His face was crumpled again. But only around the edges. There was strength in the middle.
“I love you, Dad. I’ll always be your daughter.”
“I love you, Bethie. I’ll always be your dad.”
He turned away from me in a slow, jerky movement. Then he began walking, putting one determined foot in front of the other. As he went, he pulled out his phone and made a call.
“Viv? It’s Michael. Listen, I was just calling about Grandpa Jim’s birthday—did you want me to bring anything to the party? Besides a present, I mean. Of course I’m coming! It’ll be good to see you.”
Aunty Viv was talking loud and fast, like she was trying to cram months’ worth of missed conversations into one phone call. I had no idea what she was saying, and I wasn’t sure she was making much sense. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was Dad was speaking to her again.
What mattered was that he was showing me he was choosing the opposite of gray.
I kept watching until he’d disappeared through the trees. The second he’d vanished from sight, a voice said, “Ready, Beth-the-Teller?”
I spun around to face a girl with brown skin and brown eyes and black hair that flowed like a cloak.
Catching was standing beside her. She raised an eyebrow, and I realized she was waiting for an answer to Crow’s question.
“I’m ready,” I said.
Crow held out her hand to me, and I took it. She used her other hand to grab hold of Catching’s and shouted, “Let’s run!”
So we ran, me in my yellow dress and Catching in green and Crow in black, three colors weaving through the trees. We ran as you could only run when you weren’t alive or when you could walk between all the sides of the world. We ran without limits, getting faster and faster until we were flying with our feet on the ground.
Then Crow let go of us and launched herself into the air. Her body seemed to dissolve into color, becoming every shade of black I’d ever seen, and a thousand more that I’d never known existed, swirling away into the sky above.
Catching threw back her head and laughed the first laugh I’d ever heard from her, a musical, husky sound that seemed to fill the forest. Then she leaped after Crow and became green, rising up to mingle with Crow’s black.
My turn. I went spinning into a leap and melted into yellow, becoming the love I had for my dad, my Grandpa, my Aunties and my Uncles and the cousins, and for Catching and for Crow.
Other colors came to whirl around us, shouting their joy in our presence and welcoming us home.
We found my mum and Catching’s mum, and Crow’s family too. We bathed in the clouds and sang in the sun and let the world paint our souls and our souls paint the world.
And wherever we went, we went together.
We are Aboriginal storytellers. Our perspective is shaped by the culture and history of the Palyku people, from whom we come; our individual knowledge and experiences; and the collective inheritance of our Ancestors. But we are two voices amongst the many Aboriginal peoples and nations of Australia, and we speak for ourselves alone; there is not a single Aboriginal story, nor a definitive Aboriginal experience.
In telling this tale, we were informed by two sets of stories that are the inheritance of Aboriginal peoples. The first set is stories of our homelands, families, cultures—the stories that speak to the connections that sustain us and that we sustain in turn. The second set is the tales that entered our worlds with colonization—stories of the violence that was terrifyingly chaotic or, even more terrifyingly, organized on a systemic scale. Both sets of stories inform our existences and, thus, our storytelling.
The ancient tales of Aboriginal nations of Australia tell of an animate world, where everything lives. This includes not only animals, plants, and humans but also rocks, wind, rain, sun, moon. And so Aboriginal family connections extend beyond human beings to encompass all life. These connections can also reach past one cycle of existence to shape the next. For example, a person with a particular connection to dingoes may have been a dingo before, and will be one again. So it is with Crow. As Beth says at the end of the book, Crow is “lots of things at once…little, and really big. Old and young. A girl and a bird. She’s…Crow.”
Aboriginal stories also tell of a nonlinear world, one in which time does not run in a line from the past through the present and on into the future. All life is in constant motion, turning and rotating in relation to other life, and it is through these movements that the world shifts forward or back. In the words of Beth’s Grandpa Jim: “Life doesn’t move through time…Time moves through life.” So the extent to which an event is “past” is not measured by the passage of years but rather by the degree to which affected relationships have been brought into balance. Thus, the journeys of Catching, Beth, Crow, and Michael do not “advance” because days pass by, but because these characters are finding ways to heal. Each of them ultimately reaches a point of transformation where they move out of one cycle and into another. This is why Catching says to Michael, at the conclusion of the book: “It’s the beginning that hasn’t happened yet.”
One way to heal is through storytelling. As Catching knows, it is stories that get you through and bring you home. And many Aboriginal stories tell of the multigenerational trauma of colonialism, including the terrible pain inscribed onto the hearts and minds and bodies of Indigenous women. For Catching’s family, this includes the heartbreak of the Stolen Generations.
For around one hundred years, beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Indigenous children were taken from their families under laws and policies of successive Australian governments. The Australian Human Rights Commission has estimated that between one in three and one in ten Indigenous children were forcibly removed between 1910 and 1970, and that no Indigenous family escaped the effects of this removal. (Interested readers can find a copy of the report and other resources, including testimonies from Stolen Generations members, at bth.humanrights.gov.au.) For many families, including our own, more than one generation of children was taken away. This leaves Aboriginal families with the dual legacy of terrible heartbreak and the strength it took to survive. And it is by drawing on the resilience of her Ancestors that Catching is able to survive when her own life is threatened.
The final step in Catching’s path to her own strength is shown to her by the experiences of her Great-Great-Grandmother, a woman who lived through the hard days of the frontier and was robbed of all her choices. But Catching’s old Granny knew how to hold on to her self—with laughter, with love, and through her connections to her family and her homeland.
Catching, Beth, and Crow all ultimately find their way to themselves and raise their voices to defy all that would diminish them, including the things they have internalized.
And so the story begins, ends, and begins again with what always lay at the core of this tale: the enduring strength of Aboriginal women and girls.
Ambelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina are a brother-sister team of Aboriginal writers who come from the Palyku people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. They’ve worked together on a number of short novels and picture books. The Things She’s Seen is their first joint young adult novel. They believe in the power of storytelling to create a more just world.
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The Things She's Seen Page 13