Mullumbimby

by Melissa Lucashenko

  ‘Yes and no. They found the exemption records online. But it’s hard evidence about Great-grandad Tommy being taken away he needs. Everything else is just hearsay – his grandfather’s stories about Bottlebrush, and their totems and all that. The tribunal wants to see stuff written down, not just oral history ... and then the family trees are all so bloody complicated. When you count the northern lot, there’s five John Jacksons in the last three generations alone – try sorting that lot out. Sometimes I think every blackfella in Australia is related.’

  ‘You sure you and him aren’t first cousins?’ Therese asked, suddenly dubious. Jo laughed, insulted. Christ Jesus. That much at least they’d been able to work out. There’ll be no raising iguanas for me, thankyou kindly.

  ‘So no two-headed babies coming along anytime soon?’ joked Therese.

  ‘No babies of any sort, thanks. Especially not with twins in his family,’ Jo answered, as if the temptation to make beautiful black babies with Twoboy had never crossed her mind.

  She fell silent as they drew closer to Byron and its tourist traffic. Getting pregnant. Now, that really would be the last move, welding herself to the Jackson clan and their battle. Exactly what she’d warned Therese against all those months ago. She was already waist deep in the big muddy, anyway, just being with Twoboy. Last Wednesday in Mullum, Sally Watt had walked out of the council building flanked by Basho and a bunch of other bureaucrats. Horrified, Jo had been forced to flee into the library to avoid an embarassing encounter with the gracious old lady. And for all Jo knew her own name was now on the same hit list as Twoboy’s in the eyes of Uncle Oscar, who had never been known to be gracious to anyone in his corrupt and contemptuous life.

  She frowned and rubbed the back of her skull with her knuckles. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.

  ‘What’s up?’ Therese glanced over at her.

  ‘Native Title. Years of hard yakka and fuck all at the end of it, except a community in ruins. It’s really ramping up with the Bullockheads. And it’s all such bullshit.’ Jo paused, and the image came to her of Humbug haunting the Dolphin Cafe that day in May, begging for his supper really, even though Uncle spun it, made it all seem like a bit of a lark. How many times a week did he go to sleep hungry? She grimaced. Native Title wasn’t going to fill that old brown belly anytime soon.

  ‘I mean take Uncle Humbug,’ she said to Therese, ‘he must have a Native Title claim to somewhere. But I can’t see him fronting any tribunal, can you? He’s flat out getting over to Bi-Lo on pension day.’

  Therese chewed on this for a minute.

  ‘What’s Twoboy say?’

  ‘He reckons Humbug’s just another jumped-up southerner like Oscar. Not to mention having a few dozen roos loose in the top paddock, which isn’t really debatable. Doesn’t mean he should be left starving in the bloody park though, does it?’ Jo replied.

  The picture of Humbug cold and hungry nagged at Jo like a toothache. It prompted her to describe a vision she had recently developed of Tin Wagon Road: the farm with five or six houses dotted on it instead of just one, and an Aboriginal family living well in every building, thriving, healthy, prosperous.

  Therese whistled. ‘A nice dream, but it’s pretty different to how you live now,’ she pointed out. ‘Like a hermit.’

  Jo nodded, growing enthused.

  ‘But that’s the difference, see. It’s my place, so I can do what I like on it ... Twoboy gets proper cranky sometimes, cos he’s got so much riding on the court case and I don’t.’

  ‘I can understand him being jealous of the farm,’ Therese concluded. ‘And here we are.’ She pulled up the steep driveway of the Buddhist retreat, where huge gums framed a stunning view of Suffolk Park and Seven Mile Beach.

  Jo fell silent as she reflected on how Therese’s view of the world never quite matched her own. They’d been friends forever, since grade four at Billinudgel Primary, but still Therese managed constantly to fractionally misunderstand her. She sighed.

  ‘He’s not jealous – Native Title isn’t about acreage. It’s...’ Jo struggled for the words to make Therese understand. ‘It’s about honour, I suppose. If he’s recognised as a traditional owner, then he’s a warrior who’s finally made things better for his family, a tiny bit. It’s about winnng a war that nobody even talked about for two hundred years,’ Jo added as they got out of the car. ‘And its about never giving up, never, no matter what.’

