I run outside yellin’. Then I stop. At the end of the street I see a walbiya car droppin’ someone off at the Mission. Runnin’ down the road as fast as I can to catch them before they leave, I wave my arms in the air.
‘Hey. Hey. Hey, Mister,’ I yell, surprised at my lack of shame.
‘Hello. You’re Ada’s young girl, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, Mister.’ I nod. He looks familiar, but I don’t know his name.
‘What can I do for you, young lady?’
‘If you’re on the way to town can you please give me and my sisters a lift to 18 Mile Tank? I need to take my sisters to my mumma.’ I try to sound official, not too desperate, so the man will agree.
‘Is that right?’ he asks with one of his eyebrows right up high on his ngulya.
‘Yeah,’ I say, not wanting to say any more ’cause I don’t want to lie.
‘Okay, I’ll wait here,’ he says. ‘But don’t take too long now, because I have other business to do.’
I run as fast as I can to get my minya sisters. Aunty Dorrie tries to argue with me that I can’t go takin’ them away like that, but there’s no stoppin’ me. Soon we’re in the back of the walbiya man’s car and on the way to 18 Mile Tank, a place I know Ada will be ’cause I hear the grown-ups talkin’ ’bout it all the time.
When the man pulls up to drop us off and I see Ada sittin’ on the other side of the campfire drinkin’, I thank him and help my sisters outa the car.
I’ve put on a polite, calm face to get there, but now my rage starts to fester up again, when I look at Ada drinkin’ away and laughin’ with Nyunga and walbiya mooga near the campfire. I storm over to her with my little sisters in tow.
When she sees me, the smile on her face turns to moogada.
‘How dare you do this to us,’ I scream with such force my throat feels raw.
Ada staggers to her feet and I can hear my minya sisters callin’ out for her and cryin’ behind me.
‘Just look at us, Ada. We’re bloody starvin’ and you’re here drinkin’ with these arse’oles. You should be fuckin’ ashamed of yourself.’
I know I’ve over-stepped the mark talkin’ to Ada like this, and she’ll give me a good floggin’ now but my rage is beyond control. It’s like the weepin’ pus inside me is burstin’ out, like a big festerin’ boil that’s reached its limit and is now explodin’ all over Ada.
‘You filthy mouthed little cow,’ is all Ada can manage as she runs towards me like a mad woman. ‘How dare you come here and talk to me like that.’ Her face has now gone a deeper shade and the veins in her neck are showin’. ‘How dare you come here and bring your minya sisters to this place.’
Next thing, we’re hittin’ at each other. I’ve never hit Ada before but my rage pushes me forward.
‘We’re starvin’, fuck you. We’re starvin’, Ada,’ I scream between mouthfuls of spit and hair pullin’. ‘What kind of a mother are you, lettin’ your little girls starve like this?’
Someone comes to pull us apart, and next thing I know we’re all bein’ driven back to the Mission, Ada as angry as hell and me with the devil in my guru mooga.
Goojarb, I think as we head home. Ada wanna leave us home starvin’ like that. I’m glad I shamed her there in front of all them drunken idiots. My minya sisters need her home, I need her home, with us.
18
Growing changes
It’s like our big family’s slowly breakin’ up into minya pieces and driftin’ away. First was Papa Neddy, then Old Rod. Mumma’s been away, and come back again but I know she’ll be goin’ soon too. All the aunties have got mudgie mooga now and even Molly’s found a mudgie, from Point Pearce, and will probably be marryin’ him soon and Mumma will most likely go and live with them. Since Papa died Mumma seems to have got old real quick-way and just isn’t up to lookin’ after us grannies like she used too. She’s more absent-minded, lost in her own thoughts all the time.
With less people in the house workin’ there’s less food, so we’re hungry more often. Although my Uncle Jerry and Uncle Wadu and their wives, Aunty Ruth and Aunty Nora, are real good to us and help to feed us kids, sometimes I feel shame when we eat their food. I’m thinkin’ it should be Ada here feedin’ us kids, not them, they got their own kids to feed.
