by Sally Morgan
The wind slaps her face,
blowing hard from a sky that gushes flesh and blood.
Every morning Bunga looks for a sign of what the day
will bring.
Today there is flash of green ahead of the rising sun.
Away on the horizon,
in the heart of a stiffening breeze, a sail.
They come.
As long as the seals will call.
They come.
And she answers with her club.
Flensing fur from flesh
to hoard their bloody prize.
Rafts of yula skim the swell and
hurry by to fatten hungry chicks.
Along the surging water’s edge tangled kelp writhes and
foams.
Bunga picks her way across the broken shore.
She advances to where the seals have hauled up on
sloping shelves
and slumber in the building sun.
Closing in on hands and knees
she slides, head down.
Her heavy club behind, she inches forward.
Silent.
Watchful.
The seals will sense her soon.
They know her business well.
The stone beneath her hands is limpet-flecked and tears
her flesh.
Her lips part. She whispers low.
An ancient song to calm the sea and quiet her racing
heart.
The words meld with surging foam
and dripping fur that now smells close.
Bunga gradually raises her head.
A single seal has fixed her in his gaze.
Liquid.
Soft.
His fur not dark, but white.
When Bunga wakes, the sun is high.
To the south a distant coast is ripe with trailing smoke.
Fires lit and easing winds.
Her Mother’s voice feel close.
Beside the glowing hearth, an old woman
begins her daily chant.
Intones her daughter’s name
to call her home.
To call her home.
A raft of skins at her feet,
bundled close with strings of grass,
is sealed tight with fat and clay.
Bunga wades out to a welcoming swell.
She kicks to where the current runs and smiles.
The wind is at her back.
Her arms and legs feel strong and married days are
done.
Today, if you look at Lupaylana, you will notice that beyond the large main island—out toward the open waters—is a smaller one. You see, Rowra took pity on the girl. As the men waded out into the surf, each clung to the other in fear—and this is where they stayed. To save the girl and punish the men, Rowra turned them all into stone.
When I saw that snake on TV, he was sliding close by Lupaylana. The story I already knew of those islands mingled with the one unfolding. I saw then how the world keeps itself. The white snake watches over Lupaylana to hold tunapri strong. And for all who see the snake, as he makes his long journey down the valley, there is a reminder of what is learned from this and every other place along his path.
Our life since numlaggar has distracted us from the teachings that the country still keeps. It’s not that the wisdom has been lost. Some stories may have ceased to be told, some dances may have been forgotten, or some songs left quiet. All of these are like fruit that has grown on a tree and, without harvest, falls to rot back into the earth. We are now too busy to stop and fill our bellies. Our appetites are spoiled by the rubbish we eat. And we grow lazy with the fine things that money brings to our num lives. If we spend our time living in a num world, it is not because of that ghost ancestor. It is because we, too, have closed our eyes to tunapri manta. So I say—when the news comes on TV—don’t be distracted by the stories of politics and greed. Take careful notice of the weather. It is the best show around!
The conversations we have with our world have become like those of children. We need to stop thinking about ourselves and the things we can’t have. So, I will make more time for listening to the wind. The birds aren’t worried that I don’t hear them much these days. They still call to me because they have never stopped believing. And the White Snake will slide just as well through the office blocks of the city as he does through the trees of the forest. That big snake has taught me something. Even if I don’t know all the old stories, there is no excuse for not knowing the country. And a few generations of num life don’t mean I can’t go back to believing. If I cannot find the old stories for a place, then I should listen and learn—and take my time to create some new ones.
PAT DUDGEON
belongs to the Bardi people near Broome in the Kimberley. For many years she was head of the Centre for Aboriginal Studies at Curtin University. Pat, who is completing her doctoral thesis, has national recognition for her leading role in psychology and Indigenous people. (Image 8.1)
Image 8.1
The Sinking of the Enid
The Enid, a two-masted schooner, 12.15 tons. Dimensions: 36.5 x 11.1 x 4.9 feet. Built at Fremantle by W Chamberlain during 1903.
