by Lia Hills
Nara raised her nose to the air and breathed deep, a drop plunging down her cheek.
‘Ininyingi,’ she said, then translated: ‘The smell of the earth after rain.’
Epilogue
waranta takara kuntana nara takara-ta
we walk where they once walked
palawa kani language, Tasmania
Like all beginnings, it has its sounds. The Derwent fizzing against the cliffs. The wind withing through the she-oaks. A Pacific gull complaining about a rare plane overhead. The rock here is the colour of oat biscuits, the bluff carved out, hollow beneath me, its sandstone cored by the wind. I have returned to the place of my birth, as they say we all must in the end. To the place from where we would leap, gauge the flow and depth of the water, place our fate in the humours of a river.
I haven’t slept.
Last night, the dark was rich with ghosts.
It’s been four months since that night the dogs brought me in. I think about it daily. That there are different kinds of birthing.
The gull is tearing into a mollusc it just dropped from a height, let smash against the rock. It’s shaking its head as if not quite sure of its prey, the river bowing to it, rebounding in ever-widening circles. After I returned to Alice, I heard about men initiated into the ways of water in the desert, required to meditate on the properties of a creek, a still body, a river that ran only after rains. I heard other stories too that played into my own – so many that I wondered how I’d ever believed that mine was isolated from the rest.
Despite the winds that prevail here, the she-oaks lean towards the water. The Derwent exhales, the bay a quiet cauldron, its dashed expanse the colour of the sky it mimics without conviction. Even when it’s calm, it can’t hide its mass, its potential for squall and riptide. An old guy is walking beside it, shirtless despite the crispness in the air, his gut an overhang, his white hair abundant for a man his age. He skirts the barnacle shelf at the river’s edge, his feet not as sure as they must once have been. Throws me a wary glance. I’ve invaded his secret, just as the fog – the Bridgewater Jerry – stole south this morning between the shores, still hovering when I arrived, the sun not yet over the hill.
I once heard a story about the Bridgewater Jerry – that it was a great white snake winding its way up the Derwent, past important Dreaming sites, keeping an eye on them. But I can’t remember if it was a traditional story told by the Palawa, or some revived yearning for a singing of the land on which you live, to keep shore and river and mountain alive by a constant retelling. Once I would’ve seen this as a primitive urge. In a book I read at Lou and Alec’s place when I went back there, it said that, to the people of the Western Desert, story was not so much about narrative and the ordering of events but the accretion of place. At the time I wasn’t sure what that meant. But while I’ve been sitting here these last few hours, trawling back through my own story, I’ve become convinced that there is some of this intention in my own retelling. That in every attempt I’ve made since I left Ininyingi to explain to people what happened there, a place is being made.
To mourn what must be mourned.
To put a sure foot into the future.
Though sometimes I find silence preferable, especially when the truth of something still evades you. Maybe I’ll end up like Thaddeus’ father, staring wordlessly over the landscape, hands cupped upon a she-oak staff instead of a manuka one, firm in the belief that conversation consists purely of caretaking. Maybe I’m already there.
Steps lead down to the river from here. Somebody carved them out years ago, maybe a municipal act, I don’t remember. If you continue around the lip of rock stubbled with black-shelled mussels, you get to the sandstone caves beneath me. Their honeycombed roofs are charred from so many fires, some of which I’ve lit, the debris blown away or reclaimed by storms. As a kid, I always thought they would’ve been the perfect place for the Aborigines to spend a night, the old ones that had long since left; imagined with a kid’s hunch for survival the possum-skin cloaks, the spears fashioned from trees growing in the bush through which we’d crawled to get there, the spear tip honed to a lethal point in the fire. Sometimes I’d even half expect to find a man sitting there, his skin so black that it swallowed shadows, and that he’d tell me about what plants you could eat and the best wood for the tools that would ensure my survival in this place where I’d been born. Willed with a boy’s faith in the power of his own mind that someone like Kata would be standing at the base of the stairs that led to the caves, a hand held out, beckoning for me to follow him. For he had something he wanted to tell me – a story so rich with place that I would never get lost again.
But what I never imagined was that this man might have been Jed’s ancestor.
Jed and I got so tanked in those caves one night that we convinced each other that we could walk across the river to the city, the cylindrical casino a lit phallus on the western shore, beckoning us. A winking monument to desire. The night and water were so black beyond the perimeter of the cave fire that you couldn’t see whether the tide was going out or coming in – you could only hear it, the fizz of spume on tessellated rock, its relentless approach and withdrawal. Jed was the first to let go of the Jesus moment, overtaken by a less messianic idea: we would jump from the bluff into the channel below, only our ears as guides. What’s more, for the first time we’d do it without the aid of daylight.
We scrambled back up the stairs, Jed gripping a burning stick as a makeshift torch. No match for the wind, its tip was quickly reduced to a red glow, the moon slim and hidden. The rock demarcating the borders of the channel was barely lighter than the black of the deepest water, but another instinct had kicked in by then, bolstered by cider and beer and the rush of collective thinking. We stripped down to jocks and t-shirts, the cold sobering, though not enough. Leaning way too far over the edge, Jed made the old joke about the bluff being exactly that – a bet this place was making with us. The wind off the water tore at his words and pressed into our faces. We both fell silent. Beside me, Jed oscillated, his body synching with the sound of the swell, hypnotised. And then he was gone. Plummeting head first, so close to the rock.
