Of Ashes and Rivers that Run to the Sea

by Marie Munkara

  When I was leaving they told me to go to Beswick to see my Grandfather Willy Martin first. ‘He is our father and uncle and the brother for your grandfather, and brother for Nellie and your other grandfather, Smiler.’ When I got back to Darwin I restocked my supplies and headed straight for Beswick so I could find out more.

  Beswick is situated in a really stupid place right next to the Waterhouse River – despite the countrymen who told the white know-it-alls that the area was flood-prone in the wet season they still went ahead and built the settlement there. So when the rains start and the rivers rise a bit more than expected everyone just goes out bush or to another community and leaves the place for the river to claim.

  The day I arrived was nice and sunny so there was no fear of being flooded in and after getting directions from the council I headed for Grandfather Willy’s place. He was sitting on his front veranda making a yidaki (didgeridoo) and after alighting from the car I sat down nearby and waited for him to speak, just as I had learnt from mummy. But he went on making his yidaki and then I started to worry that maybe I’d come at a bad time because although I had no doubt that this man was my grandfather (he had three short toes as well) he wasn’t being terribly talkative. He was constructing a mouthpiece for the yidaki by attaching some wax from a sugarbag nest, and you could tell he was real fussy too, the way he smoothed it and moulded it and wet his fingers and rubbed some more.

  I tried to distract myself with watching clouds and thinking of what animals they looked like and smelling the air and trying to work out the different scents of the bush. But I’m not very good at being patient so I reached over and got myself a lump of beeswax and said, ‘Here, let me have a go,’ and my grandfather twisted the yidaki around so I could reach it and together we smoothed and moulded and shaped that mouthpiece until it was perfect.

  When it was finished some kid brought out tea for us both and I began telling my grandfather who I was but he put his hand up for silence. Of course he knew who I was. So we looked at the clouds a bit more and when we’d finished our tea we went into the bush where we walked around looking for hollow tree limbs that my grandfather could make into yidakis. Listen, he’d say as he flicked the wood with his fingers, and I’d hold onto it and stick my ear next to it too, so I could feel and hear the resonance, this one next dry season, or this one ready to cut now.

  I realised he could read my mind like mummy did when he told me to stop worrying about snakes. They know when you’re thinking about them and they’ll come out, he said. As we’d passed through spear grass and over rocky outcrops my mind had been firmly fixed on death adders and king browns lurking ready to sink their fangs into my legs, so after that I tried not to think of what life-threatening creatures were hanging around.

  Later, after he’d had an afternoon nap, we spoke about language and song and he told me there is magic and power in every word we speak so we have to choose words wisely and give them the respect they deserve or say nothing. When I asked him about my mum he stayed silent and everything felt heavy then and I knew it was a place I couldn’t go. He had a number of wives and his last one Margaret told me afterwards about his affection for my mum and how hard it had been for him and his brother (my mum’s father) to send her away because she’d broken the law by refusing her promised husband. But they were both senior law men and had to keep those laws strong even if that meant sending their daughter into exile.

  After my visit to Grandfather Willy I wasted no time in getting to Nguiu to interrogate mummy. My plan was that I would ply her with beer and shame her into making admissions based on the evidence I had recently been given, but although she happily accepted the bribe she kept her mouth firmly shut. ‘I found out more about me as a baby from my uncles than I ever have from you,’ I whinged, ‘and why didn’t you tell me about all this before, why did I have to find out from other people?’

  But it was when I said I’d visited grandfather Willy that she turned and looked at me with such anguish that it pierced right through the steel-reinforced concrete block that was my heart and on out the other side. And when I looked deep down into her eyes I saw the pain and sadness for her family and home she would never see again that had been locked away nice and tight where they couldn’t bother her anymore so she could get on with her life at Nguiu. She never saw the sun rise or set in Arnhem Land again or the wet season storms riding the bluffs and valleys of the escarpment and emptying over the plains. She left behind the rock art galleries and waterholes and the burial places where her family bones had become brittle and turned to dust and were scattered by the winds. And she left behind her flesh and blood that had been one continuous line since the very beginning.

