Riding the Black Cockatoo Read online

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  { 23 SEPTEMBER 2005 }

  The next morning, Simon from the Melbourne Museum phoned as promised. He’d been in touch with the Wamba Wamba elders. ‘They’re thrilled that another of their people is going home, they’re over the moon.’

  Simon gave me a name and phone number.

  ‘Thank you, John,’ he said, ‘and please pass on my thanks to your mother and father.’ It wasn’t a hollow, greeting-card thank-you, it was one of those rare thank-yous that remind you what a powerful combination those two words can be.

  I nervously phoned the number, expecting to hear something like the gravelly, earth-weathered voice of Skippy’s Tara. Instead a young man answered with a breathless energy that suggested his life was a full one. Caught off guard, I opened my mouth and the voice of a stranger oozed forth; my tone lacked any sense of warmth, completely at odds with the way I truly felt. I sounded like a hard-nosed property developer negotiating a transfer of land rather than human remains. I sensed a negative energy in the phone line. Then Jason explained that it was a bad time to talk, there’d been a death in the community that he had to attend to, but he promised to get back to me soon.

  What a letdown; I’d been expecting my first contact with Mary’s people to be something special – magical, even. Later on I phoned Dad to pass on Simon’s thanks.

  He grunted in that stubborn Greek way of his and moved the conversation on to something else.

  { 24–25 SEPTEMBER 2005 }

  I waited all weekend for Jason to call. Nothing. Mum phoned on Sunday evening while Dad was out and told me how happy she was that Mary was going home.

  ‘Your grandmother would be just so, so pleased.’ The words caught in her throat. ‘Do you remember when she used to visit, the first thing she’d do was take a clean teatowel from the kitchen drawer and place it carefully over Mary. Remember how annoyed she used to get with your father and uncle – “The poor devil should be back with his own people,” she used to say.’ My mother doesn’t often get emotional but when she does it comes from a very deep place and means all the more. Her words steadied my uncertain spirit and gave me the reassurance I needed.

  { 26 SEPTEMBER 2005 }

  I dropped the kids at my parents’ place. In the background the morning show ping-ponged between serious news and inane chatter.

  ‘I’ve spoken to your uncle,’ said Dad, handing me a sheet of notepaper with the details of where Mary had been unearthed. The location was precise: the Old Kannon Property, 15 kilometres east of Swan Hill on the New South Wales side of the Murray River.

  ‘There he is.’ He nodded to a plastic shopping bag on the dining-room table. ‘Found him in the old TV cupboard.’

  That evening I returned home from uni with two tired kids and Mary. My wife Stella greeted me with the news that a Wamba Wamba elder, Jason’s uncle, had phoned earlier in the day; his name was Gary Murray.

  ‘What’d he say, what’s he sound like?’ I pumped Stella for every little detail while the girls ran around us squawking for their dinner.

  ‘He sounded really nice,’ said Stella.

  ‘What else, anything else?’

  ‘There is nothing else, he’s just really happy about getting Mary back and looks forward to talking to you. The number’s up by the phone.’

  ‘And he sounded nice, yeah?’

  ‘Really nice.’

  The number by the phone was a mobile number. A mobile phone; although I instantly realised how ridiculous the thought was, my concept of an Aboriginal elder didn’t include modern technology. My idea of an elder was of an old guy sitting cross-legged in red dust with didgeridoo music droning in the background, in a place untouched by personalised ringtones and SMS. Gary answered the phone, and he didn’t sound like Tara either, or old. My damned conditioning!

  Gary’s voice was deep and his sentences were short and uncluttered; he spoke the way people from the bush tend to talk. He was instantly likeable.

  ‘How’s this for timing,’ he said. ‘Unreal, isn’t it!’

  Gratitude poured from the earpiece; there was not a hint of reproach or judgement in his voice. Gary asked if I was absolutely positive that Mary was from Wamba Wamba country. I explained that my uncle found it on the Old Kannon farm, which according to the maps was well within his clan’s territory.

