve his pain.
The next morning we were sent to Perth with 11 milligrams of Panadol and codeine in a syringe, an envelope of X-rays, the address of the hospital and a taxi voucher. Six hours later, we arrived at Princess Margaret Hospital. When they tried to put us at the back of the triage queue, I lost my temper and demanded to see a doctor. By five o’clock, a team of orthopaedic surgeons had put all of his bones back in the right place, without surgery.
A few days later, the doctors said we could go back to Lombadina. It was James’s birthday, but I couldn’t call him to tell him the good news. Six houses, including our yellow house, had been cut off when a builder had put a shovel through a Telstra cable and James had been calling us from the public phone box three times a day.
‘We’ll be home tomorrow’, I promised Dylan.
The next day, the doctors on their morning rounds asked what time our flight was. I hadn’t been told yet, so I asked the ward clerk. She didn’t have any paperwork for us. ‘It’s up to the patient repatriation scheme in Derby. But it definitely won’t be today.’
Dylan started crying. I asked if I could call them.
‘There is absolutely no point in that. Parents have tried that before and it makes no difference. You just have to wait.’
She really shouldn’t have said that. I rang James and got him onto it. Within an hour he had found out that Derby had referred our case to Broome, but no-one in the Broome office had ever heard of us. He did the ‘outraged parent’ routine and within half an hour, and despite still having no paperwork, we were booked on the afternoon flight. I wondered what happened to families from remote communities who weren’t so confident about taking on the bureaucracy.
I called Linda from Perth Airport and asked if we could stay with them in Broome that night. She was happy to help, promising to pick us up from the airport and have ice-cream, chocolate and lollies on hand for Dylan. He was pleased, but not sure why he was getting so much junk food. I told him that the Scottish tradition of plying children with sugar became compulsory if they were sick. As the plane headed towards the runway, the lady next to us leaned over and offered us her open packet of Columbines.
‘Wid ye like a sweetie for take-off, hen?’
Chapter Nineteen
At Christmas we flew home to Melbourne. The Canadians had gone home and we had managed to rent our house out again from February, so we just moved back in while it was empty. We wandered around Fitzroy and bumped into friends and neighbours who were surprised to see us, and then confused when we said we were only home for a month. We stretched out on our couches and watched television. We shopped at the Queen Victoria Market and were stunned at how fresh and cheap everything was.
Soon I couldn’t remember why we had decided to go back to Lombadina for another year. I watched the boys as they played with their old friends, learned to ride their new ripsticks around the streets and celebrated their eighth and tenth birthdays in the first week of January with a joint slumber party where no-one went to sleep until the small hours of the morning. I wanted to stay. Life was easy, our friends were happy to see us, the boys could go to school with teachers who weren’t overwhelmed by low literacy levels and erratic attendance, I could get back to doing work I was good at and that my clients appreciated and we could just be normal again.
James, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to leave again. ‘It’s all so … fake’, he said, trying to explain how he felt. What I saw as ‘easy’, he saw as a manufactured, consumerist lifestyle. ‘All we do is shop.’ And it was true. We were back to being the kind of people who couldn’t walk out of our front door without spending $50, except now it was $50 that we really didn’t have to spare. And three $50s wouldn’t even buy you a thin cardigan from the shop on the corner of our street.
I argued with him for a while, trying to convince him that we could somehow cancel the tenants, retrieve our car and the camper trailer and drive from Broome to Melbourne in time for the school year to start but, even as I spoke, I knew we weren’t going to do that. I retreated into a dark place in my mind and refused to talk to him for days on end as I grieved for my city life and wondered if we were making a terrible mistake.
Far too quickly we were back at Lombadina. It was early February and the wet season was meant to be in its final weeks but it was still incredibly hot and humid. On our first day back, Janice took one look at my tear-stained face and gave me a hug, a bottle of multivitamins and a box of antibacterial soap to ward off boils. During our short absence, the yellow house seemed to have shrunk and become horribly filthy and shabby. I spent two days scrubbing the floors, the corrugated iron walls and the kitchen cupboards. I was so determined to clean every inch that I gave myself a mild electric shock by wiping the power points with a wet cloth.
As the humidity retreated, the tourists started to arrive. Lombadina had no camping facilities, so we didn’t see many camper trailers or caravans. Families, especially, tended to just drop in for the day to buy fresh bread and ice-creams and hang out at the beach before driving back to their campsites.
Some people, usually older couples, stayed in the accommodation for a few days and went on kayaking and mud-crabbing tours with Robert, Caroline’s son. They often liked to chat and after a day or two we would get to know them and invite them to join us for a Friday night campfire on the beach at sunset.
The majority of the tourists came on day trips from Broome. They got on a bus early in the morning, bounced along for 100 kilometres to Beagle Bay, where they got out to look at the church, climbed back on the bus for another 100 kilometres to Ardyaloon, where they got out to look at the trochus hatchery, got back on the bus to have lunch and a swim at Cape Leveque, then boarded it again to visit Lombadina. I was never sure if it was because they were exhausted from their day, or if they were made like this, but they were almost without exception completely devoid of the ability to engage or communicate.