  And then I couldn’t see because the tears that were flowing down her cheeks and onto her lap were flowing out of my eyes as well. For that second I had seen into the deepest part of my mum’s soul and I felt like I had violated a sacred place. I felt so ashamed. And I decided after that it would probably be a good idea to keep my mouth shut because what Grandfather Willy had said about words made a lot more sense now. But after the rivers of tears had stopped flowing and we were recovering in that strange hollow space that happens after something profound has occurred my mum cleared her throat and tucked her hair behind her ears and I knew she was going to tell me something important.

  And so she told me that if we know how our life began we will know the track our life will follow. I digested this for a few minutes and thought of my promise to myself to stop talking too much and asking questions. But bad habits are hard to break, aren’t they, so I took a breath and then asked her to tell me how and where my life began. But my mum, that person of infuriatingly few words, must have been over her quota that day and after dismissing me with an imperious wave of her hand she got up and left me to work it out for myself. And surprisingly I was fine with that. I was fine because after seeing the sadness leaking out of her I knew she was actually quite fragile under that tough skin and it wouldn’t be right to bother her about this stuff anymore. To find out about the past I would go to my Nanna Nellie who my uncles said always had plenty to say. I knew that if anyone knew about my beginnings she would.

  Despite being warned about Nanna Nellie and her temperamental ways I felt an instant affinity with her. I had made the trip to Bulman unannounced and considering how my family seemed to be able to read my mind I was not surprised to find her sitting on the veranda waiting for me with her husband Tex Cam Foo, the man who a few years later would confess to being my father. ‘We were just talking about you the other day,’ said Nanna and she bustled off to make some tea while Tex elaborated on the more ferocious aspects of the blue heeler sniffing around my legs before asking after mummy’s health. She’s real good, I said as I tried not to show fear and waited for the dog to stop sniffing and piss off. After walking behind my chair and shoving its nose up my arse and having a big snuffle it wandered off and lay down on the veranda to sleep.

  Nanna made her tea strong and black just like mummy liked to, and just like with mummy I guessed I was expected to drink it all down without complaining. She called Tex ‘old man’ which I thought was quite funny considering she wasn’t exactly a spring chicken herself. He was a lovely-natured man and very good-looking and from the stories I’ve heard about him since, I understand he was quite the ladies’ man when he was young. His mum was a Ngalakan woman from Roper River way and his dad was Chinese. His dad was originally an Ah Toy but the old bloke got the shits with his family and changed his surname to his maternal mother’s of Cam Foo.

  My nanna and Tex had a lovely energy between them that comes when two people spend so much of their lives together although it was plain to see that Nanna wore the pants. Their house was built of stone and was on a hill just outside of Bulman and it was on that veranda that Nanna and I slept together with the dog at our feet while Tex slept inside. On that first night and the following nights too I watched the morning star rise over the rocky bluffs and trees in the hours before dawn and
listened to the mopokes. There was something surreal about that place, like you could feel the beating heart of the earth.

  I loved being with Nanna, she was bold and fearless and when she made up her mind about something, no one and nothing stood in her way. Like the weather, if she said we needed some rain today, we would get rain. If she said we needed some sunshine, we got sunshine. And when I asked my Aunty Dorothy about how she could do that she said that when it comes to Nanna you don’t ask questions.

  Nanna told me that we were Remburranga and had lived in Central Arnhem Land forever so we have a special connection with this land where the Mainoru River meanders on through the centre of Arnhem Land until it meets the Wilton River. Together they journey on to join the Roper River and like three friends they keep each other company through rocky gorges and over sandbars and river crossings, sustaining life along the way until they reach the sea in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Even though our crooked little river has mingled with the other two, we know that it’s still there even as it flows into the salt water and then into the oceans of the world. And we know that it will come back to us again in the wet season when the clouds build up and the skies open and the rains become one with our river again.