  ‘I’ll have to check,’ he replied ‘but I think that’s the old name of the property right next door to Menera.’

  ‘Menera?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, that’s the name of the property we bought, Menera Station, seven kilometres of prime river frontage, it belongs to the Wamba Wamba again.’ Gary’s words unrolled like a soft fabric woven with his love of country. ‘It’s just the start; we’ve got big plans for the place. That’s where the reburial’s taking place, right in the most beautiful part of the property. Farmers keep the best land for crops, we keep the best bits for burying our people. It’s beautiful, you come down and I’ll show it to you – beautiful.’

  I was having trouble taking it all in; I’d always imagined that Mary would be returned by post, or that maybe I’d fly to Melbourne and hand it over personally at the Museum. I hadn’t given any thought to what might happen after that. Now I was not only getting a description of Mary’s country, I was being transported there through Gary’s voice.

  ‘Let me get this right,’ I said. ‘Where the remains are going to be reburied, it’s quite possible he once walked over the same ground – I mean, this is his back yard?’

  Gary laughed. ‘That’s it, he’s coming home, that’s for sure.’

  I felt an incredible stillness, as if all the air had been sucked out of the room.

  ‘You tell your old man how much the Wamba Wamba Nation appreciates what he’s doing; in the meantime I’ve got some other business to attend to, we’ve had another death in the clan, but I’ll be back in touch soon.’

  After dinner I googled Gary Murray. His name had sounded familiar, and sure enough there he was, right at the forefront of the Jaara Baby repatriation! His name popped up everywhere – if there was a story about cultural theft or the repatriation of Victorian Indigenous remains, there was a good chance that Gary’s name would be mentioned. I ran an image search and followed a link until he filled my screen. In the picture, Gary was wrapped up to his neck in some sort of patchwork fur cloak. He wore an Akubra hat pulled down low, his face a mixture of determination and defiance. His eyes stared right into the barrel of the camera lens. He held a large piece of bark – like a shield – embellished with the worn carving of a dancer, legs and arms spread wide to a world of animals and fish. It looked as old as the oldest cave paintings in Europe.

  If I hadn’t had such a friendly chat a few moments ago with this man I would have been very nervous about meeting him. He looked like a warrior. I clicked on the photo to save it to my desktop; the file reduced neatly into a little icon onto my cluttered screen, and it was then that I got my first hateful taste of racism, what it means, what it does. Underneath the folder symbol appeared the photo caption: ABO. Rather than using Gary’s name, the journalist or photo editor had typed in a generic derogatory slur that he thought no one would ever see. Straight away I understood the defiance in Gary’s photograph, and I began to appreciate the anger behind the countless raised fists I’d seen in Aboriginal demonstrations and protests on the nightly news.

  It was such a small – some would say insignificant – act, yet for me it demonstrated how the insidious hate worm of racism works. And this example was in one of the nation’s leading newspapers! Racism reduces the individual to a caricature; it undermines the power of story by pushing preconditioned buttons – primarily fear. In this photo Gary stood strong in culture and as a man, yet here was this slur attempting to kick his legs out from beneath him. People often say ‘It’s only a word,’ but language is a powerful force. As an Australian of Greek descent who weathered the taunts of ‘wog boy’ throughout my childhood, I remember the feeling of
relief when the bedraggled Vietnamese boat people started washing up onto our shores in the late 1970s. Suddenly the attention shifted from wogs to the newly arrived slopes and geeks. Yet despite the ever-shifting focus of racism in this country, Indigenous Australians have continuously occupied the bottom rung of the ladder. And all too often, when their hands reached up to the next rung, it was the hobnailed boot of language that stomped on fingers of self-determination.

  { 27 SEPTEMBER 2005 }

  The alarm clock bleeped. I jumped out of bed and almost out of my skin with excitement; I needed to talk about the reburial. I watched the clock through breakfast. I knew Craig would be at work at 9 a.m., but I took a chance and phoned half an hour earlier. He answered immediately. I spluttered the news of the reburial into the mouthpiece.

