THIRTEEN
scattered all about in confusion – dandan The ancestors never come when the whirly-whirly is about. The whirly-whirly is called the dust devil by some people because it scatters everything about in confusion. We call them dandan – they are bad spirits, tunnelling across the whole world, throwing up coal dust, sand, dirt, water and snow. I saw them on two occasions during my life. The first time was as a boy, when we took the train to the big city to perform in the sesquicentenary Flower Show for all the gathering crowds. Our performance was called ‘The Development of Australia’ and I was playing Half-Caste Boy Number Two and the other boys played the characters of Full-Blood Boy One, Two, Quadroon Boy One, Two, Octoroon Boy One, Two, and the big boys played Priest and Schoolmaster, one boy played Governor too. We had to act like gentry, the octoroon boys the most, the full-blood boys not at all. We ended up winning second prize. First prize went to the re-enactment of the landing of the Endeavour ship. At the end of the day a big whirly-whirly came through the back of the stage and the Koori actors had to be pushed up there by their guardians, that’s how scared they all looked. Even the adults. I asked Tommy – Octoroon Boy Number One – why everyone was scared and he didn’t have a clue, so I made certain to ask next time I visited my ancestors.
They told me, ‘That’s a bad spirit, and if you get close to him he’ll catch you. Never come and see us if you ever see the whirly-whirly man is around and making dandan.’ I didn’t see another whirly-whirly for years. Yet I felt all that confusion all my life. I think we all have. Many years later the dandan arrived at Prosperous and stayed a long, long time, and after that I didn’t time-travel again.
searching, looking around – ngaa-bun-gaa-nha When I turned fifteen and was too old for the Boys’ Home I was a ward of the state still, working the local properties. At nineteen I was issued my dog tag. With it I could travel in a certain distance to work for meat and salt on the field or out
mustering. I moved around far and wide looking for work, but I was looking mostly ngaa-bun-gaa-nha for home.
sea – murriyan We never went to the sea. All my adult life it seemed it was only the white families that went on holidays to the sea. Even with my ancestors we didn’t go to the beach; we did travel high above the seas, but I never felt the surf crash on my legs like I’ve seen on the TV. I’m going to leave the world having never gone to the sea, and that’s okay by me. There are plenty things I haven’t done, and it didn’t make my life any worse. I have never taken an aeroplane trip, I’ve never gone to another country overseas, not like August. I’ve never lain under the house or climbed on the roof of Prosperous, or seen an opera in real life or learnt to play a musical instrument. I can’t complain about this life – I’m a time traveller, after all. If I could have changed things, though, I would have. I would have been a boy with a sister and a mummy and maybe a daddy even, and we would have taken trips to the murriyan. As far as I time-travel, I never have come across my own mummy and daddy.
shadow, evil – nguru You can’t say much against the family – people get worried and threatened if you turn on the group. I reckon it’s because the group can’t afford to lose anyone else after everything that’s happened.
So I never told Mary what we thought of Jimmy. Elsie ignored her intuition, and so we took in my sister Mary and always with her, little Jimmy too. I was blinded by wanting family more than goodness. What was wrong about Jimmy, I can’t quite put my finger on. He didn’t throw tantrums or things about, instead he harboured secrets and nursed great contempt for people wherever he went. He did grow up into a cunning sort of lad, always the right thing to say, always the right turn of phrase. I don’t know where he got all those things from because my sister had been nothing but good and hardworking. There was honour in how she lived and worked, putting food on the table is sometimes as loving as a person can manage, but love it is nonetheless. Well, we didn’t know, but he had a whirly-whirly inside him all along, the nguru and ngarran too.
sing – babirra There’s nothing to it, they said, just open up your mouth and your body follows. Well, it’s not that easy is it, not on the ear for anyone hanging around? Good thing about living at the foot of a field is you
can walk enough paces and be pretty sure no-one’s going to hear you.
Whenever I’ve cried in my life it’s always come when I start singing. I could never hold a tune but that isn’t the reason we try something, not perfection. Perfection is just someone’s little opinion at the end of the day, and there isn’t much that man makes that is perfect anyway. There’s a saying I’ve heard that wounds can only be healed by the one who inflicts the wound. I’d bet whoever first said that hadn’t had a good sing. Singing is a balm for the singer, and if the singer can hold pitch then it’s a balm for the listener too. Any song will do, the field doesn’t mind either way. Sometimes I’ll sing the worship songs when I’m lost, a little line will get into my head, ‘Oh Jesus, show me the way … we go down to the river to pray …’ I’ll be singing low or loud and kicking in the dirt, and the tears will just come when they are ready. Sometimes I’ll hear a chorus on the radio and it’ll be stuck in my head for weeks, and I’ll take it out to the field. Then the ghosts, the ancestors taught me songs too, and I’ll be sounding like something you’ve never heard before, low notes that start at the feet and the high ones that treble in the chest and make my heart tremble. Babirra is good, it’s food you can’t see but fills you up anyway.
soil, earth, dirt – manhang In the kitchen garden we grew hardy vegetables – potatoes, carrots, cassava, the cuttings we got from the Chinese merchant who’d come through Massacre and take orders, from mob around town mostly. Over the years that Prosperous had existed our people had gone without many things, but not us when Elsie and I lived here – we put everything into the soil, good manure, and turning, weeding it every day to grow our food. In the days when I was born there was less men around to work after the war, so the women worked just as hard. They used to grow corn in the summer rainfall, high stalks with husks the colour of butter. But they stopped getting that summer rain. I think the town looked to Jesus instead, when he said in John 7:37 If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. If they believed, if they had faith in the end of a drought, then Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water. But the water didn’t come back.
In the science books at the library in town is where I eventually read about the soil. Terrible plants grow around here too, foreign weeds. The worst was originally grown by a lady, Mrs Paterson, under the Hume Weir.
In her innocent-looking cottage garden she planted a pretty purple flower
and it soon spread like a certain death for grazing animals across the entire continent. That evil purple plant’s name is Paterson’s curse, and there’s no way around that bugger. There were others, there still are – capeweed, skeleton weed, wild radish, wild turnip, rye grass, wild oats, and now that cotton too – they all suck the good and the water from the already-dry ground. Nowadays something always in the way. Back then too, when soil had gone to acid and lime had to be shipped out and sent over the mountains to put some life back into this place. Over and over that cycle never ended – taking the good out of the soil and trying to put it back with chemicals. I read that inside the soil there are the same number of microbes as there are stars in the universe, and how if you farmed the soil you took the chance of rain away with the nutrients. Well, that blew my mind – just because we don’t know something, doesn’t mean we will always find out the answer. But I found it out. Once you find a piece of something you know about, afterwards you end up getting given more and more pieces of the puzzle everywhere you go. One thing comes and then the world tells you to look out for all the other missing information. Manhang – that’s where the body goes eventually, and everything else from the manhang to the stars is eternally alive with our spirits.
