I walk around the side of the building and descend a concrete ramp to the underground carpark. I lean against the wall as a dirty van trundles up from the depths. I arrive at the basement, climb up on a sedan and settle on its roof. The water here comes to halfway up the windshields of the cars parked. I sit. A rainbow bee-eater flits past my face and lands on the branch of a wattle tree growing from within a ticket machine. The top of the tree reaches through the concrete ceiling above, and the bee-eater disappears up into its branches and through the roof. I look out across the car park, my eyes searching. I see it. A spray of air and water. A curved dorsal fin breaking the surface. This basement car park is a favourite spot for dolphins. It has become a favourite spot of mine.
I slide off the car and into the water. It doesn’t penetrate though. I am as dry as those who do not notice the dolphins or the snakes. I walk back up the ramp and onto the street. I stand back and admire the swamp that occupies Perth city. The road outside is an undulating stream. The pavement is taken over by sedges and reeds. The buildings are pierced by banksias, paperbarks and gums.
Did you come here seeking Air?
Beneath my feet, deep under Perth, is a scar. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the creator serpent split the billion-year-old crust in two. Half the continent was shorn away, leaving a bubbling sea of molten rock in its wake. Such were the brutal beginnings of Noongar Country.
Noongar land is a place of abundance, spirit, and culture. Noongar people cared for it before the settlers came. Noongar people continue to care for it.
The ocean of lava cooled leaving a broad basin of black rock attached to the new edge of the Australian continent. In the distance, the Indian plate was making its way north where it would crash into Asia and push up the Himalayas. The basin left behind was fifteen kilometres deep and thousands of kilometres long. The Wagyl got about creating.
The creator serpent is a Rivermaker and Rainlord. It wore down the mountains of inland Australia and washed the broken pieces into the scorched basin. Layer upon layer of fragmented earth was laid down, forming bands of sandstone and shale. The serpent pushed up hills and sank swamplands, and beaches were crafted from the skeletal remains of ancient sea creatures. The Wagyl’s watery body embedded itself in the landscape, bringing life and health to this new creation. A dusting of soil and plant matter settled delicately across the surface. This is the Swan Coastal Plain, a Riverland, built as a paradise for the humans and animals to come.
The memory of split earth remains, though. The Darling Scarp, the mountain chain to the east of Perth that runs parallel to the ocean, is the thousand-kilometre-long surface expression of where the Indian plate sheared off. The land remembers the violence that begot it.
Today this rich and storied Country lives under bitumen, brick and grass. Skyscrapers are the new signifiers of a history of violence.
I come to stand next to the bronze statues of kangaroos set in front of a local government building. Two drink from an artificial pool. The settler has become water-maker. Three kangaroos are bounding away, their backs to the pool and the Swan River, fleeing both actual and manufactured water. I lean in and inspect the dark expression of the large male. He is looking east – to the Scarp perhaps? I run my fingers along its neck and a glistening thread emerges from my palm. I break it off and let it drift away on the breeze.
Settlers will say that they brought science, technology and worldly culture to the shores of this wild country. Marvels. Advancements. Shakespeare. The wheel. And they did.
But they also brought savagery to Noongar Country. Slavery. Poverty. Incarceration. Massacre.
I step out of the way of a group of teenagers in private-school uniforms who are laughing as they walk. A family of ducks float through my legs.
There is another import to Noongar Country that has gone largely unnoticed.
Time.
Settlers are manufacturers of their own particular Time. European Time. Chronological Time. Linear Time. Biblical Time. The kind of Time that began not long ago, is happening now, and will end one day. This ancient continent has its own: Deep Time.
Noongar mob are pattern-thinkers and cycle-watchers. We remember the last Ice Age, tell stories of the Cold Times. Deep Time is a stone dropped in a pond and we read the ripples. This Country remembers what it was. It remembers everything that it has ever been. Settler Time overwhelmed us, but Deep Time endures.
Geologists can see what the creator serpent did, can read part of that story in the rocks. Ancient continent, they say. Blown flat by Time.