  ‘Mate, Mary is going back into the same ground, the same ground he used to walk on, the same side of the river even!’

  Craig was pleased, but remained calm. ‘Mate, there are big wheels turning in the universe that we haven’t even begun to understand yet.’

  I could only agree. After the call I closed my eyes and for a moment I could feel those big wheels turning like constellations, unstoppable in their tidal force. Since deciding to return Mary, doors had been flying open before me. Something was going on, ‘it’ was all around me, but if I looked too hard it vanished.

  I made my way to the desk and tried to concentrate on my work and studies, but it was impossible to stay focused. I looked up my uncle’s number; like my father, he was a veterinarian and the two had shared a practice together for over 20 years, but since their retirement I’d rarely seen him. He seemed happy to hear from me and had heard of my efforts to have Mary returned. As a man of science and medicine, he was a little bemused by all the fuss being made over some old bones. My uncle was a country vet fresh out of veterinary school when he started his practice in Swan Hill in 1966, and like my father he spent much of his time calling on farms.

  ‘There were bones everywhere along the Murray,’ he explained. ‘Before we came along, the Riverine plains supported the highest concentration of blacks in the country.’

  My uncle described the vast networks of irrigation channels that were gouged through the earth to draw water from the Murray River into the distant fields. Excavation machines called ‘rippers’ would tear open the earth in long lines, often opening up burial sites.

  ‘These burial sites were often in raised mounds called camp ovens,’ he explained. ‘When the Murray flooded, which it did every year, the blacks would camp on these ovens; I saw some that were bloody huge. Well, if a blackfella died during a flood they had to put the body somewhere, so they planted it in the camp oven.’

  I asked why they were called camp ovens.

  ‘Well, I guess they were really midden heaps, like the ones you find along the coasts – they’re a build-up of thousands of years of shell and bone, leftovers really. The mounds are just shell-grit and ash. They’d dig a firepit in it and do all their cooking there. Sometimes they’d cover the food over and do a slow cook using big clay balls to hold the heat.’

  ‘Like a Maori hangi?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s it. You can still find the clay balls all over the place. But the thing about these camp ovens is that they drained really quickly – because they were mainly ash and shell-grit – so bones and artefacts tended to be really well preserved. Things buried in normal soil break down much quicker.’

  My uncle explained that one night in a Swan Hill pub he’d mentioned a recently ripped open mound to a young pathologist.

  ‘This young fella begged me to take him out to the farm, so a few days later I took him out. There were bones all over the place. He thought it was Christmas,’ my uncle chuckled. ‘That’s when I decided to souvenir a couple too, and that’s how Mary ended up on your old man’s wall unit.’

  ‘So, you didn’t have to notify anybody?’ I asked.

  ‘No!’ My uncle scoffed at the question. ‘Burial sites were being ripped open and ploughed up all over the place. Sometimes a farmer might feel a little guilty about it and leave a few sugarbags of bones by the police station at night.’

  ‘So what did the police do?’ I was hanging on my uncle’s every word by now.

  ‘Loaded ’em up into the paddy wagon and took ’em to the rubbish tip,’ he replied.

  ‘The dump! You mean they just chucked them in with everyone’s garbage?’ I imagined bags of skulls lying amid stinking kitchen scraps and broken toys. ‘My god, people were allowed to scrounge in those days, imagine coming across . . .’ My voice trailed off as I imagined someone – a child – peeking into an inviting-looking sugarbag.

  My uncle chuckled again. ‘No, it wasn’t like that, they had a quiet corner set aside for blackfellas’ bones.’

  I breathed the slightest sigh of relief and wondered what had become of that ‘quiet corner’ now; had the dump been developed? Was there now a house on top of all those remains, a sporting field, a school?

  My uncle was on a roll now; we talked about his experiences with the Aboriginal people who lived in the camps outside Swan Hill.