Coming back here feels like a beginning, though of what I can’t be sure.
As we flew in, circling over Midway Point, I read in the paper about the renaming of Mount Wellington – that after years of lobbying there’s going to be a return to the old name, Kunanyi. And it was in that moment that I was struck by my ignorance of the original languages of this island, felt it in my gut like a longing I didn’t know I had. I don’t even know what this place was once called. Second Bluff is way too numerical a title for an outcrop of rock that sits in my memory as somewhere so singular. The possum-cloaked man I pictured huddled in the caves here always spoke in English – how could I have imagined otherwise given the upbringing I had? – but, of course, he would’ve had his own name for it, in his own dialect, the sounds as familiar to him as the shrieks of the Pacific gulls.
So many names have been forgotten. But others, it seems, have merely fallen out of usage, like after a death. They await the moment when the mourning period is over and they can be brought back into the language again. Such thoughts haunt me. Not just what may have been lost forever, but why. What we are willing to wager. Thaddeus has his ghosts, but he’s not the only one. History has a way of scattering responsibility.
The day before I left Ininyingi, Kata told me about the first time his grandfather saw a white man. He’d thought they were returned spirits, ancestors come to haunt the living, the kind of mamu people took great care not to call back. Holding his arm in the direction of the road on which I’d come that first night, Kata described his grandfather’s apprehension with more than words; through his gestures he metamorphosed into another man, one whose movements bore resemblance to a dance, arms rippling, head jerking like a bird, a conduit for other rhythms. I’d heard similar stories before, attributed a loose charm to them – the untainted, poetic mind – an iro
nic foresight that was kind of chilling. But this was different. I knew Kata. Knew his family and the place that was as familiar to him as the story any man accepts as the narrative of his life. Distancing was no longer an option for me either. Besides, there was another truth to it. There were still those who roamed the land like spectres, in limbo, never quite inhabiting the place where they found themselves. Not all of them white.
Sometimes I think of this whole thing as a ghost story. Give in like the gull that just stepped off the lip of rock into the water and is being spun by unseen currents, beak raised to the air. As I sit here at the bottom of an island below an island, the arse end of the arse end as my father once said, it’s so easy to draw on the grand tradition of Tasmanian Gothic. But that is a world of dripping rainforests and escaped convicts and silent blacks. Other forms of exile.
I had to leave the place of my birth in order to understand it. Go into the desert. First a foreign one, because sometimes we need a distant reference point in order to bring things into focus. Then that great dryland which lies at the centre of this country and was once referred to as the Dead Heart, as if the fledgling nation was already fighting for its life.
Many have felt a similar urge. Sensed that the stories they heard and told along the way – the ones that take their breath from the winds which construct and dismantle the dunes – could shape them too. Lend a little of the amplitude afforded by so much space. But there’s something bigger at stake, less personal, at least in this place; Thaddeus hinted at it when he said we’d never found a myth to replace the one about the inland sea. What was left was a great, empty void. Except it wasn’t. The silence was a lie. So was the emptiness. All along it was inhabited. By people who knew its waters. Whose stories have always aligned with them.
The wind is picking up, sieved by the gangly leaves of the she-oaks, with with. It’s pulling at my jacket, sending dark ripples across the surface of the water. Soon the bay will be filled with whitecaps. In a desert not far from Ininyingi, a people once layered gypsum, the remnants from a vanished sea, as a mark of grief. When the cap fell, it was time. One more act of what Nara called ‘finishing off’.
I should be getting back. I haven’t eaten and I’ve got the thirst of a man surrounded by water he can’t drink. Besides, I told Ziggy I’d call her this morning. She’s in Alice waiting to hear how it all goes.
Last time I was sitting on this rock shelf, Jed was standing by the edge there looking down at the river, his shirt flapping and folding like a sail changing tack. He was twenty – we both were – and about to head overseas. Hands in his pockets, he leant into the updraught, asked me to go with him, but I still had a year of uni left.
Jed never even considered travelling around Australia. He was done with it, he said, with places that had no history, that tried to contain you. Eighteen months later I was also on the road, leaving behind this island like so many of us did. We were restless in our homeland. We believed the centre of the world lay elsewhere.
But here I am now.
Saul, the one who always returns.
This story started off in Sydney, but really its beginning has many places, few of them purely geographic. I think back to what Jed said that night about understanding the river. His long-secreted ancestry. The ghosts that lay their claim.
And as I stand here now, the bay lending its expansiveness, I’m reminded of what once made so little sense to me.
The way we make a country of the people we love.