  My nanna loved my mum and missed her terribly when she left to marry Casmir and live at Nguiu. She told me how my mum was raised in our traditional way and saw a white person for the first time when she was eight years old and how her father, my grandfather, was the famous medicine man ‘Bad Medicine’ who had had a book written about him by Vic Hall back in the forties. In the book Bad Medicine was portrayed as an evil man because he authorised the killings of men who had broken the traditional laws. But in real life although he did authorise these killings he was a kind and gentle man who was held in high regard by all. And when I was a tiny baby he would hold me and sing to me and blow into my ears and onto my eyes so that I would be able to ‘hear’ and ‘see’ things that lived in the spirit world.

  Nanna told me about mummy’s promised husband whom mummy had refused, Charlie Brian, who lived at Bulungadhuru, one of our family outstations. I was to meet this lovely old man many times and always wondered why my mum turned him down. Maybe because she would have had to share him with my Aunty Michelle and her sister.

  Although I was starting to wonder when she was ever going to get around to it, Nanna reassured me that she hadn’t forgotten why I was there. She was still pleased to impart her wisdom about my beginnings but not before she was ready and not before she’d told me everything else she thought I should know as well.

  ‘You know that baby for that no-good cousin-sister of yours, well im daddy is brother-boy for you aunties first son to that wrong husband one. Dat mother one proper no good cheeky blackfella.’

  or

  ‘You know dem fat desert womans oo come ere and steal our blokes? Well dem only good for wind break! Nussing else!’

  and

  ‘I told im nephew my boy, don’t go dat way and waddya know, im silly bugger goes dat way an gets stuck in that creek rite up his arse. Stuck tight im was in dat mud, rite up his arse.’

  Impatient as I was, I held my tongue. I was beginning to understand that there’s no interrupting Nanna when she gets going. And so a week later with my head full of scandal, skulduggery and Nanna’s escapades, I finally learnt about my birth. I was surprised to learn that I was born under a tree on the banks of the Mainoru River. Many generations of my family had been born at that place on the river but sadly I was one of the last because Native Affairs didn’t think it was proper to have babies in the scrub anymore like we’d been doing for ever and ever. There was a three-quarter moon and a late wet-season storm crashing around the sky. I was in a hurry to arrive and Nanna said that was a blessing because no one wanted to be struck by lightning while I dilly-dallied. Nanna Nellie and Nanna Clara, her cousin-sister, delivered me. They used a freshwater mussel to cut my cord and tied it with a native vine. But not everyone was happy when I arrived to thunderous applause from the heavens. ‘Too white,’ my Nanna Clara said as they checked me out by the camp-fire light, and everyone knew what that meant. Back in those days any coloured babies in my family were given to the crocs because dealing with these things right away saved a lot of suffering later on. It was better that we die in our own piece of country than be taken by the authorities and lost to our families forever.

  But maybe in those first few seconds of life I sensed that something was in the balance because Nanna Nellie said I didn’t make a sound. My eyes were open and I was looking right at her, like I was waiting. She stared at me real hard, looking for a sign so she could give my little spirit to that river. But there was nothing. We’ll keep this one, she said, she’s special.

  Nanna Nellie knew right then that I was a Yawk Yawk, a mermaid, and I would always come back to that river, that I was meant to stay and face whatever life was going to give me, even if I did end up down south living with whitefellas. After that she cleaned me with the ashes of the black wattle. This was to make sure that the energy of that place would go into my body and I would always be tied to where I was born.

  When Nanna finished telling me about how I was born I understood that only she could have told me this, not my mum, not anyone, only her. And whether I lived or died, whatever decision she made would have been the right one.

  3.

  I didn’t realise how much of my mum’s space filled my life, and still does, until she died in early December 2000 – isn’t that always the way. But we’d had twelve years together and during those twelve years I think we more than made up for what I had lost as a little kid taken away. And after she left me I missed her silences and her prickly little packages of sarcasm crammed with secret compartments that even now open up when I least expect them to, giving me a glimpse of my mum in other places and times.

