Riding the Black Cockatoo Read online

  I fished out a piece of paper from my wallet. On it were a couple of hastily scribbled numbers.

  ‘Uncle Bob Weatherall, he’s the expert in the business of repatriation up here,’ Craig had told me before rattling off the numbers. I hoped they were correct; I’d been too nervous to ask Craig to repeat them.

  The first number was for an organisation called FAIRA. A pleasant woman answered the phone and explained that the organisation had closed, but that someone came by every few weeks to collect the mail and messages. I phoned the next number and another woman, who I assumed was Uncle Bob’s wife, told me that Bob was away on a fishing trip and wouldn’t be back for at least a week. She gave me his mobile number, which I tried a couple of times only to receive the out-of-range message. I resigned myself to waiting until he returned.

  After dinner I read my daughters their bedtime stories, but my mind was elsewhere. I settled in front of the computer and ran a search on ‘Aboriginal’, ‘remains’ and ‘repatriation’. Pages and pages of results came up instantly. Before I knew it I was diving in and out of websites, trying to piece together some sort of understanding. Newspaper articles, academic papers, essays and links flashed before me. I was too impatient to read anything fully; if something looked relevant I hit the Print button or bookmarked it. The printer screamed for paper and fresh ink. I darted in and out of search results like a shark feeding on a cloud of silver mullet. The deeper I went, the greater the urgency I felt. A couple of hours later, I fell back in my chair, exhausted; I’d expected to find perhaps half a dozen obscure articles, but instead I’d waded into a cultural, political and emotional riptide.

  There were articles about institutions stubbornly refusing to hand back collections of Aboriginal remains that sometimes numbered in the hundreds. And there were stories about personal collections, cobbled together by enthusiasts in garages and back-yard sheds. After a quick perusal of my random printouts, it dawned on me that the issue of repatriation didn’t concern just a few hundred sets of remains, it was of a far greater magnitude – there were tens of thousands! The very scale of the issue was too mind-numbing to get my head around; images came into my head of those terrible expanses of bleached skulls on the Cambodian Killing Fields. Why? Why had so many Aboriginal remains been shipped off to the four corners of the globe? It seemed so utterly unreasonable that the British Museum needed – actually needed – 1570 sets of remains from Aboriginal men, women and children. Filed in specimen drawers, lined up in glass cases, stuffed into cabinets and crammed into never-to-be-opened boxes, locked in a dusty twilight zone far from country; these were human remains in limbo. And here I was, with just one skull tucked under my arm. What difference could one repatriation make?

  As the torrent of information gushing from my computer began to sweep away my resolve, there was one story that leapt out – one story about one tiny set of remains that helped me understand, and kept me anchored to my promise to Mary.

  ‘The baby in the tree story’ concerned the remains of an Aboriginal infant that had been discovered by a woodcutter in 1904 near the north-western Victorian town of Charlton. The tiny skeleton had been laid to rest in a tree hollow, lovingly wrapped in a possum-skin cloak with, as one newspaper described it, ‘a dazzling array of rare treasures’. The Indigenous arte–facts included over 100 wooden pegs used for staking out possum skins for drying, necklaces, a tool and weapons belt, and an emu-feather apron, as well as some European-made objects. So numerous were the artefacts, and such was the care with which the child and his possessions had been laid to rest, that it was believed the infant might have been the son or daughter of a tribal elder. The remains were handed to the National Museum of Victoria, where they were catalogued and assigned to drawers, and lay untouched for the next 90 years. As the twentieth century drew to a close there was a sudden renewal of interest in what became known as the Jaara Baby, by researchers and the Dja Dja Wurrung, the infant’s traditional family group. Museum anthropologists were keen to discover whatever secrets the little prince might reveal, while his descendants wanted him put back to rest without delay. It was a tug of war between the sciences and the spiritual that continues to underpin the entire repatriation issue.