  ‘They used to come into town for grog mostly. At first I used to get angry with the shopkeepers and publicans. I’d say, ‘Why are you selling them this booze, can’t you see it’s killing the poor bastards?’ But I was young, new in town; you learn to accept things the way they are.’ A sadness began to weigh down on what until then had been happy reminiscences. ‘I saw too many things, too many – I guess it just makes you switch off.’ My uncle was a larger-than-life character; in his prime he’d travelled the world and mixed it with the big boys – he’d been a player. But I’d never heard him speak like that before; I’d never heard his voice falter.

  { 28 SEPTEMBER 2005 }

  The ceiling fan churned hot air. My daughters were in bed. Crickets buzzed; but it was only when they paused to pant in the sticky night that I noticed them. The lights of Brisbane’s CBD hummed silently, but you could feel a transfer of energy drawn from the midnight earth into filaments and glass that rose up in the distance. The carpet-snake river curved though it all in timeless twists, cooling its tongue in the sea. Good god! It was starting to get to me, this other way of seeing.

  Gary was on the other end of the phone, half a continent away in Melbourne. Our conversation came easily, naturally. I’d been holding back a couple of details about the skull – about Mary – but Gary sounded cool, relaxed.

  My first concern was the name, Mary; I’d been worrying that by calling a male – albeit a deceased one – by a female name, my family had been disrespectful, or even worse was breaking some sort of taboo. Gary laughed when I made my first confession. ‘Mate, at least you gave him a name, you humanised him, you respected him. Most of the remains we get back are tagged with a serial number, like army dogtags – only there’s no name, just a number, like the numbers the Germans tattooed on the arms of the Jewish people in the Holocaust. It’s a beautiful thing that you and your family cared enough about my ancestor to give him a name.’

  ‘Well, there’s another thing,’ I continued, feeling a little more at ease, ‘Mary is kind of, well . . . yellow.’ I almost whispered the last word. I explained that Dad had given Mary a liberal coat of lacquer every couple of years to preserve the bone, and now, 40 years later, it had taken on a yellow – almost golden – patina. Gary laughed again.

  ‘And there’s a tiny piece of wood glued to the back of the skull to stop it rolling backwards, but it’s only the size of a matchbox and Dad’s stained it to make it look nice. I thought about tapping it off gently with a hammer before returning it, but I’m worried bits of bone might break off with it.’

  ‘Listen, mate, don’t worry about it, just leave it as it is, I’m just so glad your old man made the effort to keep the old fella in one piece. Yellow.’ He chuckled again. ‘John, I’ve gone into houses where the skull’s been wrapped up in metal and wire to keep it together. I’ve had skulls returned with all sorts of right-wi
ng neo-Nazi shit written all over them. People have used the top parts for ashtrays and mulling bowls – I even saw one wearing a rasta hat with a big fat joint sticking out of its mouth.’

  My mind flicked back to Mary with a Winfield Blue balancing where a tooth should have been. ‘Oh, people did that?’ I said sheepishly.

  ‘Listen, mate, we don’t care what the story is, we’re just happy to get our old people back. Listen, I’m coming up to collect the old fella. Tell your old man I’d like to buy him a beer, I really want to thank him for taking such good care of Mary. We really owe you for this one, we owe you big time.’

  After the call, I sat on the front steps looking out through the trees at the city lights. The gum trees danced in a swaying motion, leafy boughs raised to the heavens like shamans’ arms. How strange, I thought; I should be apologising to these people for everything I’ve taken from them, and here they are thanking me, saying they owe me.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  The bicycle is my totem. I first learnt to ride on a cattle property in central Queensland. As a vet, Dad did contract work all over the state, mostly blood-testing on cattle. Mum, my little brother and I would wake in the pre-dawn and take Dad out to the airfield in Brisbane where we’d say our goodbyes and watch him climb into a tiny twin-engined aeroplane. Dad always attempted to look a little sad as he hugged Mum and gave her backside a squeeze, but you could tell he was excited to be going bush again. My parents grew up in the country, and they are still country people at heart despite having lived in the city for over 40 years. Smelling of Old Spice aftershave, Dad would kiss my brother and me. And when we saw him again, days, sometime weeks later, his face would be bristly grey and smell of campfires and the clean red earth.