Owners: John Sydney Hicks, Doctor, of Fremantle, D N McLeod, Pastoralist, of Carnarvon, Victor Ralph Kepert, Pearler, of Broome, Thomas Clarke, Pearler of Broome and Albert Barnett Saunders, Pearler of Broome.
The vessel left Broome for Fremantle under C Kruger, Master, on the 22 nd of May 1928 and was not heard from again. Three lives were lost. [92]
Some years ago I found out that my great-grandfather, William Munget, had died in a shipwreck. I was surprised at this information. Though I had discussed our family history with my grandmother on many occasions, she had never once told me about her father’s death and the circumstances surrounding this. Fortunately, my lulu (great uncle) Mathew had told me the story before he passed on. I searched through the State library maritime records and found the entries about a schooner called the Enid. Three crew had been lost at sea, presumed dead. Only the master’s name was mentioned. The other two people remained nameless and unknown. I wondered whether this had been the convention of the time, as the other recordings mentioned only the captain’s name and not those of the other crew members. I wondered whether this was because they might have been Aboriginal, like Grandfather Willy, or Asian. I wondered whether that had been William’s first trip to Fremantle or whether it was one of many he had been part of. The ghost of the Enid haunted my thoughts. How could a pearling lugger disappear like that, never to be heard of or seen again? But I was thinking about the Enid in the context of modern technology, when seagoing vessels rarely disappear or are wrecked. Eighty years ago, the situation was very different. Sometimes debris might wash up to identify that something terrible has happened, but more often than not ships just simply disappeared.
The north-western Australian coast is a very remote area. Survivors of shipwrecks there during the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries would have found it difficult to last even if they had made it ashore. Further, the region is within the cyclone belt, which extends from the northern part of the continent to about halfway down the coast of Western Australia. Whole pearling fleets have been wiped out by cyclones. It was not uncommon to assume that if a vessel went missing, it had been wrecked in a cyclone. The Enid was going to Fremantle on a postal run and for refitting. She might have been caught in a cyclone around the Exmouth area and sank, all hands lost.
In 1928, William Munget left Broome on a lugger, the Enid. He was part of a three-man crew going to Fremantle to have the Enid refitted. The Enid also carried post and other cargo for Perth. Sea transport was common between towns along the west coast in those days. Though the report quoted at the start of this chapter says the Enid left in May, two other reports say it left in February, which was more likely. It is not very important, dates get mixed up in history, but February is in cyclone season, unlike May. Australia’s tropical cyclone season extends
from November to April. The pearling season is during the dry season, from April to October, and ‘lay-up’ is during the wet season, November to March. William Munget was thirty-four years old, in the prime of his manhood; too young to die and too young to leave a dependent family behind, alone and unprotected.
Family legends whisper that maybe they mutinied on the Enid, capturing the lugger and sailing to Asia, where the men might have started new families. William Munget was a Bardi man who would not have left his family and home country. (Family legends whisper that it was really Jurud, William’s mother, who found the famed Southern Cross Pearl, and she traded it for tea and tobacco to the white pearler who is famous for the find. The dates of the find and Jurud’s age match up, but that is another story.)
Some weeks after seeking this information about William Munget and the Enid, I had a dream in which I was a man drowning in a violent storm out at sea. Amid the terror and desperation of the situation, I knew that I wanted to live, I wanted to grow old with my family, and my last thought was that I would die far away from my country, and they would not know that I died, would not know where my body was and would not mourn me properly. I woke up shivering and terrified. I wondered whether my curiosity about the Enid had made me dream of dying like William, my great-grandfather, must have done on that night, stranded and alone in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The crew would have seen the cyclone coming in; the black thunderclouds before sunset. The barometer would have dropped and the wind would have been gusting in from the east. The skipper might have thought they could ride it out, dropping the sails in preparation. Or did they try and run for shore and shelter, only to be immobilised by the eerie dead calm before the storm, the schooner drifting helplessly in that strange vacuum? She might have capsized; turned over and over until she filled with water. Her timbers might have been shattered in the battering waves out in deep ocean or splintered by the power of the monstrous surf close to shore. In this story, the Enid is caught in a hurricane out at sea and this is the dream that woke me, choking for air, my heart beating like a fast drum.