Durin’ this time, I start to think about food all the time. Is there gonna be enough food to go ’round? Will Ada be home soon with a good feed for us? What am I gonna do if my minya sisters start cryin’ hungry-way again? How can I get more food into their little djuda mooga? It was easier when I was younger ’cause I was real clever at survivin’ and gettin’ food but now there seems to be less options and I have my minya sisters to think about now, too. I remember when I was little goin’ over to old Jack and Jude Clare’s place and workin’ real hard-way, washin’ dishes and doin’ their floors and hangin’ ’round until they’d give me a plate of food. Jack Clare always had work, so his family nearly always had food at their house. Then there used to be old Mr Dempsey who I’d help to do the weedin’ and he’d give me money to buy my sultana cake at the Mission shop and if I had enough left over, pineapple juice, bush biscuits and Iced Vovo biscuits. But now Mr Dempsey too old to do his weedin’ job on the Mission footpaths and no-one needs me to help them with their work any more, so I can’t earn any bunda to buy food.
I try to look after my minya sisters now that Ada isn’t home very often. Other than endowment from the government, when Ada’s home to buy food with it, and the Mission rations of tea, sugar and flour, we have no food of our own to contribute to our household. We’re all that sick of eatin’ boonu, a pasty mixture of flour, water and sometimes sugar. Boonu clogs us up and at times we get so sick of it that we don’t even wanna eat it at all. Drippin’ on bread is even a luxury now. And when we get real desperate we go out and chew on sour sobs for a feed when they’re in season but when we eat too many we get djuda minga. Sometimes I take my sisters out in the scrub to try to find a feed of Nyunga mai like Mumma, Ada and the aunties taught me, but it seems to be hard to find ’cause everyone’s cleaned it out close to the Mission, unless we walk a long way away, and that isn’t always safe, ’specially for the little girls.
I remember when I was Jane and Maddy’s age, Mumma takin’ us kids down to the caves along the beach between Ceduna and Thevenard in the hot weather and gettin’ us to lick the salt off the cave walls. Normally, salt is imin, tabu, bad or evil, something that might make us sick Nyunga-way, and we never put it on our meat, but takin’ it like this was all right, it must have been good for our minya bodies. Mumma knows so much about how to keep us strong Nyunga-way but now she’s growin’ old and weak and everything’s changin’, even those cliffs near the beach where Mumma took us when we were younger are startin’ to be washed away by the tides.
Sometimes Dave and Aunty Mim pick us up and take us to the farm, then we can have a good feed. Durin’ these times, once every now and again, Dave will complain, in a round-about way, about us girls. It’s in the way he says things and how he acts, and sometimes it makes me feel a bit shame. But Aunty Mim always reminds him of their promise to Old Rod before he left for Adelaide and I’m always real thankful that she and Dave look after us real well when we spend time with them. Mrs Williams has asked us to call her Grandma now. I think she must know about Old Rod’s promise too ’cause she treats us real nice-way.
When Eva comes back for holidays, sometimes Dave and Aunty Mim pick up just the two of us. If Ada’s home, she’ll look after the minya ones and if not, the aunties and Mumma will, or sometimes we all go together. Other times, they take Eva and me to the football at Charra, a dance, or some walbiya place for a supper. Occasionally, we go to the Children’s ’Ome and pick out some second-hand clothes and other times Aunty Mim makes clothes for us to wear. Then she helps us dress up at the farm beforehand.
My most favourite time is when we
go to the Charra Hall for tea and a dance after the football ’cause they serve the biggest feed of roast meats, salads and desserts on big trestles. When everyone finishes eatin’ they clear the tables and move them and the stools back to the side walls to make space for the dance floor. Then the music starts up and everyone dances away. And even though we don’t mix with people much ’cause we’re real shy, usually standin’ back in the shadows in the corner, we see how them whitefellas behave among themselves and how we’re expected to behave when we’re ’round them. And even though the whisperin’ behind people’s murra about us still happens, I don’t feel as shame as I usually do. Maybe it’s because I’m there with Dave and Aunty Mim and they’re married, not like Ada and Old Rod, ’cause he already had a wife.
One day, Dave and Aunty Mim come to pick me up to take me to supper at another farmhouse and lots of other farmers will be there too. I haven’t got any clean clothes to wear, only my dirty, old, stained dress and my wrists still have those sores on them.
