Of Ashes and Rivers that Run to the Sea

by Marie Munkara

  It’s late and mummy and F are fast asleep snoring lightly in their chairs while my two brothers are hugging and crying and saying how much they love each other. The food has been reduced to a few crusts and a bit of salad while a sizeable dent has been made on the grog in the fridge. I clean up the bits of leftover food and quietly wash the dishes and stack them on the sink. I don’t know where the dish drainer is but I’m guessing it’s in its special place somewhere because F would have a place for everything.

  Then I grab a beer for the road and head for the front door. I push in the lock button and then pull the door shut behind me. But F must have been woken by the door noise because he’s out here before I hit the end of the driveway. He insists on taking me home and knowing the packs of camp dogs that will be roaming around at this time of night I agree and we get into his vehicle. But instead of heading towards mummy’s place F plants the foot and heads out of town. The lights of Four Mile flash past and I resign myself to my kidnapping. A few kilometres down the road F hands me a bottle of wine and a corkscrew while he negotiates the Tarntippi turn-off with one hand. The bottle opens with a beautiful pop and I take a swig and hand it back to F. I wonder what mummy and the boys are up to.

  The moon is full and high in the sky, bathing the sea and sand in a beautiful silvery glow. We are up on the dunes where no curious crocodiles can take advantage of our drunkenness. We sip our wine in silence and I wait for F to make his move while I formulate a plan to get out of having sex with him. Will I tell him I’m gay or will I be in the secondary stage of syphilis with some genital warts thrown in for good measure? F is clearing his throat so I know he’s about to say something.

  Then he’s explaining that he was a lay missionary until a few years ago and although he likes women he has never been in a relationship before so could I forgive his hopeless attempts at showing an interest in me. I have just taken a sip of wine but my choking is quickly under control as I absorb this unexpected piece of information. I’m glad it’s dark so he can’t see the astonishment on my face. My heart wells up with compassion for the poor bugger even though there is one tiny part of my brain telling me not to be fooled. But the compassion wins over and I immediately abandon my plans to fob him off and start planning how I’m going to seduce him instead.

  But nothing. We’ve gotten past the fumbling and getting sand in sensitive places and we’ve kicked the wine bottle over, but F’s penis has other ideas and no amount of coaxing will make it do as it’s supposed to. I put this all down to F’s nerves of course and not my ineptitude. When F heads to the car for something else to drink I rearrange my clothing, hoping that nothing is inside out because mummy would spot it immediately, then he returns with a bottle of gin, jokingly remarking that it might liven things up a bit. Yes, nothing like a stiff gin, is there, I think, but keep my comments to myself as I don’t want to insult him and his unresponsive penis and then be walking the seventeen kilometres home in the dark.

  But despite everything he’s really good company and we have a great laugh about his missionary days and the rotten arseholes he has to work with and my crazy family. He asks me what I want out of life and I tell him I want endless adventures and we raise our glasses and toast.

  I have to have a pee but when I get back F has passed out and his previously lined and worried face looks surprisingly gentle and at peace in the moonlight. Stars are reflecting off the languid ocean and the moon is rising steadily over the Cobourg Peninsula in the east. I swig on the bottle of gin and listen to the sounds of the night and marvel at my capacity to find the strangest of people.

  16.

  I don’t know Bishop Francis Xavier Gsell’s version of arriving on Bathurst Island to found a mission, or the official version (because there always has to be an official version) but I do know the version told to me by my aminay, and it goes a bit like this. The year was 1910, and one day everybody was just hanging around doing what they always did. Some were hunting and some were fishing and others were having a well-earnt nap when to everyone’s surprise a boat appeared on the horizon. The boat came closer and closer and they knew it was coming to their islands but they didn’t know which island, this one or Melville Island.