The water surged all around him; the world was grey water and darkness. For a brief second he was hurled out of the water and in the seething dull foam he saw the cat, a momentary beacon of white and orange, desperately scrabbling onto the tossing wood and sailcloth, front and back legs working wildly; but already the debris was sinking. A mountain of water smashed down on him, would he ever surface again? Clinging to the pitiful lifesaver, he tumbled over and over. He tried to force himself to think calmly, measure the time he would need to suck in air if he came up again, hoping for another surfacing and another breath of air. He was a helpless doll swirling and buffeted in the wild ocean. With absolute certainty, he realised he was going to die, like the cat. It was his time to die. His thoughts ran full of terror and despair; he was going to die. It wasn’t right to die like this. A man in his prime. He was too young to die. He had too much to do. His family was too young to be left alone. All alone and with no-one. No-one would know he had died. So far away from his home country. His spirit would be lost. In desperation, he struggled against the pounding water and opened his mouth to scream, sucking in water where there should have been air.
Fathoms under the raging sea, all was calm. With other bits and parts of the lugger, his broken body sank slowly down to the seabed to finally rest, far away from home.
Jurud woke up in middle of the night. She sat straight up from her bed, her mind clear with sharp waiting. There was a tingling in the air, she wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and crawled out of her hut. The night was bright and crisp, no moon but bright stars lit the trees. She breathed deeply, drawing in the brittle air, tasting it to find what was wrong. She went to her camp fire and pushed the dull red embers around, placing a few small sticks there. She checked her dogs but they were fast asleep; one near the fire and one curled in the opening of the hut.
‘Jurud!’
She heard her name called clearly. That must have been what woke her. The call came from both inside her head and from the clearing in the trees away from the camp. She pulled the blanket closer around her thin body, clutching the folds with one hand to her chest feeling her heart beating loud and fast. She knew what it was, but was terrified to have it confirmed. Her dogs whimpered, one twitching and the other pawing restlessly at the ground, but still asleep. The camp fire slowly flared, shedding more light, but everything remained still and crisp like the night had frozen and she was the only thing able to move. She walked slowly away from the camp to the clearing in the trees. She looked up a slope on the side and saw the outline of a figure, pitch black against the cold white starlight. Black and void of light. She realised she was sobbing in terror and grief, clutching her blanket. She knew who it was.
‘Willy,’ she said harshly, ‘my boy, you have to go now. Good job you come back to tell me, but you have to go now. Go, go on. Go!’
She hissed, waving her free hand at him. The shadow figure stood watching her and then, gradually, it inclined its head and in the slowest motion drifted down behind the slope, not turning away, watching her still as it sank out of sight.
It was gone.
Her grief bust from her, and she keened under the cold stars for her son, who had passed away in strange country but found his way home.
Thirty years before, Jurud had thrown Willy up onto her straight, hard shoulders, his sturdy legs wrapping around her neck. He was about five years old and the centre of her life, this beautiful black child with white flashing teeth and sunlight in his heart. Jurud carried him easily down the dunes to the beach. They stepped out of the shady bushes and the beach opened out before them, endless, edged by blue sea, all sparkling with white stars from the sun.
‘See over there, little man?’ Jurud pointed with her lips across the sand to where the mud began. ‘Cockles.’
Willy nodded yes, vigorously, as he scrambled impatiently down her body.
His aunty laughed as she walked out from the shade. ‘Eh, boy, you are just like a little goanna running down your mother like a tree!’
