Of Ashes and Rivers that Run to the Sea

by Marie Munkara

  So how do I end something that I thought was just beginning? It’s easy. I make a plan and say goodbye and continue my journey down another road that will lead back to this one every now and then. But it will never stop here, it will only pass through.

  19.

  I’ve never been able to ask mummy before about what happened to me and why I was taken away and it always felt like such an awkward thing to do. But today I’ve got some courage and I open my mouth and it all comes tumbling out and then floats in the air between us like a thick fog. Mummy is silent for a bit and then she tells me how the mission nagged her endlessly about handing me over and that it would be the best thing for me so I would get an education and grow up like a good white person because that’s what the government wanted. But she said no. And then one day when she came home from her job in the mission laundry I was gone. She and my brothers’ father Casmir Munkara went to see Bishop O’Laughlin three times asking for me back, and each time they were told they should be grateful for what had been done for me and were then sent packing.

  I tell her how strange I think it is that the white bureaucracy took black women’s kids away from them because they thought they weren’t fit to be mothers and couldn’t keep a decent home and then turned straight around and gave them their white kids to look after and their homes to clean. There didn’t seem to be any intelligence behind this at all. We both agree that it doesn’t make sense. Then mummy tells me how in defiance she would starch the nuns’ underwear and habits when she worked in the laundry, just to get a bit of her own back. We laugh long and loud at this and my love for her grows as big as the universe. She goes on to tell me how they would regularly flood the laundry and make a big mess which got right up the nuns’ arses, and how each day one person would sneak their own washing in while the others kept watch in case they were sprung. And Daddy Casmir who worked as a carpenter for the mission, although he took great pride in his workmanship would help himself to useful pieces of wood or tools and nails with no guilt whatsoever. His reasoning was that the mission had stolen me from him and mummy so it’s not theft when you steal from a thief. I’m so sorry he passed away before I got back, I would have learnt so much from him. And it fills me with great joy to know now that my parents didn’t sit by and let the mission take me away without a fight. I wasn’t a kid that nobody wanted as I was frequently told by my white parents. My mother and Casmir loved me.

  20.

  My mum knows the language of birds and every time she sees one she thinks it has a message for her. A message like someone is going to die or we’re going to get a visitor or something lucky is going to happen, and when we get the predicted visitor and when mummy wins big money at cards I decide I want to learn this for myself.

  She is surprised that I want to know about this stuff but nonetheless launches off with great enthusiasm about the different messages that belong to different birds. She also gives me a fascinating account of their various habits and where they like to build their nests and how. I’ve always wondered why the larger birds like the eagles and kites and ospreys have rough-looking nests that look like they’ve picked up a bundle of twigs and dropped them in a pile while the smaller ones like finches and honeyeaters have delicately shaped and intricately woven nests.

  ‘Im beak an claw,’ says mummy knowingly. ‘Jus im beak an claw.’ Big beaks mean big nests and little beaks mean little nests. So it’s all just a matter of what they can comfortably fit into their beaks and claws and weave together. That’s very clever and makes sense and I can’t believe I didn’t work it out before. A deen deen lands on the front grass and calls out with its thin piping voice. In Victoria I’ve heard people call them rain birds and I ask mummy what their call means.

  ‘Im singing for rain,’ she says. ‘Nussing else.’

  The sand out the back under the African mahogany tree is the perfect place for bird-watching and I organise my folding chair and mummy’s blanket and keenly scan the heavens for more of our feathered friends. But it doesn’t take too long before we’re disagreeing.

  ‘You didn’t say that about brown kites before,’ I say. ‘I think you’re just making it all up as you go along.’

  ‘Nah, im different cos im sitting on la ground now,’ says mummy testily. She is obviously exasperated at my lack of understanding. I think about this for a few minutes. So it’s not as straightforward as it seems and there are many combinations and permutations to take into account. Like if the bird is airborne, sitting or walking, calling out while mobile or stationary, flying in a funny way, flying low to the ground, scraping its beak, hanging upside down. The list goes on forever.

  A blue-faced wattlebird lands on my washing line and sings out in its shrill but melodious trill and then promptly shits before flying off. There is definitely a message in that and I ask mummy to decipher it.

  ‘Im just do toilet,’ she says. ‘Nussing else.’

  A brahminy kite lands on the edge of the roof above the kitchen and sits there watching us for a few minutes before it proceeds to sing the long and sombre song of the raptors. On it goes singing while mummy and I watch in silence. Then another one comes from nowhere and joins it and they sing together, a lingering and mournful song that chills me to the bone. They finish and on wings that sound like two hearts beating they fly away. Something important has happened here and I gather my thoughts before I look at mummy. She is still, her face in quiet repose.

  ‘What was that about?’ I ask while I hold my breath. Something is telling me that I don’t know if I really want to know the answer.

  ‘You flying away soon,’ she says with her eyes still glued to the spot where the birds had been, her hands motionless in her lap. ‘You leabing dis place.’

  21.