  When she was alive her thoughts would travel from her eyes to mine straight as an arrow and they would speak to me more clearly than any words. I absorbed her thoughts through my skin and breathed them into my lungs like air, they hung in the sky like stars, I could smell them, I could see them. And when she died she gave me her thoughts, like she said she would, a final parting gift. And every now and then when I realise I’m seeing something through my mum’s eyes I thank her because she had a lot more common sense than I was ever born with.

  It was only after mummy was gone that I realised she knew she was dying long before we did. But my mum was like that, she wouldn’t have wanted the pall of death to be floating around us while she was in the space of the living. This was her secret, it belonged to her and while no one else knew about it she could deal with it all in her own way and time. And what a beautiful thing, to keep those moments to yourself and to look at the world through eyes that have seen everything you are ever going to see and to be content with that. No yearnings to travel to the moon or see the Mona Lisa before it’s too late, nothing like that. Just to walk on this earth and know that you have been blessed with a life, to have an acceptance of what has been before and what’s to come. She was pretty amazing.

  And when it finally became obvious to us that she wasn’t well and we all started freaking out about the cancer in her throat and her bones, that was when she started to pull away from us and retreat into her own little place of peace inside her. She didn’t want us carrying on and pilfering bits of her soul to turn into memories so we could keep some of her for ourselves, because we were stealing her energy and she needed it for herself. And her dying didn’t belong to her anymore, we’d taken ownership of it and were twisting it this way and that and trying to make it listen to us. And when that didn’t work, we laid siege with emotional blackmail, we loaded up the trebuchet and bombarded her with our pleas.

  ‘You can’t leave us, what are we going to do without you, you won’t see the grandkids grow up.’ We went on and on.

  And then one day when the cancer had eaten through the side of her face, right where I used to kiss her when I was coming home or going off s
omewhere (or sometimes just for the hell of it) she told me a story. It was about when her mother-in-law was sick and old and she wanted to go to Yuwalinga out at Tangiyaw and just sit. So off they went, mummy, Amah, Daddy Casmir and the boys, and they camped at our favourite spot on the beach under the beauty leaf tree. From here you can see the sun set over the ocean, and the reefs just off the shore where the painted crays live, and the ochre cliffs in the distance that flare up into unimaginable colours when the sun’s rays hit them. Mummy made a fire and boiled the billy and after his cuppa daddy went off with the boys to do some fishing while mummy and Amah sat just like my amah wanted and they watched the world go by. Then my amah asked mummy if she could get her some water from the spring nearby. So off mummy went to where Jeremuru the white-breasted sea eagle sat on his tree guarding the spring and dug the sand away a bit where it had fallen in since the last visit and got a billy can of the water. Filtered through rock and sand this water is so sweet, so mummy had a nice big drink and had a bit of a chat to Jeremuru and then headed back to Amah.

  But she’d taken no more than a dozen steps when she heard a curlew calling out from the bush. She just threw that billy can and ran and sure enough the curlew was right because when mummy got back Amah was peacefully lying down facing the ocean and already on her journey to the other side. At first mummy was upset because she’d been dawdling and hadn’t been there with Amah when Amah had decided it was time to go but then she realised that Amah had done it on purpose. She had sent her off because she wanted to spend her last moments on this earth by herself and not surrounded by people wailing and crying and trying to drag her back.

  Amah was buried right there at the place that she loved.

  After my mum told me this I pulled myself together. Mummy didn’t need to see me blubbering like a big baby because there’d be enough time for that later on. She didn’t need to see my eyes filled with fear and pity and sadness and all those selfish things you feel when someone you love is being taken away from you and you are helpless to do anything about it. So I stopped resisting and accepted that my mum was on a journey that she had to take alone and she would leave when she was good and ready. I had no right to hold her back, I had to let her go. And it was like a great big weight had been lifted off me and I could focus on her living instead of her dying.