Willy stuck his tongue out at them and turned to run down to the sea, laughing and yelling, ‘Old dugongs! Slow old dugongs, try and catch me then!’
Later he brought them cockles—too small for them to bother cooking—as a peace offering, mischievously giggling behind his sand glittered hands after his olive branch had been sombrely accepted. Now, when Jurud thought about him, the most vivid image was of that five-year-old boy, the pride and love of him, the first born of her and her sisters; his bright teeth in his laughing mouth, those dark eyes flashing in glee as he ran down that white beach to the sea, while they yelled back to him and shook their sticks at him, pretending offence but laughing with him, on that warm spring morning.
Willy had grown up in the mission. Jurud didn’t mind that Willy had been taken into the mission. She was sometimes sad that he would not be taught the old ways properly, but times had changed so much since she was a girl and the first gardiyas came. He was special, born when not many children had been born. He was special to her and her sisters and to the missionaries, too. They took him in and put the three powerful spirit beings into him. That old man, very powerful father one; and his son whose totem was the cross that they put everywhere; and that third one who was hard so see, but whose totem was the white bird. New spirits from another country but good ones, very strong, to keep away all the pearlers and sailors who came to make humbug for the women. Frightened them right away from the mission. Everybody fell down on their knees when they saw the totem for the son one. Ceremonies all the time for these spirit ones. Jurud had hoped these new spirits would help protect him and make him even stronger. But they weren’t any help now. Nothing was any help.
She knew he was dead; her boy was gone.
In the mission, word had come through that the Enid,and all hands, was missing. Martha, Lillian and Willy’s daughter, started waiting on the same day every week for the provision truck. S
he would leave her school duties early on that day and sit under the big tree in the centre of the mission, where all the visitors stopped. She spread a blanket and sat in the shade hours before the truck was due. The younger children, who weren’t at the school yet, thought this was comical at first, and a good excuse for teasing. But Martha gave one of them a good thrashing for pestering her too much. Too thorough, his mother thought grimly. In other circumstances she would have fronted up to the girl, or the girl’s mother, to seek justice—to see that the girl also got a belting from her mother, or to belt the mother herself. But the girl’s family was having a bad time and had enough grief before them.
After the bashing incident, the little children left Martha alone. But later, some of them forgave her her temper, and quietly started to keep her company. They would sneak onto her blanket and sidle up to her, leaning gently against her silent form. Knowing she was sad, they imitated the comfort that adults gave them when they were sad. They sat with her only for short times and then they would get bored and take off to play, screaming and running, full of life.
Each week, on the same afternoon, the nuns would see Martha sitting under the same tree. The nuns discussed the situation and decided it was best that Martha continue her hopeless vigil. She was advanced in class, and the missed school afternoons could be afforded. Better this wait than that uncomfortable wild grief and anger that would certainly come. The nuns were fearful to mention Willy’s name, not only out of respect, for cultural reasons, but also because they might provoke the madness they saw in the girl. In the first week after hearing the Enid might be missing, Martha had gone mad, rushing around screaming and shouting, blaming the missionaries and the mission people for his disappearance. To her mind, they made him dead by believing it and saying it out loud. There was no point trying to talk sense to the girl, or taking a firm hand with her, she just became more agitated and aggressive. Once it had taken two of her uncles to hold her down during a fit of rage, and they had dragged her off to old Jurud’s place. It was not right. She had confronted Father Max in the meat cool room, threatening to assault him because it was he who had brought the news back from Broome! Lillian, Martha’s mother, was paralysed with shock and grief, but even without this tragedy, she would not have been any help. Lillian had always been soft; they had all protected her from the day she arrived at the mission. Martha was always a strong personality, but this behaviour was not right. The other women were looking after Lillian’s young children and house. Young Mary, the eldest girl, seemed to be the only capable one in the family. Everything had changed in the instant it was known Willy was not coming home.