THIRTY-FOUR
Biyaami, spirit that ruled the Gondiwindi – Biyaami, Baiame When the world was young still, my ancestors told me, Biyaami came upon the earth and decided to make it a beautiful place to live, so he made the plateaus and the mountains, he made the deserts, and stretches of sand and seashores. He planted shrubs and flowers and trees and ferns in different places. Then he needed to make the waterways in order to feed the plants and trees he’d created. So he made the oceans, beaches, lakes and rivers too. He blew on his creation and had a lovely breeze sweep across the land.
He loved what he’d made so much that he decided to stay up in a cave on Kengal Rock with Mother Earth. In the meantime, Marmoo the evil spirit had been watching all Biyaami had created and was jealous. He decided to destroy everything that Biyaami had made, so he went into his own cave and made some little strange creatures. The creatures flew sometimes, crawled sometimes, wriggled sometimes and had legs to get about, and of course wings too. Marmoo made millions and millions of the strange creatures and then released them into Biyaami’s creation. The creatures left Marmoo’s cave like a plague and ate and attacked all the beautiful plants.
High on Kengal Rock Biyaami and Mother Nature saw the ugly brown patch that was growing larger and larger over the land. Biyaami started to fret while Mother Nature thought quick on her feet and ran into their cave to make a creature with long strong legs and a lean body and a sharp beak and white feathers. ‘What’s that?’ Biyaami asked. ‘It’s a bird,’ Mother Nature said. And she made many other ones, with different colours, and beaks, and shapes. ‘What does it do?’ Biyaami asked. ‘Look!’ Mother Nature said, and released the birds from the cave – there they soared down and ate all the insects. Before long the insects were under control and there was no more plague.
be anxious, longing for – bunba-y-marra-nha I spent all my days fishing, I wasn’t wading out to get a good catch, I was always looking for
Jedda. We never said to each other what we were doing, not when Elsie extended the garden, looking, not when she’d spend all her days walking through the bush, looking. We were filled with bunba-y-marra-nha only to wrap her and have to rest on ngurambang.
Biyaami’s son – Gurra-gala-gali I asked the ancestors once if there was just one single belief in the world. I asked what about Gurra-galagali, and the story he died for Biyaami, how it sounded like the story of Jesus to me. My great-great-great-grandfather said, ‘This is not a toy, this belief we have.’ He said, ‘Are you experiencing me talking to you?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He told me that Biyaami is the creator, but we don’t worship Him or His son.
We worship the things He made, the earth. Of course, the ancestors showed me how true they were in the end. Gurra-gala-gali was just a son, a coincidence.
blood – guwany, guwan, guwaan There’s two bloods running through me: where I come from and where I am. Some things I cannot understand and I am ashamed at what one of my family members has done. It severed a vein, that terrible thing. It is not part of me or our family anymore, my nephew. He has drained from who we are like the guwany leaving the body.
In that case water is thicker than blood.
bogong moth – buugang The Gondiwindi used to travel south to feast on bogong moths from the mountains, the alpine mountains, when the country still had seasons. The ancestors took me on a long walk there once.
It was in summer and the buugang had travelled from the north to the cool mountains to escape the heat. When we arrived there we collected the buugang and all sat around fires. There were people from all over ngurambang there, about five hundred fires I must have seen! Everyone was there to cook and feast on buugang – which tasted a little like a pork chop, but more nutritious. After that I felt strong walking back to the Boys’ Home.
book, paper – garrandarang My daughter Nicki is going to look after this dictionary, she’ll take the garrandarang to the council, she said. She said she’d do something good with it, protect the resting places on the farm with it.
breast – dhudhu This is the female word for the chest. Now, this is the first word I ever remember my mummy saying to me. That might sound funny, but I only knew her as a small boy, until I was three years old. I knew her as a young man much later. It was the first word I ever heard because dhudhu is also used to say to infants, ‘Here, here, baby’, ‘Here, here, little one, come to the chest, lie against my heart.’
brolga – burral-gang The ancestors came back quickly once the whirly-whirly left. They returned to talk with me just one last time. And then the brolga appeared. They told me that the burral-gang, it was Jedda, that she was safe. That she’ll always be a brolga. They said they didn’t need to come back anymore to see me. They said I was like an initiated man, that I had caught up on all the things I needed to know. My great-great-great- grandfather laughed again and put his arm around me. He said that he wished they could have taught me all these things from when I was a little boy. ‘No matter,’ he said. ‘You are resurrected, a man brought back from extinction! Jedda is resurrected too – burral-gang.’ He said that I would have big challenges ahead of me, but that all I had learnt would show me what to do.
burnt grass – bimbayi My ancestors took me out to show me how they used fire. The women arrived with their branches aflame and one patch at a time in a line about a few hundred yards from the riverbank, they burnt one tussock after another of the grass and then with a shovel they beat the fire out. Eventually they built a long firewall then waited until there was the finest breeze which took fire onto all the wild grass that ran from the river.
The fire spread easily and I could feel the heat radiating off the field. Then the fire reached the breakwall and stopped. They went around and beat any stray flames and then they sped up time for me, so I could see the changes.
The ash receding into the earth, feeding the soil and quickly the rain fell, the sky cleared, saplings popped up, then buds, then the stems grew longer until the buds broke and yellow blossoms covered the patch they’d burnt.
They had grown long tubers, good for roasting and grinding into flour or boiling and adding water and beating into a sort of gruel. Everything was cooked twice and the excess flour they stored in their homes, or possum- skin bags in the earth mounds. The kangaroos came too and one was
speared for a feed. Now, in those same places, wherever the Falstaffs’ wheat and cattle haven’t made home, the acacia trees have shot up in abundance. In some places they’ve shot up ten thousand to an acre where edible grasses once were.