The sun is on its way down. The sky is pale blue with grey-pink clouds, reflecting in the river. Near my feet a tortoise with a thick carpet of shaggy moss on its shell is making its way past a traffic cone to its secret home somewhere within the walls of a restored church.
The streets are filling with people leaving work for home. Thousands of bodies. They are sliding through the swamp undampened. They traverse like cross-cosmic travellers in spacesuits walking on a foreign planet, carrying with them the atmosphere of their place of origin.
Anthropocene Air.
Threads continue to shed off me and float away on the breeze. The swamp water around my legs is feeling colder.
This Anthropocene Air was brought to Noongar Country from the European civilisations across the seas. It travelled with them on the ships, in the lungs of convicts, soldiers and settlers, trapped in their clothes, clinging to objects they brought with them. Like a second skin, an Air around them, a buffer between the minds and bodies of settlers and the Deep Time of Noongar Country. After more than two hundred years this coating of Air has survived. Parents breathe it into their infants born here, English language generates and replenishes it, children absorb it from art, music and stories. Anthropocene Air clumps together in cities and communities, bolstering it, reinforcing it.
This Air is around our feet, our hands, our eyes, our tongues. We walk on Air, a cushion of resistance between the soles of our feet and the soil of Noongar Country. A cloud that distorts and bends Time around us, keeping us in the quicker experience of Settler Time, and blocking out the cyclical Deep Time, the kind of Time that can split continents, raise mountains and fill oceans.
In this suit of Air we slide across Noongar Country. Never settling in, never sinking down.
I pull something like a clump of spiderwebs away from my arm. I let it go and see a shiny patch of transparent film float down to the swamp water.
Something has happened to my Anthropocene Air.
A dorsal fin breaks the surface of the road-river in front of me. Its tip points towards the sky, unlike the curved fins of the dolphins of the basement carpark. I leave the bronze kangaroos and walk a few steps down towards a street corner. I turn back to see that the fin, rudder-like and with compass accuracy, has zeroed in on me. I step off the kerb, jellyfish fleeing from my path, and a cold sensation creeps up my legs. I hurry across the road and step up onto the next street corner. I look back. The fin is following.
I quicken my pace and weave between people leaving work. I feel safe in the thick throng of humans. My legs are feeling heavy and cold.
I turn and a mother pushing a pram is about to run me over. I bring my hand up to stop the pram crashing into me but my hands touch nothing, the mother walks right through me. I am frozen on the spot, my eyes darting around.
The light changes around me. The skyscrapers are losing their solidity. The golden late-afternoon sun now filters straight through them, illuminating all the water around me. Coldness creeps up my legs and I look down and see that I am damp to my knees. The pedestrians walking past look like ghosts; light passes through their heads, obliterating their facial features. The outline of a suited man approaches me and my eyes pass through his eyes as we occupy the same space, impossibly, for a moment.
My hair stands on end. I glance back over my shoulder and see the dorsal fin bearing dow
n on me again. I turn and run. The swamp water is dragging against my legs. I can still feel pavement under my feet but the reeds are dragging me back. Pieces of diaphanous Air are peeling off from my chest like rotted rags. I keep running and splashing among the spectres of citizens. I reach another street corner and I leap off the kerb. When I land there is no road beneath and I sink like a stone into cold water. I reach up for a handhold but my body weight plunges me deeply. I sense a dark shape moving overhead and my fingertips graze the underside of a smooth, slick belly. Panicked, I kick my legs and search for the surface. The water is holding me down, like the coils of a snake around my limbs.
Water and Air.
I break the surface and look around wildly. I see the cliffs of Kings Park, rising high above. I turn and the bank of the South Perth foreshore is far behind me.
I must be in the Swan River.
No.
There are no buildings. No luxury apartments on the foreshore. No skyscrapers piercing the river banks.
I swim towards a rocky spit covered in reeds. My feet find a foothold and I climb out of the water, coming to stand on a sandy islet. I glance around and the shorelines are different; they are fuller, deeper. The Swan River that I know isn’t present. This is the Bilya.