‘Hi!’ I would call out. ‘Does anyone want an ice-cream or a cold drink? We’ve got fresh bread too. Only three dollars!’
They would glance at me and wander past in their group, listening to their guide telling them about the history of Lombadina, then pile back on the bus to go back to Broome.
Tourists weren’t the only people who were easy to classify. Someone had told us that there were four kinds of white people who choose to live in Indigenous communities: mercenaries, missionaries, misfits and malingerers. James and I decided we definitely weren’t missionaries, except for a short period at Imintji when we lobbied Stan and Jenny to make cheap school lunches for the kids. We didn’t consider ourselves to be mercenaries either, unless a desire for experience could be interpreted that way. We were undoubtedly malingering, though. Every day, we spent the first hour of our two-hour lunch break at the beach, lying semi-naked on the hot sand and jumping in to cool down when we got too sweaty. And I had to admit to a fair proportion of misfit too. I was losing the ability to chat to the tourists. It wasn’t them who had changed: I just couldn’t be bothered. I was starting to sympathise with Robert at Lennard River and his book of stupid questions. I had compiled my own list in my head.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘How many people live here?’
‘Do you live in the community?’ This one always confused me. Did they think I commuted 400 kilometres a day from Broome?
‘Why is it so nice here?’ The unspoken part of the question was: ‘… compared to other communities we have seen.’
‘Why are you working here?’ In other words, ‘Why is there a white person working in the shop?’
‘Where is the church/craft shop/beach/toilet/fuel/bakery?’ All were clearly marked on the map they were given at the office. If they didn’t have a map, it meant they had driven in without registering, and I wasn’t going to help them out with directions.
‘Is the beach nice?’ Once, this was followed by ‘… because the beach at Cape Leveque is pretty ordinary.’ This was a family from Sydney who were making their way around the entire country, apparently determined to be unimpressed by any of it.
‘Do I really have to drop my tyres to get to the beach?’ James and I regularly helped people who were bogged in the soft sand because they had ignored the signs and not reduced their tyre pressure.
‘Are the people here nice?’ I was once asked this when the shop was full of community members patiently waiting their turn in the queue.
‘Yes’, I had replied. ‘Except for Alphonse over there who is a bit of a mongrel.’
‘Do you sell beer?’ No, we didn’t. Not all of the communities on the Dampier Peninsula were officially dry, but there was nowhere to legally buy takeaway alcohol north of Broome.
‘Is there anywhere I can buy beer?’ No.
‘Can I get takeaway beer from the restaurant at Cape Leveque?’ NO!
Sometimes I helped out in the office, where there was always someone who got annoyed at having to pay a $10 fee for access to the community and the beach.
‘I think that’s ridiculous’, she – it always seemed to be a woman – would say. ‘It’s not like you have to pay to come and drive down my street.’
‘Fair enough’, I wanted to answer. ‘But your street is maintained by your council. You don’t have to keep the roads graded so that residents can get around and the supply truck can get in to deliver food. And you probably don’t have tourists refusing to let their tyres down when they drive on the road to the beach, which trashes the track and means the next lot of tourists get bogged and have to get towed back out and then you have to grade it again. And I’m guessing that your street is pretty much the same as thousands of other streets in the country and you are the one who just drove for two hours from Broome to visit this community.’
One afternoon a couple arrived in a shiny black Hummer. They had rung a few days earlier and paid a deposit for three nights in one of the two new motel-style units. When they checked in and took the key, the woman said she would pay the balance after they had looked at the accommodation. Caroline apparently knew what was coming, because she rolled her eyes and retreated to the very back of the office. The woman came back in with a sad look on her face.
‘I’m sorry. I really don’t think we can stay there.’
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, reaching for the phone to check if the unit had been cleaned.
‘Well, dear, it doesn’t even have a TV!’
I managed not to laugh. ‘Most people come here for the outdoor stuff. It is kind of remote.’
‘But what do you expect us to do at night? Sit and look at each other?’
‘Play cards?’ I suggested. She glared at me.
Caroline was still pretending to be deaf so I rang her daughter-in-law for help.
‘Tell them to get fucked.’
I translated: ‘I’m sorry but we are fully booked this week and I can’t refund your deposit.’
They left to drive the Hummer all the way back to Broome. When Robert came in I told him what had just happened.
‘Why didn’t you put them in the other unit?’ he asked. I looked at him, confused. ‘You know, the one that has the telly.’
One Saturday afternoon, Oscar’s best friend, Jumat, knocked on the door. He was carrying a paper plate loaded with big chunks of dark-red barbecued meat.
‘Dad thought you might like to try some dugong.’
‘What does it taste like?’ said Dylan warily.
‘Pretty much like beef.’
It did too, although after chewing on a rubbery slab of pale green fat for a while I had to admit defeat and drop it in the bin. Jumat didn’t seem to mind. He didn’t eat the fat either. Later, Jumat’s father gave Oscar and Dylan the dugong’s tusks. They were yellow and stained, with small cracks running along their curved length, but we wrapped them up and put them away safely to take home with us.