  Kids were sent off to warn everyone to be ready in case there was going to be a battle. As the boat got closer they could see there were a few people in the boat and they were murrantani, so there was a collective sigh of relief from the blokes because they were fond of going over to the mainland and stealing Iwadja and Larrakia women and they thought it might have been a retributive visit. But this didn’t mean they could relax altogether. Although Joe Cooper had been hunting buffalo on Melville Island since the 1890s, the murrantani didn’t have a very good reputation for the way they treated black people. As the boat got closer it was obvious that it was going to land where Nguiu is situated now. It reached the beach and one bloke with a long beard got out with a few bits and pieces and then the boat sailed away.

  From their hiding places their keen eyes observed that this murrantani didn’t have a gun and he didn’t carry a spear. So what was he there for? He obviously wasn’t lost and he wasn’t there to fight them. Posting some look-outs nearby they all gathered to discuss this matter. Round and round in circles the discussion went. Was he there looking for a wife? Was he running away from his wife? Was he an outcast? Was he sick? No one could work it out. Finally they decided that he must be karlu boonta (no brains), there could be no other reason for it. No white man in his right mind would get dumped on an island in the middle of nowhere like this for no reason. And so they watched him for a few days more just in case he was going to do something dangerous, but all he did was sit in the shade of the coconut palms or pace up and down with something in his hands that he kept looking at (which turned out to be a Bible). Every now and then he’d get up and go to the bushes and have a piss or shit, but that was all he did. He didn’t go for walks anywhere and when he slept he just lay down on a blanket where he was.

  Now everyone knows that the strait between the two islands is full of crocodiles and that crocodiles like to eat unsuspecting and unobservant people like this fool sleeping on the beach, so this just reinforced the notion that this man was indeed crazy and that he’d probably been dumped there because he was causing trouble where he came from. In some cultures people might kill a loony person but in ours we care for them because they have a right to live just as we do. It’s just invaders and people up to no good who we kill. So it was decided that my grandfather, who was a strapping young lad at the time, be sent down to the beach with some food and water for this poor brainless idiot and to make a fire for him. This must have made a very deep impression on Father Francis Xavier Gsell who noted in his journals that a young man approached him and gave him food and water and he was of such regal bearing that he named him Louis after the king of France, Louis XVI. Naturally his wife was named Marie after Marie Antoinette and so the tradition has stuck and the names have been handed down and that’s why my brother and I are called Louis and Marie.

  And so Father Francis Xavier stayed and my unsuspecting mob built him a mission because they thought they had enough to share with this man with a hidden agenda who had befriended and, as it turned out, betrayed them. Apart from establishing the mission, he was also known as the bishop of 150 wives because he would give flour, sugar and the like to the families of girls who didn’t want to get married. My Aunty Bertha was one of these wives and she thought it was a great joke how our mob would exploit him like that while he thought he was civilising the blacks. Anyway after he’d gotten a few more missionaries of the Sacred Heart over to run the mission, Father Francis Xavier headed back to Darwin in 1938 to become Bishop Gsell of Darwin.

  I wonder what would have happened if a crocodile had eaten ‘Whiskers’ as my mob referred to him back then? Would the Catholic Church still have imposed a mission on us or would they have given up? And maybe if my mob hadn’t been so kind to fools and had stuck to killing everyone who dared to la
nd on our shores, we might have spared ourselves from having God and a new way of life forced onto us.

  17.

  My mum wants to go to the convent for morning tea so she can introduce me to the nuns. I don’t want to do this because one of my pet hates is religious bigotry and from what I’ve experienced, Catholicism has a star-studded cast of bigots. They offer love and peace by being brutal and hateful. They preach kindness to their neighbour while they practise intolerance towards everyone who doesn’t come in line with their fundamentalist beliefs. Now who does that sound like, I wonder? But I indulge her whim and off we go. My mum tells me that the tea room has two tables, one for the nuns and one for visitors, so when I pour my tea I deliberately go and sit at the table where some nuns are already seated so I can piss them off. My mum is already sitting at the visitors’ table and I call out to her and point to an empty chair on the other side of the table where I’m sitting. I can see the cogs turning in her brain. Does she ignore me or does she ignore the rules? The nuns don’t know where to look because they know I am openly defying their laws about sectarianism in their tea room. I find it strange that a form of apartheid exists in this mission that is teaching the blackfellas that everybody is equal in the eyes of God. But not in the nuns’ tea room.