The city isn’t there. Just swamp, streams, sandhills and limestone. Banksia, paperbark, melaleuca and gum. Swans, herons, pelicans and gulls. It’s very quiet. The evening sky above is dappled with pink and violet clouds. There is no sign of people around. I am alone.
I look down at my hands and they are draped with a barely perceptible translucent coating. I pinch it with my fingers but it’s too fine to get a hold of. Shreds of this material hang all over my body. I move my fingers to my mouth and push strands away from my lips. I breathe in deeply.
A heron walks past in the reeds, long-legged and soft-footed, looking for crabs. The water gives off light where it is disturbed.
A ragged piece of Air is hanging from my elbow and I wonder at it. How did it become so flimsy? I crouch and dip the edge into the water. It fizzes slightly. I pull it out and the transparent fabric has frayed out into threads.
Riverwater can split rock, dig basins, wear away mountains.
The water was there, patiently wearing away my suit of Anthropocene Air. The lakes and swamps seep through. I look around and see that there is no dry land in Deep Time Perth. The landscape is a pervasive memory of saturation. The reclaimed earth that the skyscrapers occupy is only temporary, ephemeral even. It wasn’t there in the past and it won’t be there in the future.
I see a dolphin pod chasing bream out in the open.
Do I want roads and parks here again? My grandmother’s culture was bitumined and concreted and bricked and grassed. My grandfather’s culture brought Anthropocene Air from across the sea. Perhaps all my life I have been marooned on unnatural dry land along with everyone who settled here. Like sea creatures washed onto a rock, gasping for life, and the Deep Time memory of the river flowed over us, invisible, keeping us alive. Held between Water and Air.
I stand on the rocky shore of the Bilya, the ecstatic and unbound body of the Wagyl. The water is glinting in a way that I’ve never seen before. Reds, blues, greens and yellows are bouncing across the surface. An invitation from the creator serpent. Jump back into the water. I will rid you of that suit of Air for good.
Evening in Deep Time Perth is settling in. The amber light from the sunken sun fades and the sky is a deep indigo. Out of the corner of my eye I see a flicker. I turn and face where the city was and something is glinting there, something in the Air maybe, but I can’t make it out. I turn and look up at Kings Park, no, Kaarta Gar-up, and there are shadows dancing between the trees. I run my hands across my eyes and I can feel the shreds of my suit of Air. With a slow movement I brush the remaining strands from my face and look again.
My vision is overcome with rainbow prisms and I blink rapidly. Slightly nauseated, I look up at Kaarta Gar-up and see the glow of campfires dotting the clifftop. People. Noongar mob. The light of my ancestors shines through the vast memory of Deep Time.
Not so alone.
I look back at the swamps of Perth and see that there are pinpoints of light there too. In the Air. Hanging in nothing. Hovering lights in columns, up and down and across. They have a grid-like arrangement, strange against the natural splendour. I realise what they are. The lit-up windows of the city pierce through to glow over the Deep Time river landscape.
Did you come here seeking Light?
I settle onto a rock. Far beneath where I sit, under layers and layers of broken pieces of long-dead mountains, is a split landscape. In Settler Time it has healed and changed into the paradise that is Noongar Country. But in Deep Time that split echoes, and echoes, and echoes.
Dreamers
Melissa Lucashenko
Melissa Lucashenko is a Goorie author of Bundjalung and European heritage. Her first novel, Steam Pigs, was published in 1997 and her work has received many awards. Her sixth novel, Too Much Lip, won the 2019 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Melissa is a Walkley Award winner for her non-fiction, and a founding member of human rights organisation Sisters Inside.
‘Gimme an axe.’
The woman blurted this order across the formica counter. When the shopkeeper turned and saw her brimming eyes he took a hasty step backward. His rancid half-smile, insincere to begin with, vanished into the gloomy corners of the store. It was still very early. Outside, tucked beneath a ragged hibiscus bush, a hen cawed a single doubtful note. Inside was nothing but this black girl and her highly irregular demand.