  Jo was woken early on Sunday morning by a strange rattly annoyance that she didn’t recognise. Were tiny elves banging on the leadlight windows of her Sangsurya cabin? She yawned and realised that she had slept through the optional six a.m. yoga that was added to the six hours of daily meditation the retreat required. No great loss there. She yawned again, then realised that for the first time in months, she had slept past dawn. Taken aback, Jo lay looking at the ceiling. Her limbs were relaxed, and her back had mysteriously lost its ache. Yesterday afternoon, during the fourth hour of sitting still and following the flow of her breath in and out, even her neck had softened. Shit, Jo frowned, Therese was bloody right, the bag! Irritated and amused in equal portions, she hauled herself out of bed and into the shower. As she dressed, she discovered that the unfamiliar tapping was the sound of fairy-wrens manically attacking their own reflections in the leadlight glass of the window above her bed. Mad little buggers, Jo thought with a shake of her head, feeling like she understood them only too well.

  After breakfast, Jo joined the others in the zendo for that morning’s dharma talk. Sitting on cushions along with the three dozen students, she listened as the teacher, Libby, expounded upon the causes of suffering. The possibility of an end to suffering. The illusory nature of reality, and of the self. Greed, Anger, Delusion: the causes of all our petty woes. All very well, she had commented to herself on Friday night, if you live in Paddington on macrobiotic tofu and organic beetroot juice, but not if you live on Tin Wagon Road with Oscar Bullockhead threatening to cave your boyfriend’s head in any old tick of the clock.

  When the first set of instructions had been given to the beginners on Saturday, it was all Jo could do to stop from busting out in cynical laughter. Sit comfortably, try not to move, and follow your breath. Or, if you prefer, concentrate on another sense – on what you’re hearing, for example, or on what your body is physically touching. Jo had always imagined Buddhist meditation to be about breathing.

  ‘It’s dadirri!’ she had insisted to Therese in the cabin later that night. ‘It’s exactly what blackfellas have been doing here for thousands and thousands of years – sitting still and listening to the world. The exact same thing. I’ve been meditating all my life, fuck ya!’

  Therese had merely smiled and raised a finger to her lips to remind Jo that it was a totally silent retreat.

  By midday Saturday, Jo had begun to re-evaluate. Sitting inside a hall on a beautiful May day was still middle class hippy crap, but perhaps, she reflected reluctantly over lunch, Libby did have some things to say that were worth hearing. But Jo grew impatient with the silence, burbling with unexpressed ideas; she itched to grill both Therese and Libby. Late on Saturday as she finished her sixth painful hour of cross-legged sitting, it had dawned on her why Libby had such familiar eyes. Their depth and their expression, for all that they were in Libby’s dugai face inside a Japanese zendo at a Sufi-styled retreat, were familiar from Jo’s childhood. They were, she marvelled, Aunty Barb’s eyes set in a stranger’s face. It had taken her six hours of sitting perfectly still to see it.

  ‘So what’s the verdict, luvvy?’ Therese asked as they packed their bags on Sunday afternoon.

  ‘There’s a lot to it,’ Jo admitted, swinging her bag onto her shoulder. ‘But basically it’s just what Goories have been doing since the year dot.’

  Therese smirked.

  ‘I knew you’d like it. Not that I reckon you mob were necessarily talking about greed, anger and delusion, back in the day.’

  ‘I didn’t say I
– ouch!’ Jo lifted her right foot from the floor in sudden sharp pain. ‘What the hell?’

  Therese apologised, and bent to show Jo what she had stepped on. It was a bird’s nest that she had found in the bush outside.

  Jo took the nest in her hands and marvelled. The outer layer was made entirely from old and rusted strands of barbed wire. Inside, the nest had been carefully lined with feathers, and with grey and white down that some long-dead bird had donated for the comfort of her chicks. Talk about resilience, Jo thought, as she turned the singular object around in her hands. She imagined a mother magpie bringing the strands of fence wire to a fork in a gum tree, and twisting them with her beak into a suitable place to lay her eggs.

  ‘That’s wild, eh,’ Jo said softly in wonder. ‘You should give it to the Sangsurya mob.’