‘We can’t take her like that,’ Dave says, lookin’ me up and down.
I feel real shame. I can’t help it if my sores won’t go away and that we don’t have any money to buy Velvet soap to wash the stains outa my clothes.
‘Let her come,’ Aunty Mim pleads. Then she turns to me and says, ‘Grace, do you wanna come and you can wait in the car for us?’
I nod my head, real pleased. That way I can still go with them to the farm after, for the weekend. I’m glad ’cause I’d rather sit in a car in the dark than stay on the Mission.
Later one of the older walaba girls comes out to the car and gives me a plate of food. I thank her, we talk for a while, and then she goes back inside. It feels strange that a walaba girl is treatin’ me nice like that but it makes me feel good inside, too.
As I sit in the car and wait for the supper to finish that night, I think about Ada, how she’s changed since Old Rod’s died. I wonder what it’s like for her now. Did she feel like she was sittin’ outside in the dark too, now that the money going into the Mission shop has stopped and her sister, Aunty Mim, was now in charge of the farmhouse? After Old Rod died, Dave and Aunty Mim moved into Old Rod and Grandma Williams’ bedroom and Grandma Williams moved into the front room. She kind of disappears into the background after that ’cause she’s no longer the main woman runnin’ the house, although she’s always there supportin’ Aunty Mim and helpin’ her with the cookin’ and housework. But this must be hard for her.
It must be hard for Ada too, to cope with lookin’ after us kids by herself, she must be real sad missing Old Rod but it doesn’t excuse her for runnin’ ’round like she does. I promise myself that when I’m old enough and find a mudgie, I’ll get married and not have kids like her and Old Rod. No way will I marry any of those ugly Nyunga boys on the Mission, especially not the ones that call us names. I’ll marry a handsome man like the movie stars I’ve seen in the magazines at the hospital and the films they sometimes show in the Mission hall. And when I have kids, I’ll work hard to support my family, and make sure my kids are well fed and looked after. No kids deserve to go through what my sisters and me have been through, and if I have my way my kids never will. But Ada seems to have settled down more now, getting work as a milkmaid on the Mission and so we’ve got more food and us kids are eatin’ better now.
There’s a lot of changes for everyone at this time. Everythin’ seems to be changin’, includin’ me. My minya wunyi body’s growin’ into a woman’s and there are things happenin’ that I feel shame about. There’s no hidin’ my mimmi mooga that are growin’ out in front of me that I can’t cover up even if I stoop forward and put on layers of clothes. The Mission boys seem to be noticin’ my changes too. They look me up and down real slow-way, like they’re studying me real hard with their goola goola guru mooga, which makes me feel shame and moogada with them too. I want to throw bunda mooga at them and hit them in their stupid heads to stop them starin’ at me like that. I don’t know what they see in me anyway.
Sometimes I try to see what they see, strainin’ my guru mooga in Mumma’s little sliver of a mirror near the bowl of water where we cook and sometimes wash our hands, but it’s too small to look properly. I can only see one minya part of me at a time: an eye, a nose, part of my mouth. I can’t see the full picture of what other people see.
Then one day, on a rare occasion that the Mission bus takes us into town, I stand in front of a shop with my minya sisters pretending to look at the display. Instead I look at my reflection in the window. My hair is shoulder length, thick and wavy, and my figure, slim. As my sisters happily chat away about a dolly they can see, I turn sideways. My mimmi mooga are gettin’ bigger, pushin’ out from the front of my dress, and my hips more curvy than I remember. But look at those skinny legs. They’re just as skinny as when I last looked at them in the mirror at Mona Tareen’s, but now they are real long. I look quite tall standin’ next to my minya sisters. I can’t believe how much I’ve changed. Is that what them boys see? But true to God, I wish they wouldn’t stare the way they do.
Even my smell starts to change, especially under my armpits, my nguggil smell is more like a big woman’s now, more like Ada’s or Mumma Jenna’s. I remember Mumma Jenna smiling at me with her loving eyes as she wipes her murra mooga under her armpits and tells me how her nguggil, when wiped over my minga leg, will make it strong. I know that’s not the way whitefellas look at it; they turn their noses up at nguggil, screw up their faces, tell us to go wash ourselves, or just walk away. I think of Old Rod telling us to keep clean and wash ourselves regularly, wash away any trace of those strong powerful smells from our bodies. We’re comfortable with our own smell, but walbiya want us to wash it away, want us to smell like them.