  I can’t work out if those two brahminy kites precipitated my leaving because I was seriously wanting to go, or if their song was giving me permission to spread my wings and fly away. I know my family will be fine when I’m gone but I’m afraid I won’t be because I’ve never learnt how to let go very well. I know I won’t be leaving them forever but the idea of going at all sits in my heart like a stone. But I’ve given it a go and to stay would be deluding myself. I know I need excitement and new things to stimulate my senses and I’ll go mad here.

  Mummy is really cool about it when I try to explain to her that I can’t live here forever because I’m not wired that way but I think she’s already worked that out or some bloody bird has told her. My brothers are a different story though and they shed real tears which makes me shed real tears as well, lots of them, and it’s then that I decide I will live in Darwin so I am close by. My aunties cry as well and my sister-girls and everyone else too. They all hug me and shake my hand and I just keep crying and don’t say anything because all my words have dried up. And somewhere inside me, in that place where I work things out, I’ve realised that mummy wasn’t being mean to me when she left me to fend for myself in the mangroves and when she tried to show me how to hunt and cook or snapped at me when I grumbled about getting dirty. She has been the best teacher I’ve ever had. Maybe she has been hoping that my blackfella instincts would wake up and stir like some sleeping dinosaur but I don’t think they have. And I’m fine with that because I’ve got others things to help me make it in this world, like my city knowledge and an education, and I’m a survivor. Despite my whinging I stuck it out and came out the other side intact.

  My last night at the club is a rambunctious affair with lots of beer drunk and sloppy kisses given. There are no fights for a change but it’s all over too soon and then we are weaving our way back across the oval and then down Munkara Street to home. We sit around and talk for a while and I feel true love between us all, my mum and my brothers and my extended family. There is a real sense of togetherness and I wonder briefly why I feel this now that I’m going. It is so Zen – now I don’t crave it it’s all mine. When it’s bedtime I lie down with mummy and tell JJ and Lorraine they can have my bed. I want to know the sweetness ag
ain of how it feels to be snuggled up safe and sound with my mum. I want to imagine what it was like before I was taken away and everything changed. My mum knows this and holds me tight and I sleep like a baby.

  And then the day dawns and I feel as light as a feather. I’m as excited as hell about my new life in Darwin and can hardly wait to get on the plane. At the airport mummy holds my hand. I regret for a moment the years we didn’t have together but we can’t change our destiny and despite everything I’m still happy with what I got because during this time I have discovered a most amazing thing. The languages of those who came before me. They are a direct link to this land and to my own flesh and blood because our words tie us all together in a way that nothing else can. The words that our ancestors spoke hundreds of years ago and we are still speaking today are in my head and on my tongue and are part of every cell in my body. They are still there in the place where I was born and those words will be around long after I have passed into the next world. It doesn’t matter that I can’t hunt or kill things or survive alone in the bush because through the power of our words I still belong.

  And after the plane takes off for Darwin I look out the window and see the islands falling away behind me and it takes me back to that memory of all those years ago when I was a little kid in a big plane looking out the window and seeing the lush green vegetation surrounded by brilliant blue ocean shrinking into the distance. Like then I am heading off to an uncertain future but there is a difference this time because my heart is bursting with hope not fear and I know I will be able to conquer anything. I scan the waters hoping to catch a glimpse of just one teensy whale who might have taken a wrong turn but there is nothing, just beautiful blue ocean with silver tips glinting in the sunlight.

  PART 4

  1.

  It’s a pity we can’t remember anything from when we’re babies because I know my mum would have been beautiful and the sky would have been so much bluer and the cuddles and kisses when I was being handed around would have been magic. I wish I could remember floating around the billabong in my coolamon looking at the sky listening to the women’s voices and the songs of the birds while my mum dug up water-lily bulbs to eat.

  But I don’t have those memories because they belong to my mum, not me, and I only know about them because she told me these things the night before I left Nguiu. The very first memory I have is being held in my mother’s arms while I looked at a wooden building over her left shoulder. I must have been about two and I still wonder why my brain chose that image and not the scent of the bush when it rained or the black cockatoos floating across the sky like burnt leaves. The discovery as I walked along the beach at Nguiu twenty-five years later that the building wasn’t a figment of my imagination as I had wondered and was in fact the church on Bathurst Island made me realise the amazing capacity of our minds. Without my memories I would have been adrift. They anchored me to solid ground.

  I have no memories of the wonderful man Casmir who, like my mother, didn’t want to marry his ‘promised’ either, but he wanted my mum, the cute little thing that she was, and I was part of the package. And because my mum’s pregnancy had come to the attention of Native Affairs, and the mission at Bathurst Island didn’t seem to like single men wandering around the place, someone made the decision to marry them off. It was arranged that they would be married at the Daly River Mission before being sent to Nguiu where Casmir was from and where they would spend the rest of their lives. Back in those days the fate of people like my mum and Casmir were decided by governments and missions with no mind to whether the poor buggers were complete strangers or if they liked each other. Marriages weren’t made in heaven, they were made by the stroke of a pen by a government official. Thankfully Casmir was a good man.