  I put the articles and news clippings into chronological order and in the quiet midnight hours followed the Jaara Baby’s journey from his burial place to the coroner’s office and the museum, and back to a burial place known only to the Dja Dja Wurrung. The infant and his belongings were handed back to his people on 10 September 2003 – 99 years to the day after they were first discovered. As I read the story, I began to glean an understanding of just how deeply Aboriginal people respect their dead kin, and above all, of the importance of going home to country. I laid the wad of printouts on my bedside table and turned off the lamp; moonbeams swished overhead, chopped into even fragments by the blades of the ceiling fan. The timeless and the temporal – it somehow seemed like a weird metaphor for the story I had just read, for the last few days, for what was happening. But before I could think about it much more, I was asleep.

  { 21 SEPTEMBER 2005 }

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that skull all week, I can’t get it out of my head,’ said the girl with the big eyes. A week had passed since I’d blurted out our family secret. At the mention of the skull, the eyes of all my classmates were again upon me. It was my moment. I explained that I’d spoken to some people about returning ‘the remains’ – a term it was suggested I use out of respect for the original tenant (the word ‘skull’ was just weighed down with too much horror-movie baggage). I detailed my encounters with Craig, Rob, the tree baby and the amazing patchwork map; it was as if I had just returned from a fleeting visit to a mystical, far-off land and was regaling my countrymen with tales of my wondrous adventures. After I had finished, my lecturer smiled and suggested to the class that they all take a leaf out of my book and go on a little positive adventure of their own before the next class in a fortnights time. A hot blush swept up my chest and over my face. My classmates didn’t look particularly thrilled at the prospect of seeking out their own particular rabbit holes.

  ‘Like what?’ moaned a hirsute young fellow. ‘John was lucky, his something was right under his nose.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ I said, glad for the chance to lighten the mood, ‘I haven’t actually mentioned any of this to my father yet, perhaps you’d like to ask him to hand over the remains?’

  There was a ripple of nervous laughter.

  ‘Oh, we forgot about your dad,’ said one of the girls. ‘Perhaps you’re not getting it so easy after all.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘Believe me, I’m not.’

  { 22 SEPTEMBER 2005 }

  I’m not a little kid any more; I left home 20 years ago and now have two children of my own. Yet my father still has the unnerving ability – with a barely perceptible nostril twitch – to teleport me back into the shorts of a very nervous ten-year-old. I didn’t spend my childhood in fear, far from it; in fact, my brother and I often got away with murder. But Dad wasn’t one to tolerate fools, and if he was in one of his dark moods it was best to stay out of his way. And even when Dad was in a good mood, it often took only a trivial thing to set his highly combustible Greek temper alight. Little things on television – like a story on lefties, greenies or Aborigines – could set him off on a right-wing diatribe and it would have been reckless of us to do anything but nod in agreement.

  These thoughts stampeded through my mind as I arrived at my parents’ house to drop off my two-year-old daughter Lydia for the day. Even though my father had mellowed considerably over the last 30 years, it was the firebrand Dad of old who occupied my thoughts as I fumbled Lydia’s lunchbox and bottles into the fridge. I waited for my moment in the kitchen, struggling to look casual while Mum fussed over my daughter. Eventually Lydia scampered off down the hallway and Mum gave chase; Dad and I were alone at last.

  ‘Dad, I wanted to discuss something with you.’ There was no turning back now. ‘It’s
sort of a delicate matter.’

  My father was caught off guard. I’d rarely addressed him so seriously before, and I’m sure he thought I was about to hit him up for a loan – or worse. He tensed in mid-step and turned to me. He took a breath, as if to remind himself that his son – someone he’d spent 20 years telling what to do – was now a man. I took a deeper breath and reminded myself of the same thing. The father–son patterns of a lifetime creaked aside in painful slowness and let this new moment through. And then for the first time I realised – marvelled – at how much older he had become; I was now taller and he shorter. Still, I didn’t feel any braver.

  ‘It’s about the skull, you know, Mary. Well, I’ve been thinking . . .’