  ‘I offered it to them,’ Therese said, ‘but they told me to keep it. And it was on the ground, so the bird’s not using it anymore.’ She placed the nest very carefully in the top of her rucksack and zipped it inside.

  It was not until they were zooming up the highway, almost back at South Golden, that Jo realised: this beautiful nest and the fence which had killed Comet were made of the same stuff. She blinked. Maybe her grief was lifting. Maybe she was starting on the way back to herself.

  Humbug regarded Pete the Snakeman, and Pete the Snakeman regarded Humbug, and nothing at all passed between them. Humbug felt his lifelong sense of burning grievance double and then double again. The old story was repeating itself: a trespasser standing uninvited upon his land. And not content with that, the dugai world had now seen fit to add insult to injury, to deliberately send this gammon imposter – a white man who thought he knew snakes, the very idea was laughable – to evict him and his brother from where they had lately taken up residence at the RSL memorial.

  Pete the Snakeman shrugged.

  ‘Sorry, mate, just doing me job. Normal people don’t want snakes in the middle of town.’ Pete turned away and added under his breath, ‘Or dirty old abos either.’ He retrieved from his truck a long wire lasso, specially designed for extricating dangerous creatures from places they were feared or unwanted.

  Humbug fumed. Until now, the Mullum RSL memorial flame had been an ideal spot from which to extract his rightful tithes from the community. The neighbourhood centre was right there next door, a handy source of hot meals, cuppas and sympathetic female attention. Public toilets no more than twenty steps away. And the razzle-dazzle itself across the road. The club was, naturally, unavailable to him with his black face, his ragged attire, and his lack of ready cash, but as a veteran Humbug found some contrary solace in the building nevertheless. And he’d discoverd it took surprisingly little effort, in the late afternoons, to walk to the park beside the river and find enough dry palm fronds to turn the symbolic memorial flame into a real, substantial fire capable of warming himself, Slim and a tribe of motley hangers-on through the length of a chill August night.

  Overshadowing all these pragmatic attractions, though, was the symbolism of the war memorial. It marked a sacred site – sacred enough that even the dugai (universally milbong and binung goonj as they were) could see it, and had gone to the trouble of solidifying the fact in white marble. Humbug well recalled his most recent release from the hospital a week ago. He’d walked the length of town in search of a lift home to Bruns. Upon reaching the RSL, he had stood in front of the low chain separating the marble monument and its flame from Dalley Street. Inscribed in the dignity of bronze he had observed the legend:

  Sacred Site

  Please do not sit here.

  Humbug had never learned to decode the white man’s writing, but he could recognise a snake track when he saw one. Since he was of the snake totem, and Slim was, of course, a python, Humbug felt that his path was clear. Slim took a little convincing to shift home so abruptly, but Humbug had patiently sat and explained the merits of the move until his brother finally agreed to give it a try. They had hitched up from Bruns the same afternoon.

  But now, this dugai. Standing here with his van and his noose. This new and intolerable outrage.

  ‘You can’t pucken touch my brother!’ Humbug instructed Pete the Snakeman hotly. His angry brown forefinger jabbed the air between them like a fang.

  ‘Can and will. It’s me job, mate. Now hop it will ya?’

  ‘This is a sacred site,’ Humbug insisted, as though to an obtuse child. ‘Ya got no pucken business here!’

  Pete the Snakeman adjusted his lasso. He moved closer to where Slim was coiled asleep in the sun at the rear of the marble monument.

  ‘It’s a sacred site for the bloody RSL, mate, not your lot. What war were you in, again?’

  Humbug smiled a humourless smile that didn’t reach his eyes, and allowed the contempt he felt for this imposter to show on his lips. The fool didn’t realise he had been born into war. If Australia had a sole surviving battler, he was it. Humbug’s mother before him had lived her entire life warring with the welfare which took seven babies off her, distributing them, apparently at random, to orphanages and foster homes throughout the land. His father’s campaign against the mission superintendent and the tame blacks who did his bidding had consumed the man day and night until it killed him of sheer rage at the age of fifty-three. Humbug, stolen from his mother’s arms in the hospital – or no, not in the hospital, out the back of the hospital in a dirty lean-to on a pile of stained chaff bags – taken from his distraught mother and gifted to the nuns down south, had likewise been at war for every single one of his forty-nine years. And now this cheeky dugai, standing there with a wire rope to twist around his brother’s neck, ready and all too willing to effect another removal, wanted to know what war he’d been in?

