ONE
I was born on Ngurambang – can you hear it? – Ngu–ram–bang. If you say it right it hits the back of your mouth and you should taste blood in your words. Every person around should learn the word for country in the old language, the first language – because that is the way to all time, to time travel! You can go all the way back.
My daddy was Buddy Gondiwindi and he died a young man by the hands of a bygone disease. My mother was Augustine and she died an old woman by the grip of, well, it was an Old World disease too.
Yet nothing ever really dies, instead it all goes beneath your feet, beside you, part of you. Look there – grass on the side of the road, tree bending in the wind, fish in the river, fish on your plate, fish feeding you. Nothing is ever gone. Soon, when I change, I won’t be dead. I always memorised John 11:26 Whoever lives and believes in me shall never die, yet life rushed through and past me as it will for each person.
Before I believed everything they taught me I thought when all were dead that all were gone, and so as a young fella I tried to find my place in this short life. I only wanted to decide for myself how I’d live it, but that was a big ask in a country that had a plan for me, already mapped in my veins since before I was born.
The one thing I thought I could control was my own head. It seemed the most sensible thing to do was to learn to read well. So in a country where we weren’t really allowed to be, I decided to be. To get water from the stones, you see?
After I met my beautiful wife, although beauty was the least of her, strong and fearless was the most of her – well she taught me lots of things.
Big thing, best thing she taught me was to learn to write the words too, taught me I wasn’t just a second-rate man raised on white flour and Christianity. It was my wife, Elsie, who bought me the first dictionary. I think she knew she was planting a seed, germinating something inside me when she did that. What a companion the dictionary is – there are stories in
that book that’ll knock your boots off. To this day it remains my prized possession and I wouldn’t trade it for all the tea in China.
The dictionary from Elsie is why I’m writing it down – it was my introduction to the idea of recording, written just like the Reverend once wrote the births and baptisms at the Mission, like the station manager wrote rations at the Station and just like the ma’ams and masters wrote our good behaviour at the Boys’ Home – a list of words any fool can look up and be told the meaning. A dictionary, even if this language isn’t mine alone, even it’s something we grow into and then living long enough, shrink away from.
I am writing because the spirits are urging me to remember, and because the town needs to know that I remember, they need to know now more than ever before.
To begin – but there are too many beginnings for us Gondiwindi – that’s what we were bestowed and cursed with by the same shifty magic – an eternal Once upon a time. The story goes that the church brought time to us, and the church, if you let it, will take it away. I’m writing about the other time, though, deep time. This is a big, big story. The big stuff goes forever, time ropes and loops and is never straight, that’s the real story of time.
The problem now facing my own Once upon a time is that Doctor Shah from the High Street Surgery has recently given me a filthy bill of health – cancer of the pancreas – which is me done and dusted.
So, because they say it is urgent, because I’ve got the church time against me – I’m taking pen to paper to pass on everything that was ever
remembered.
All the words I found on the wind.