  I became acutely aware of every change in my father’s face; every pore in his skin seemed magnified. One eyebrow rose a quarter of a millimetre, his nostril hairs fluttered, but it wasn’t enough to throw me off course. I told Dad about my study of indigenous writing, the feelings I’d been having about Mary, and what I’d learnt about repatriation. His cropped grey hair bristled, but he was no longer the fearsome drill sergeant I remembered as a child. For years Dad had insisted that my brother and I wear crewcuts just like his. ‘If it’s good enough for the US Marines, it’s good enough for you two,’ he’d bark at my brother and me. One day he bought a home barbering kit. Dad may have been a fine veterinarian, but somehow he got the idea that shaving dogs’ bellies prior to operations qualified him as a gentleman’s hairdresser. It didn’t. How cold my head felt after each ‘number one’. When I see those old World War II photos of the French women who collaborated with the Germans being publicly shaved in the streets, I feel a certain connection. My brother and I hid out under matching terry-towelling hats for weeks after every haircut, and were even granted permission to wear them in class! The clippers mysteriously disappeared one day, which I suspected Mum may have had a hand in.

  He was still listening. Dad’s exterior may have been as tough as an old stockman’s boot, but inside beat the heart of a passionate and sensitive man.

  ‘You know, Dad,’ I said, beginning to probe for cracks in the boot leather, ‘I wouldn’t want your noggin sitting on someone’s mantelpiece in England.’

  ‘That’s different, we’re family,’ he snapped. ‘Mary’s lot are long gone.’

  I explained the little I understood about the Aboriginal concept of family and how it’s much broader than ours. He was getting annoyed; and I could almost hear him thinking, ‘What sort of bullshit are they teaching at university these days?’

  It was then I pulled out my clincher, the one Craig had suggested. ‘Look, Dad, it’s no different to us bringing home our lost soldiers, sailors and pilots from where they fell in far-off lands. Just think of how much money and effort goes into those repatriations, sometimes just for a few teeth and a set of dogtags.’

  His shoulders slumped, not in defeat, but because he couldn’t be bothered arguing over old bones. ‘Ohhh, you can have it, it means nothing to me.’

  ‘Well, it will mean a lot to its people,’ I said, trying to hide my grin. ‘Thanks, Dad, thanks.’

  I noticed Mum on the sidelines; she’d been listening in and looked worried.

  ‘We’re not going to get into any trouble, are we?’

  ‘Mum, they’ll just be happy to get him back,’ I reassured her, promising – or rather hoping – that there would be no legal implications.

  I asked Dad where Mary had come from, but he couldn’t tell me any more than I already knew – which wasn’t a lot. He promised to ask his brother for more details. I decided not to push any more, we’d covered enough ground for one day!

  Mum started looking around the mantelpiece. ‘I can’t remember where we put it.’

  She seemed a little flustered; I sensed she was looking forward to getting Mary out of the house after all these years. I played doggo; it didn’t feel like the right moment to announce that I’d already rifled through half the contents of the house.

  ‘We’ll dig it out later,’ said Dad, returning to his morning paper. ‘I’ll let you know when we find it.’

  Once home, I sat at my desk and surveyed the folders neatly laid out before me – university subjects, illustration projects, they all demanded my attention; but instead I was drawn to the telephone. I couldn’t wait for Uncle Bob to return from his fishing trip. I felt as though a hand was inside me, pushing me forward. My first call was to the Queensland Museum. I was put though to a lifeless young woman from the Indigenous Collection. Speaking with her was like trying to suck sap from a 100-year-old telephone pole. Her boss was away on a field trip.

  ‘Ring the Mines Department,’ she suggested in an uninterested monotone.

  ‘Mines Department?’ I felt insulted; what did she think Mary was, a lump of coal?

  ‘Yes, the mining operations are always ripping up burial sites. Ring them,’ she said blankly and then hung up.

  I looked up the number and introduced myself to the chirpy young girl on the switchboard.

  ‘Oh my god! Are you serious, you want to return a skull?’ Her voice darkened with suspicion. ‘Sa-a-ay, you’re not calling from a radio station are you? Do I win a prize or something for not getting tricked?’

  I assured her that she wasn’t going out live to air and that I wasn’t a hoax caller. She seemed disappointed.

  ‘A skull, yeah, like, a human one?’ She sounded unconvinced but agreed to put me through to her supervisor. Two supervisors and three departments later I was connected to someone in an environmental unit. After listening to my story, the environmental officer called out to his colleague, ‘Hey, Bill, I’ve got a bloke here who wants to return an Aboriginal skull.’

  ‘A skull,’ asked the colleague, ‘where’s the rest of it?’