Author’s note
I recorded the first draft of The Crying Place on the road and in three weeks. What followed was over four years of research, numerous trips to Central Australia, many conversations over cups of tea and hurtling down highways and dirt tracks. Along the way I was guided by a number of principles, not all of them creative. A question I frequently revisited was what material it was appropriate to include and in what form. This sometimes required working with representatives from organisations like the Central Land Council or Parks Australia (Uluru Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre), or seeking out the senior law man or woman for a particular story. At other times I took my lead from those who lived in or had worked extensively in remote communities, or from protocols outlined by various Aboriginal organisations or the Australia Council. We never write in a void, and I was always aware of how important these stories and places continue to be to their custodians; that just because something is already in the public domain, doesn’t mean that it’s fair game. This meant that on a number of occasions the central story had to bend around requested changes or new pieces of information, but it was more important to respect this process than adhere to the notion of poetic licence. It also made the novel feel more collaborative. More real. These discussions took me to places both physical and personal that I never would have gone to if I hadn’t felt the necessity to verify and alter in the wake of what I was learning.
While working on the novel it became clear to me that I would need to gain some understanding of the Pitjantjatjara language. My teachers were generous and many, and thankfully not lacking a sense of humour. Most of the Pitjantjatjara language used in The Crying Place exists in dictionaries and is in common usage. The exception to this is the word ‘ininyingi’, used as the name for the fictional community in the novel. Although I heard it from a number of sources, it appears to be an old word, and to my knowledge it has never been officially transcribed. Consequently it should not be considered in the same way as other Pitjantjatjara words that appear in the novel. No such place exists and the characters that inhabit it are entirely of my imagining.
When I set out to write this novel, I had little idea where it would take me, nor how much it would play into my own life. When I would tell the story to people I met along the way, often I’d be asked if I was talking about a person they knew or something they’d heard about that had happened not far from where they lived. I was constantly reminded of the truth of fiction and – from ngangkari and narrative therapists I spoke to, who work in communities – the healing power of story. As a writer, these gifts from chance encounters are invaluable. They kept me going in the moments of greatest doubt, and without them The Crying Place would not have been possible.
Acknowledgements
This is the most collaborative work I’ve ever written as the knowledge required to complete it went way beyond my own and what can be acquired in books or online. My gratitude to the wonderful people in Alice who provided me with shelter and guidance on countless occasions, most notably Stella Hayes, Keith Castle, Craig San Roque and Anne Bromhead. Without you it would be a lesser thing. Over the years I had some wonderful conversations with elders and members of various Arrernte, Pitjantjatjara (Anangu) and Warlpiri communities, including Kaltukatjara (Docker River), Wallace Rockhole, Yuendemu, Pukatja, Mutitjulu and Alice Springs. Due to cultural sensitivities, individuals are not named, but I am very grateful for your generosity, and for the knowledge and stories you shared with me. Any failings of interpretation are entirely my own.
Of the many others who helped along the way, I wish to thank the following in particular: Sarah Francis, Tim Pegler, Martin Campbell, Sue and David Woods, Marian Spires, David Tacey, Richard Biffin, Steve Hargreaves, Kristyn Oxenbridge and the staff at Anangu Jobs, Amanda McMillan, Simmone Howell, Shelley Walker, Clive Scollay, John Sweeney, Grace Moore, Ryan Castle, Rowan Sutton, Jan and Tony Hills, Megan Miller, Kirsten Lenck, John Broderick, Beth Sometimes, and John Bradley from the Monash Indigenous Centre.
With regard to the Pitjantjatjara used in the novel, special mention must go to Paul Eckert, who was my teacher at the University of South Australia Pitjantjatjara Language Summer School and kindly proofed the Pitjantjatjara in the manuscript. Also to Alison Milyika Carroll who was my very patient tutor. The palawa kani phrase in the epilogue was included with the kind permission of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Corporation.
Several texts stand out among the extensive reading I did over the years. The Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara to English
Dictionary from the wonderful IAD Press; the NPY Women’s Council’s seminal text, Traditional Healers of Central Australia: Ngangkari; Margaret Kemarre Turner’s Iwenhe Tyerrtye ‒ what it means to be an Aboriginal person; the graphic novel The Long Weekend in Alice Springs, adapted by Joshua Santospirito from an essay by Craig San Roque; Vincent Serventy’s The Desert Sea; and Roslynn D. Haynes’ Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film. My thanks also to Alice Springs institution, Red Kangaroo Books, for their fabulous and erudite selection. This novel had its soundtrack and an important part of that was the music of Frank Yamma, a Pitjantjatjara man, whose album Countryman was never far from my mind and gives a whole new meaning to ‘singing country’.
I gratefully acknowledge the funding provided by Creative Victoria that enabled me to take the time to begin writing this story.
Many thanks to my agent Catherine Drayton – your call one evening changed everything and assured this novel a readership. To the accomplished and incredibly warm crew at Allen & Unwin, it was like a homecoming, and I am indebted in particular to Jane Palfreyman for your absolute faith in this story and, also to Ali Lavau and Siobhán Cantrill, for your astute and deeply respectful editorial work.
Love and gratitude as always to Patrick, fellow desert traveller and life companion. And to my two boys for putting up with my absence whenever I was on the road, and for your heartfelt ideas and encouragement. In memoriam Enid Hills and Fiona Proffitt, two extraordinary women who were strong ties to my country and who passed during the writing of this story. You are deeply missed.