Lizzie's Tale

by Graham Wilson

  Chapter 18 – Rescue

  Slowly the dust became a car carrying aboriginal people coming towards them. They waved and the car pulled to a stop.

  The people got out and came over to them, showing little surprise to see them in this empty place. Their words of English were few but their smiles and chatter were happy.

  They made space in their car. Lizzie and Catherine squeezed into spaces alongside these black bodies. An hour and a further fifty miles of driving saw them at a small aboriginal settlement, an outstation it was called, on the northern edge of the Great Sandy Desert. These people fed them, they shared their houses. They hugged and played with Catherine and she played and ran with her brown skinned friends.

  Days passed, they could all talk some common words now and she came to understand that they were living in a community of people who moved around the edges of these western deserts. She understood that these people had previously lived on cattle stations around here. They had then been forced out when they started to ask for land of their own.

  Now some had come out here to a soak in the desert and had made their own camp, a home in a place which no one else wanted. The old people had known of this soak from centuries of living in the desert, and they had shown it to their children. Now those old people were gone but the children, grown old, still remembered this place and its stories. So they had brought their own children here to teach them about this land and its stories. Some of their families still lived around Halls Creek and on other cattle stations.

  These people called their tribe the Djaru; someone had written it on a piece of paper and she now rolled the words around her tongue. They lived a simple life; they had built bush shelters and a couple more substantial timber buildings. There were occasional white visitors and once every couple weeks someone would drive to Halls Creek to buy food and other community necessities.

  But for the most part they lived here in their own place, far from anywhere. They offered to drive Lizzie back to Halls Creek but she declined. On the next trip someone brought her car back. A lead had come off the starter motor, soon repaired by a bush mechanic. She knew she could leave now but she chose to stay. She gave them her car to use when they needed it. She also gave them the money she had brought with her, more than nine hundred dollars, telling them to buy food in town for her and anyone else who needed it.

  She knew in time she would have to re-establish contact with the outside world, but she was happy in this simple place for now. Her daughter seemed completely happy with her new group of friends and this was good.

  As time went by she started to realise she was needed here. It was not about what she could do to succeed in her own right, to acquire things to make her safe, happy, or even rich. It was that here were things she could do to contribute to the life of this band of people. They in return did things which she needed.

  It was different kind of sharing than what she had known in the past, except towards her special friends, though she had experienced glimpses of it, such as when all the town kids had come home with Catherine and she had fed them all sweet pastries, but more important she had shared with them parts of her life’s joy and experience, the first lick of an ice cream, the season’s first mango.

  But back there most giving was in an expectation of return, that if you helped someone that they in return would do something back for you, it was exchange. She remembered how she had made Catherine and her friends pay for things at her cafe, she had considered it teaching them the value of money. But here such a concept was foreign, if anyone needed food and another had it, it was given without reward or question.

  Here sharing was what life was all about, integral to all parts of each day of living. You did the things for which you had skill or capability and others shared what you had or did as a matter of right; they in return did what they did and you shared it back. There was no counting in this giving.

  Here she could see there was no teacher to teach the children how to read and write. There were eleven children between about five and fifteen who lived in this place. So Lizzie started to teach them, at first with no paper and no books. She used a stick and the things around her to teach; she pointed to a tree and drew a symbol of a tree in the dirt. They taught her their word and she tried to write the sound. Then alongside it she wrote her own word for the same thing and made everyone say it.

  Each day she made them all learn ten new words and before long they all had a long list of words that they practised. Often the older people in the community came and joined in, and while this added to the fun and laughter she insisted that this was serious and they must do it properly. Then she started on counting, doing it the same way, but also using fingers, with ten people she could get to a hundred.

  A month after their rescue, Catherine came to her one day and said. “Mummy, Sophie has been talking to me again. She has been telling me about the people you know and how they need you. Your own Mummy needs you, she has been sad for a long time since you went away, and she wants to see and know me too, and I want to see and know your brother David too. They still live in the house where you lived and where Sophie lived. You need to go back there and see them and bring me with you.

  “The second person who needs you is Julie, she has been angry for a long time since that bad thing happened to you. You need to visit her too and show me to her. Then she will really understand how, from that bad thing they did to you, a good thing has come, and she will not be so angry inside. Her being angry is making it hard to be nice to other people, especially to men, as she hates them all for what happened to you.

  “The third person who needs you is someone you have never told me about, a man called Robbie who you knew when you lived in Melbourne. When you left you promised him you would write to him. Instead you have done everything you can to put him out of your mind and not think about him. He had been sad for a long time since you went away. He needs you to help him come back to a good place and be happy again.”

  Lizzie marvelled at the wisdom of her child, she sensed her rescue, which brought her to this place, was not just a rescue from the desert, it was also the rescue of and from herself; finding what was good in herself and using it. It was also for helping her friends and family, who she had neglected for far too long, to find the good in themselves.

  She knew her daughter was right, the time for running away was past. Now she must come back to her friends, give them her help and support and let them help her too, she must never run away again when trouble came.

  She remembered her promise in the desert, how she must also do something to stop those bad men who had hurt her, not so much for herself, but she must use her own rescue and new strength to give this same gift of freedom to their other victims.