With them Mission boys starin’ at me, and goin’ out with Dave and Aunty Mim, I’m noticing the stains on my dresses now, my dirty legs and my knotted hair, and now I’m always trying to keep clean and tidy. And ’cause we can’t get clothes from Mona Tareen’s any more, my clothes aren’t flash either. Feelin’ shame, I often stay at home instead of runnin’ ’round and playin’ with the other kids on the Mission like I used to.
When I do go out, or to school, the teasing starts again. But now it’s about boys. This time it’s about a boy called Bradley Winterman. ‘Grace loves Bradley Winterman. He’s your mudgie, ah, ah, ah.’
‘Shut up. He is not,’ is all I can manage in my defence.
I’m so moogada with their stupidity. I know Bradley Winterman quite well, he is a quiet boy who lives in the Children’s ’Ome and goes to the Mission school but I have no intention of making him my mudgie.
Next it is another boy. ‘Grace loves Arnold Clare.’
In the end I just ignore them. I have nothin’ but contempt for these boys on the Mission and there is no way I am going to marry any one of them. For starters they’re black and all my life they’ve teased me that I’m a ‘whitefella kid’ so it seems to me that we don’t belong together. And I think all them boys are ugly anyway. Although I have a rough idea that Nyunga-way some of these boys might be the right skin for me to marry. The old Kokatha people on the Mission would know this, if I cared to ask. But I have no intention of listenin’ to anybody, ’cause I know they’ll want me to stay on the Mission and marry one of those miserable, nasty boys.
Besides, I’m headin’ to Adelaide to go to high school soon, and I know from my time in hospital that life in the city is very different from life on the Mission. When I come back I’ll see the world differently, just like those other girls who’ve gone to Adelaide, including Eva. They always seem more confident and use their manners when they come back for holidays. Anyway, I want to be more like them pretty actresses I see in the movies. Then I can find myself a handsome walbiya man to marry like those lady actresses do. They’re always so confident and comfortable with their selves too, and wear beautiful clothes and drive in nice big cars like Old Rod’
s. And I’m always so impressed how they know exactly what to say at the right time and always end up with the most handsome man in the movie.
That’s how I wanna be and those ugly boys on the Mission aren’t gonna be my boyfriend. With all their teasin’ over the years I just don’t feel like I belong there anyway. Leavin’ is what I really want to do.
19
Wash me away
The following month, as I stand at the back door of our minya cottage, I know the time’s comin’ soon for me to leave my minya sisters and go to Adelaide to high school. As I watch them playin’ out in the backyard sadness sweeps over me and fills my guru mooga with tears. I really don’t want to leave them alone but I have no choice. The Superintendent has already made the arrangements for me and Neta Bales to travel on the bus together.
On the other side of the yard, I can see my uncles cleanin’ a biggy ngunchu in the metal tub in the shade from the side of the house. This tub is more often used to clean wadu mooga before they get cooked but they’ve somehow got hold of a biggy ngunchu and are now shaving its dead body with a sharp knife. Uncle Jerry is holding the stiff front legs while Uncle Wadu shaves the back of its fat pink body. Every now and again they wave their hands over their faces to shoo away the yumbra mooga that buzz around.
I want a bath but I’ll have to wait ’til they finish cleanin’ the biggy ngunchu. The grown-ups mostly use the tub to have baths but sometimes it’s used like it is now, for cleanin’ dead animals before they’re cooked. It’s usually left outside ’cause it takes up too much room inside.
A gust of wind whips up around the back of the house. I think of Papa, his spirit movin’ through the wurly wurly at his funeral, then me kissing his cold cheek and the blanketie bein’ pulled over his face. I shudder. I miss the warm, livin’ Papa. He was like the mortar that held our minya cottage together and now it seems that we are slowly crumblin’ and tumblin’ down. I walk over to the old copper boiler to refill it and heat up the water for my bath.
Mazin Grace Page 19