  I’m waiting to be put in my place so I can tell them to get fucked but it doesn’t happen, they just sit there and make some very small talk between themselves to show that they are in control. Mummy opts to stay where she is and not disrupt the status quo any more than has already happened, she definitely isn’t a risk-taker, this mother of mine. So I help myself to one of the nuns’ biscuits. Well, I’m assuming they’re the nuns’ biscuits because they are on the nuns’ table. By now the nuns’ attempts at conversation have fizzled out so I strike up a conversation with the one next to me. I ask her what her real name is and why she decided to become a nun and if she had any pets when she was a kid. She gives me a sideways glance like she’s looking at the devil incarnate and I give her a big friendly grin but then my mum has me by the arm and is pushing me out the door.

  Mummy is really grumpy and stalks along in silence, her walking stick clacking on the ground with each step of her gammy leg. We are heading to somewhere else in the religious precinct. I am starting to worry that she is taking me to father whats-his-name to have my confession heard after my insolence in the tea room but we pull up at a door where there are some other ladies waiting. Mum tells them about the tea-room incident and they all glance at me from time to time as she carries on like I’d spat at the Pope or something. I hear footsteps approaching and turn to see one of the nuns from the tea room. It’s the one I tried to strike up a conversation with and again she avoids my gaze and unlocks the door.

  It’s a room full of second-hand clothes. Mummy and the other women start rifling through the stuff like they were going through the Boxing Day specials in Myers. Mummy already has a few dresses over her arm and is eagerly scrounging for more. I tell her another person has sweated onto those clothes and maybe some kid has pissed or shat or wiped their snotty nose on them as well but this makes no impression on her and she tells me to have a look for something to wear when we go hunting in the mangroves. When I tell her no, she tells me not to whinge about the mud stains on my clothes then. Well, okay, I did whinge once or twice but I’m fine about the mud stains that will never come out of my shorts with the frilly bit on the bottom and the white cotton halter-neck top that makes my boobs look bigger. I’m okay with this because I can continue to wear them into the mangroves and save my other clothes from the same fate.

  When we get home mummy pulls out some tops and skirts like the ones she wears and gives them to me. I can’t refuse them so I stuff them at the back of my shelf. But the day I wear them is the day I lose all self-respect and I’m not going to let that happen.

  18.

  Mummy has decided I need to learn how to cook the way she does. I tell her I can make toast and boil an egg but to her that’s not real cooking. I need to learn how to make proper things, she says, like stew and damper. But I don’t seem to have the touch for it.

  ‘Like dis,’ mummy says in exasperation as she deftly rolls the dough and manoeuvres it into a nice neat shape like a cowpat. I try again but somehow my hands aren’t doing what my brain is telling them to and I’m afraid of burning myself when I put the damper on the coals to cook. The latent heat radiates up into my face when I bend down near it and I feel like my eyebrows are crinkling up like when you stick a match to some hair. This is scary stuff. I remember a kid in my school whose face looked like it was melted because she’d fallen into a fire when she was little. This could happen to me if my big flappy dress gets too close to the flames. Mummy has a stove but she doesn’t use it, she prefers to use a fire instead. She just uses the stove to store things in to keep them away from the ants and flies, like sugar and flour and hunks of raw meat. I have a few more goes and end up with something passable but it isn’t good enough as far as mummy is concerned and she tutts and stalks off to make a cup of tea.