  On that last night in Nguiu as we snuggled together on her bed mummy told me about how we lived in a tin shack right next to the beach when I was a baby. She said they would regularly hear the sound of clanging corrugated iron only to rush outside to see one of the shacks fallen down with the inhabitants ensconced within. If any feet or any other limbs were protruding from underneath everyone would stand around pointing at them and hooting with laughter. Thankfully there were no injuries and the poor buggers whose house had fallen on their heads would have a good laugh about it as well, then the onlookers would give them a hand to reconstruct the debris.

  My mum herself was guilty of knocking down a wall of their shack when she was chasing a rat and bumped the offending wall with her arse as she bent over to crack the furry little miscreant over the head. She never lived that one down. But as we know, my time there was short-lived as the mission waited for us to settle in and get nice and comfortable before taking me away and dumping me at the Garden Point Mission. By then my mum was pregnant with my brother Louis who thankfully would help to fill some of the empty space that I’d left behind.

  I sometimes think of how I was taken from the loving arms of my mum and Casmir and given into the ‘care’ of a paedophile and a violent abusive woman and I feel great big holes in my heart for what was lost. And then I tell myself to look on the bright side of things because I wouldn’t be who I am if I hadn’t lived the life I have. But it was still wrong and I know because of that there are some dark places inside my soul that will forever be in the shadows and never see the sun, and parts of me that will never be right. But I can’t mourn the losses, I can only count my blessings, because I only have one chance at this life.

  2.

  It was only with the distance of Darwin that I realised most of the crappy stuff that had happened at Nguiu was probably my doing, not my family’s. Despite the regular flare-ups my family were in complete harmony with each other and their environment and it was me who was the irritating piece of sandpaper that rubbed things up the wrong way. I was completely out of place there because I’d resisted everything I didn’t understand instead of going with the flow and keeping an open mind. Knowing this now I’m amazed they hadn’t taken me out bush, dumped me and then driven away without a backward glance. But they didn’t.

  My first job in Darwin was working as a field officer for Block 4, the Centre for Communicable Diseases based at the Royal Darwin Hospital, and it was while visiting the clinic at Maningrida that I discovered that moving to Darwin hadn’t put any distance between me and my family at all. I was working with Senior Health Worker Charlie Gunaburra when he asked me why I hadn’t visited my family yet. Didn’t know there were any here, I said, not expecting Tiwi people to be living at Maningrida, after all there was the language difference and a marked absence of Catholic clergy and their infrastructure.

  ‘I’ll take you there after work,’ he said with a look that told me there was no getting out of it while I inwardly fumed. I wasn’t ready for this, I’d only just gotten away from the buggers and was enjoying not being humbugged. I was right, there were no Tiwis at Maningrida, just the discovery that my mum’s family were spread right across the Top End and the adjacent islands and there were a heap living right there at Maningrida. On that first visit I met her brothers, my Uncles Jeffery, Wayne, David and Jacky. Before meeting my family at Nguiu I’d read that traditional Indigenous men were reserved and not in the habit of openly displaying their emotions. But that wasn’t the case at Nguiu and it definitely wasn’t the case at Maningrida either where my uncles hugged and kissed me and told me stories about when I was a baby.

  ‘First time you sat up,’ said Uncle Jeffery, ‘was on the veranda of the Mainoru Station homestead, an you give me n old Sandy McKay the biggest grin then fell over.’

  ‘An you could yodel real good,’ said Uncle Jacky. ‘When you was cranky I could hear you screeching way over other side of camp.’

  ‘An you think every titty had milk in it, even mine,’ said Uncle David while everyone laughed as I blushed in shame.

  I also learnt that we had five family outstations called Bulungadhuru, Malyanganak, Borkjam, Angababirri and Kolibirradha. Although my uncles and their families had a house each a
t Maningrida they spent a lot of their time at their outstations in the dry season, hunting and doing ceremonial stuff. They sometimes stayed there in the wet as well but they had to make sure they had supplies to last a while as they were cut off by swollen rivers and swamps and billabongs that joined up when the rains came. They told me they used to pool their money and if they needed a tractor or supplies they were bought so the whole family benefited. But when grog and gunga started having an impact and some selfish ones were getting pissed and stoned and then expecting the others to support them, their community way of life fell apart.

  They told me I had a grandmother Nellie Cam Foo who lived at Bulman and she had a really bad temper but was the repository of all knowledge in the family and remembered every birth, death and scandal. And they pointed out that the last three toes on my right foot were shorter than the others, just like all of theirs. Despite being connected to my feet for the past twenty-nine years I had never noticed this before and when I checked their feet and mine, it was true. Uncle Jeffery, who is an accomplished linguist, could also write back to front and upside down like me, maybe such a useless trait is genetic. He was a bit of a larrikin and I was immediately drawn to him and he is still the uncle I feel closest to.