The woman’s voice rose an octave. ‘Give us a Kelly, Mister, quick. I got the fiver.’
She rubbed a grubby brown forearm across her wet eyes. Dollars right there in her hand, and still the man stood, steepling his fingers in front of his chest.
It was 1969. Two years earlier there had been a referendum. Vote Yes for Aborigines. Now nobody could stop blacks going where they liked. But this just waltzing in like she owned the place, mind you. No please, no could I. And an axe was a man’s business. Nothing good could come of any Abo girl holding an axe.
The woman ignored the wetness rolling down her cheeks. She laid her notes on the counter, smoothed them out. Nothing wrong with them dollars. Nothin’ at all. She pressed her palms hard onto the bench.
‘Are. You. Deaf?’
‘Ah. Thing is. Can’t put my hand to one just at the ah. But why not ah come back later, ah. Once you’ve had a chance to ah.’
The woman snorted. She had had had fifty-one years of coming back later. She pointed through an open doorway to the dozen shining axes tilted against the back wall. On its way to illuminate these gleaming weapons, her index finger silently cursed the man, his formica counter, his cawing hen, his come back later, his ah, his doorway, and every Dugai who had ever stood where she stood, ignorant of the jostling bones beneath their feet.
Her infuriated hiss sent him reeling.
‘Sell me one of them good Kellys, or truesgod, Mister, I dunno what I’ll do.’
As twenty-year-old Jean got off the bus, she rehearsed her lines. ‘I’m strong as strong. Do a man’s eight hours in the paddock if need be. Giss a chance, missus.’
When Jean reached the dusty front yard of the farm on Crabbes Creek Road, and saw the swell of May’s stomach, hard and round as a melon beneath her faded cotton dress, she knew that she couldn’t work here. When May straightened, smiling, from the wash basket, though, and mumbled through the wooden pegs held in her teeth, ‘Jean? Oh, thank God you’re here,’ she thought that perhaps she could.
Ted inched up the driveway that afternoon in a heaving Holden sedan. Shy and gaunt, he was as reluctant to meet Jean’s eye as she was to meet his. This white man would not be turning her door handle at midnight. She decided to stay for a bit. If the baby came out a girl she would just keep going and, anyway, maybe it
would be a boy.
The wireless in the kitchen said the Japanese were on the back foot in New Guinea but from Crabbes Creek the war seemed unlikely and very far away. What was real was endless green paddocks stretching to where the scrub began, and after that the ridge of the Border Range, soaring to cleave the Western sky. The hundred-year-old ghost gums along the creek; the lowing of the cows at dawn: these things were real. A tame grey lizard came to breakfast on the veranda, and occasionally Jean would glimpse the wedgetails wheeling far above the mountain, tiny smudges halfway to the sun. May had seen both eagles on the road once, after a loose heifer had got itself killed by the milk truck. You couldn’t fathom the hugeness of them, and the magnificent curve of their talons, lancing into the unfortunate Hereford’s flank.
Jean fell into a routine of cleaning, cooking, helping May in the garden, and sitting by the wireless at night until Ted began to snore or May said, ‘Ah, well.’ Of a morning, as she stoked the fire and then went out with an icy steel bucket to milk the bellowing Queenie, Jean would hear May retching and spewing in the thunder box. One day, two months after she first arrived, there was blood on the marital sheets. Jean stripped the bed and ordered May to lie back down on clean linen. Then she took Ted’s gun off the wall and shot a young roo from the mob that considered the golden creek flats their own particular kingdom. A life to save another life. Jean made broth from the roo tail. ‘And you can just lie there till it’s your time,’ she said crisply. ‘It’s not like I can’t manage that little patch of weedy nothing you like to call a garden.’
The life inside May fought hard to hang on. Her vomiting eased, and as the weeks passed the terror slowly left her face. When her time drew very near, an obvious question occurred to May: Didn’t Jean want children of her own? A husband?
‘Not really,’ said Jean, ‘and who would I marry anyway, and is that Ted home already.’
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