Dugong wasn’t the first endangered animal we had eaten. A few weeks earlier, we had been invited to a ceremony on the beach. As part of the celebration, the Bardi rangers had caught and cooked two sea turtles, upside down and still in their shells. There was a lot of shuffling feet and shaking heads as the turtles baked. There was a difference of opinion between the communities on the Dampier Peninsula about how to cook turtle. In Djarindjin, they really liked the green fat that sits in a thick layer between the meat and the shell, but the Bardi mob preferred their turtle well-done. People were standing around fuming as the turtles were cooked … and cooked … and cooked. A perfectly good turtle had been charred to a crisp. There wasn’t a piece of green fat to be seen anywhere.
A fortnight later it was the July school holidays and we’d decided to visit Nev. As we drove up the Gibb back towards Imintji, we realised we looked exactly like regular tourists. We had the camper trailer, the kids in the back with their faces stuck in books, and Victorian number plates on the car. We agreed not to tell people how long we had been away from home – we didn’t want to sound like show-offs – but we only lasted an average of three minutes before one of us said something like ‘We left Melbourne two years ago’ or ‘We live at Lombadina’.
We camped behind Nev’s workshop at Imintji, caught up with friends, climbed to the top of the escarpment and spent a glorious day back at Bell Gorge, our favourite spot in the world. One afternoon Nev took us to one of his favourite places. We drove behind him, off the Gibb River Road, over a wire fence and along a narrow track to a huge waterhole that dropped down at the end of a stretch of flat, red rock. A sandy beach sloped gently into the clear, green water. The boys gathered wood and Nev built a fire in the sand and scooped water from the river in his billy to make tea. On the other side of the pool, the rock folded and curved around the water. We swam across to explore the ledges and caves and Nev showed us where figures had been carved into the rock wall.
‘It’s a men’s place’, he said. ‘The elders used to bring the young fellas here and teach them the old stories.’ He looked at me. ‘You shouldn’t really be here, but we won’t stay long.’
For the next few hours we swam, lay on the hot sand and chewed on beef ribs that Nev cooked on the coals. For most of the day, the sky was the usual bright blue of the dry season. Wisps of cloud floated above us. As the sun began its downward arc, the clouds became puffy and more solid, like balls of cotton wool. A few of them joined up and started to look quite substantial. Within an hour, there were definitely more.
‘Do you think it’s going to rain?’ I asked Nev.
‘Dunno. Pretty unusual for this time of year. We should think about getting back, though. Don’t want to get caught out if it does.’
As we packed up the debris of our lazy day, a large cloud formed above us.
‘Oh, yeah’, said Nev. ‘Time to go. We’ve pissed the spirits off. Look at that!’
I looked up just in time to see the distinctive face of a Wandjina forming in the cloud towering over the waterhole. More puffs of white scudded across the sky and joined up with it.
‘Never seen one that good before’, said Nev.
Back on the main road a few heavy drops of rain fell, bouncing on the red dirt in front of us and throwing up dust before sinking into the track and disappearing. By the time we were back at Imintji the sky was clear again.
When we got back to Lombadina, the humpback whales had arrived on their annual migration. We had spotted a few on the horizon from the
beach, but I was desperate to get out in a boat and see them up close. I dropped hints for weeks until Robert said he’d take us out on the boat. He wanted to go fishing, but we could have a look for whales first.
Before the boat had even reached the reef we could see them. One humpback was jumping, splashing and spouting as if it was inviting us to come and play, and a group of three whales was further to sea. Robert cruised slowly towards the group, saying that if we approached slowly they were less likely to swim off. As we got closer, they moved towards us. Soon they were so close that we could see them clearly under the water.
I raced around the boat to see them better. Robert directed me from the cabin. ‘They’re out the front now! Over there, there they are! Just to the left, look, they’re about to come up!’
Up they came. One, two, three massive whales, blowing and splashing, rolling over and waving a fin in the air then sinking under the surface like synchronised swimmers. I tried to take photos but when I was looking through the lens I got confused about where they were. When I looked up from the camera, it was like a slap in the face. There was one right in front of me. I looked straight into a massive eye that was most definitely looking right back at me.
After ten frenzied minutes of doing battle with my camera the whales submerged and didn’t reappear. ‘I reckon that’s it’, Robert said, getting ready to move on to a good fishing spot.
I slumped down, exhausted and exhilarated. Suddenly, just metres from where I was sitting, two whales rose up and blasted water, snot and foul-smelling air straight at us. I put my camera down and watched from the side of the boat. And, as if they had been waiting for my full attention, the real show started. They flashed their white bellies; they swam under the boat and popped up again on the other side; they pretended to leave and then dived, turned, and emerged from the water heading right towards us. Eventually they lined up beside the boat and flipped their tails in unison. When they left, they just melted into the water, blowing a couple of times from a distance as they headed back out to sea.