  ‘You there?’ the officer asked me. ‘Where’s the rest of it?’

  ‘As far as I know, still buried,’ I answered, feeling as though I’d stumbled into a Monty Python skit.

  ‘Still pushin’ up daisies,’ the officer called to his colleague.

  ‘Why’s he asking us then?’ asked Bill.

  ‘The Museum told him we had a department that looks after bones ’n’ stuff.’

  I heard a groan in the background.

  ‘Tell him to ring Trevor, he might know.’

  ‘Might be best to talk to Trevor,’ Bill explained, sounding relieved to have passed the hot potato into yet another part of the building. ‘Hang about while I dig out his number.’

  Five minutes later, my shoulders slumped as Trevor’s answering machine clicked in.

  ‘Hello, this is the message service for Trevor—. I’m on fieldwork for two weeks and won’t be returning to my desk until—’ I put the phone down. The Mines Department; it just didn’t feel right. It sounded cold and undignified, as if the bones were being reduced to their mineral makeup, devoid of spirit. Anyway, Trevor sounded like a boof-head.

  I spent the following three hours dialling numbers. I felt like a crazed rat in a laboratory maze, able to smell the cheese but too addle-headed to find it. I felt driven by something not of me; I ran on clumsy intuition, ignoring the leads that didn’t feel right, side-stepping, hopping from one lead to another. There was little empathy from the people I spoke to; one minute I was made to feel as though I was trying to return a lost umbrella, the next like a blood-sucking ghoul.

  Finally, finally, some kind soul at the National Museum suggested that I call the Melbourne Museum. Looking back it seems painfully obvious and logical that my first call should have been to the Melbourne Museum, but it wasn’t. Perhaps I was forced to run though the labyrinth for a reason. An internet search led me to the museum’s Indigenous collection and a name. I dialled the number, hoping that this person wouldn’t be away on fieldwork, on long-service leave, or a moron. Simon answered on the second ring. He listened quietly as I told my story. Even though he’d only said three or four words, there was a reassuring calmness coming from his end of the line that encouraged me to t
ake my time.

  He let me catch my breath after I’d finished.

  ‘Well you’ve phoned the right place, if they are Victorian remains. I don’t suppose you have any idea where the cranium came from?’

  ‘They came from just outside of Swan Hill,’ I explained. ‘I’ve been studying the maps and I’m pretty sure it’s from Wamba Wamba country.’

  There was an audible intake of breath on the other end of the phone; a sort of sucking noise – not fear or shock, something more like astonishment. I heard him mutter to himself, a barely audible few words slipping through the earpiece like wisps of smoke: ‘weird . . . can’t believe . . . just keeps happening’.

  Simon returned from his private thoughts.

  ‘John,’ he said evenly, ‘are you sitting down?’

  ‘Mmmm, yes,’ I lied, more intrigued by Simon’s curious reaction than concerned with finding a comfy chair.

  Simon explained that the day before he’d received a fax from the Wamba Wamba tribal council informing the Museum that a reburial had been scheduled to take place on Wamba Wamba land in two weeks time.

  ‘How often do these reburials take place?’ I asked, imagining that they were a regular occurrence.

  ‘Almost never,’ Simon answered, ‘at least not like this one. Every so often a single set of remains might go back into the ground, you know, quietly, but this one’s big. Thirty sets have been returned from different institutions from all over Australia and as far away as Scotland.’

  We talked some more and Simon promised to get back to me the next day with the telephone number of one of the elders.

  ‘They’ll be very interested in your story.’

  After the call, I sat in the kitchen and stared through the louvred windows that opened to the back yard. Rainbow lorikeets twittered amid the bright yellow explosions of golden penda flowers, bees droned about the nectar-laden coils of grevillea. In that moment of contemplation, in that neutral space between the whirling gears of thought, I understood the perfect synchronicity of it all; the pushing feeling, the fax, the reburial in two weeks. Mary’s people were going home and he wanted to go too! I phoned Dad and excitedly filled him in on developments. As usual, my mind raced ahead of my mouth and I announced that I might fly Mary to Melbourne and hand him over personally. There was a gruff silence, then, ‘Christ, son, you’re going to a hell of a lot of trouble for an old Abo skull.’