  The next thing we try is stew. I’m okay with cutting up the onions and potatoes and carrots but I can’t touch the raw meat and when I try to pick it up with a fork the feeling of stabbing it makes me gag. Mummy tries to put it into my hand but I scream and jump back out of the way of her bloodied hands. Then she gets the shits with me because before I use anything she has touched, I pick it up with a dish cloth and scrub it with hot soapy water to wash off the blood she has transferred from her hands to the utensil. In the end she makes the stew while I watch. Afterwards I ask her to wash her hands so she doesn’t spread any more blood around the place but she ignores me so I go around wiping door knobs, light switches and anything else I think she’s touched. She asks me how I haven’t died of starvation yet but I ignore her.

  I am starting to feel that nothing I ever do is good enough for her. I can’t hunt properly, I can’t weave properly, I don’t make the tea properly. I wonder if this is what mothers all over the world are like. It occurs to me that my black bush one and my white city one are remarkably similar in some ways.

  While the stuff is cooking I sit watching her, wondering what must be going through her brain.

  ‘Did you want me to come and stay here with you?’ I say petulantly. ‘You’re always so grumpy.’

  ‘You nebber ask me,’ she says tetchily like I’ve struck a raw nerve.

  And mummy is right, I didn’t ask her. And I have never asked her how she felt about her three-year-old child being taken from her life and a twenty-eight-year-old stranger waltzing back into it again. I assumed that we would take up where we left off but I realise now that the years have been too long and the differences between us too many for that to occur.

  I ask mummy why she didn’t take her promised husband and be done with it instead of carrying on with my father. She would have known the implications of getting herself pregnant to a non-black man. But, she says simply and without emotion, ‘I gave you life.’ I can’t argue with this. Yes, she did give me life and despite some crappy obstacles, it is my responsibility to do the best I can with it and it’s up to me to learn from this and stop whingeing. It’s then that I know I have to make peace with this tiny part of the universe in the Northern Territory. I don’t have to feel guilty about my lack of skills and I don’t need to resist everything so hard because I’m just a human being after all.

  But I can’t stop thinking about what mummy and I were talking about and I feel different now. Not the sort of different where you wake up one morning and the world has changed. But the different where you feel like you’ve fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole and you’ve crawled out the other side dazed and confused, with sticks and leaves in your hair and dirt on your face. I feel sort of wary like a baby chimpanzee that’s been captured and given to humans to bring up. Like the baby chimp there’s still a little piece of something in my heart that no one can reach because it lives deep down inside me. I think this family wants to take th
e something out of my heart and make me black, just like the other family wanted to tame me and make me white. I know that nobody is interested in the parts of me that don’t concern them. The white parents aren’t interested in the pre-assimilation black bits because they wanted a white girl with black skin. And my real family don’t want to know about the post-assimilation white bits because they think I’m a black girl with a white heart. I know that I’ve disappointed them all. The anger from the white parents. The pitiful looks from the black. The fretful and all-consuming silences from them both. I wish I could open the doors to my mind and let them in, so they could see the world from my eyes and forgive me for not being able to fit their expectations. But I can’t because this journey is all mine. I don’t want the days when they brush me aside because I can’t get it right. I want there always to be beautiful days when the space between us is full of light and love.

  But it’s hard work trying to be the person that everyone else wants me to be and I’m getting really tired of it now. Despite the fact that I am biologically a member of this family, at the end of the day I know I am not the complete package. I don’t quite belong here because I am not black enough. There are already a few mixed-race people living in this place. Not in my family though, I am the only one. But it didn’t take long to work out the difference between them and me – these other coloured people were born and have lived in this place all their lives and I haven’t. I don’t have the same knowledge in my head as they do and my family does. I don’t think the same, I don’t act the same. I am not the same. And it’s exactly like this with my white family. As far as my white parents are concerned I am not sufficiently like them either. But they don’t realise that there is no stolen and there is no lost, there is no black and there is no white. There is just me. And I am perfect the way I am. And I know now that I have to leave this place because I’ve learnt all I can for the time being and this lesson is over now.