  Well.

  ‘This one,’ cried Humbug, shattering the Snakeman’s nose with his hard right fist.

  Outside the courthouse, Sergeant Adams stiffened, and headed for the memorial, unhooking his handcuffs. The old darkie, making trouble again. It was about time he had a tune-up.

  When Jo arrived home from Sangsurya, Ellen and Twoboy were waiting for her in the kitchen. Ellen thrust an entry form for the art competition at her. Pleased, Jo quickly scrawled her assent on the dotted line. Art is good. We like art, for our kids and for everybody else. Then Ellen handed her a large white envelope.

  ‘What’s this?’ Jo asked suspiciously, fearing some unexpected bill. Creation was good for the soul, but was she going to have to fork out for oil paints, or expensive hog-bristle brushes, or...

  ‘A present.’ Ellen had that brittle look on her face again. Craving approval, but ready at the drop of a hat to back away into the refuges of sarcasm and anger. Her daughter reminded Jo of the turtles that sunned themselves on the rocks in the Bangalow Creek; tentatively poking their heads out, but hard shells always at the ready if trouble should arrive.

  ‘A present?’

  Jo glanced over at Twoboy, who was waiting with an expectant grin for her to open the envelope. Her mouth fell open as she took out a fine ink sketch of Comet grazing beneath the distant lychee trees. Across the bottom of the drawing Ellen had written: Comet Breen. RIP. Jo’s heart clenched tight with pain and with love. She hugged Ellen tightly to her as she told her that she loved the picture, raising her eyebrows at Twoboy over the child’s shoulder.

  ‘I dunno what you said or did to her,’ she told him before releasing Ellen, ‘but whatever it was, keep it up.’

  ‘You underestimate that girl, you know,’ Twoboy answered mildly.

  ‘How about we paint the ute when Aunty Kym gets here?’ Jo added as she threw a packet of frozen snags into the microwave, noting that the dogs were almost out of dry food. ‘She might have some good designs. And some paint too, for that matter.’ They had discussed turning the old bomb into an art car many times, but it just never seemed to happen. ‘And you could talk to her about the competition, too, see if she’s got any ideas.’

  Ellen shot her mother a withering glance. She went to her room and when s
he returned a couple of minutes later, she silently handed over a large sketchpad. Jo took it in two-handed amazement. Ellen had never volunteered to show her sketchpad to anyone, ever. Something was shifting inside the child for this to happen. Jo smiled, grateful for this tiny, unheralded step into Ellen’s world, as the microwave dinged behind her to say the snags were defrosted.

  When she opened the sketchpad, Jo discovered a term’s work that made her catch her breath and sink slowly onto a kitchen chair. Ochre handprints emerged from flying clouds of dust that suddenly became the eyes of an eagle looking down from the peak of Bottlebrush. The Milky Way – Emu in clear view – soared above a winding river of diamonds which mirrored it in the valley below. And a pencil drawing of a decayed red quandong leaf – its ribs remaining after it had been eaten out by miniscule snails (exactly as Jo had seen them lying on the banks of Stoney Creek) – which rested at the base of a grove of walking stick palms festooned with bright red berries.

  Jo was lost for words. The drawings weren’t just technically excellent. The kid had infused them with a real knowledge of country, and a vision that went way beyond thirteen. A shine of delight entered Ellen’s eyes as Jo sat transfixed.

  ‘Who taught you this?’ she finally breathed.

  ‘Different people. Aunty Kym mainly. What I’ve seen in shops. Twoboy. And DJ taught an art class at school this term. I have got eyes and ears, you know,’ Ellen added slyly, ‘mil and binung.’

  ‘Told ya.’ Twoboy ruffled Ellen’s hair affectionately.

  ‘Huh.’ Jo rifled through the rest of the sketchbook, discovering that almost everything in it looked gallery quality to her. Had anyone spoken to Ellen about selling her work, she wondered, about being a professional?

  ‘I don’t mind painting the ute with Aunty Kym,’ Ellen told Jo with haughty teenage dignity, ‘but I don’t want any help winning that prize.’