Awakes the land and sings

The Song of the Land

The Song of the Land – A Prose Poem

At long last the land is beginning to sing.

The words were there at first, lying about randomly.
Words taught to us wadulah by Noongar kids.
We threw boondies at trees.
We took gidgies to spear fish
(at least, some kids did. Fishing was never a pastime for me).

We tried in vain to lure shrewd gilgies out of the water
onto our catcher made of string and meat.
We made our own kylie and failed to kill any birds with them.
We picked bardie grubs off tree trunks and ate them.
Their fat flesh tasted like delicate white fish.

My Dad said, ‘Let’s have a wongi,’ It’s time for a talk.
‘Wongi’ a word from the Eastern Goldfields from the Wangkatja people .

We knew we were wadulah.
We knew the Aboriginal kids, and their families, were Noongars.
We laughed at grown-ups grown stupid with drink.
We called them kaat-wara – soft in the head. We wadulah were double ignorant
and cruel.
For the Noongars, alcohol was a poison and those affected were not to blame.

The shelters Noongars built were called maya maya.
We put ‘maya’ together with the Yamatji word ‘guna’.
We giggled along with the Noongar kids.
‘Guna’ is ‘shit’ and ‘maya’ is shelter, so ‘guna maya’ is an outdoor dunny.

We teased the town cop as manitj, the white cockatoo.
The yellow crest of the cockatoo resembled the police cap,
and ‘Manitj!’ became the warning: ‘Police are coming!’

We watched yongar with his trademark hop.
Wesaw groups of ‘wetj’, the birds as tall as men, running across open land.

Quenda scurried about on the dry leafy ground,
while inquisitive quokka snuffled up to visitors on Wadjemup, called Rottnest,
And in coastal heath near Albany.
Tiny dunnart scampered under bushes, fearful of the wedge-tail eagles flying above.
These animals don’t have a name in English, nor does the word for ‘numbat’.

These names were simply there in the land, befitting the animals they described.

At night, the owl sang, ‘mopoke’.

The words were there, stirring in the depths of the land.
The words rose up from Noongar
To became part of West Australian English and held on to in Noongar Aboriginal Creole.

And the place names:
We splashed in Lake Toolbrunup, ‘the place that has water when all else is dry’.
It was on our farm.

We travelled every day to school in Tambellup.
The wallaby ‘tamar’ may give Tambellup its name.
Near our farm were Gnowangerup, the home of ngow, the mallee hen,
and Ongerup, the home of the yongar.

Nearer Perth, Gidgeganup was the place for making spears,
and Willagee was where the ochre wilgee for ceremonies was dug.
Rae and I lived there from 2003-2006.

Like the dry bones in the valley imagined by Ezekiel,
so many words were lying around the landscape,
rattling and trying to come alive.

One day, along came a Noongar with a welcome to her country.
‘Kaya’, she said, ‘Hello.’

Then she said, ‘Wanju – Welcome!’

And with these smiling words changed everything.

We wadulahs are welcome on this Noongar land,
unceded and unconquered as it is.
We wadulahs, despite our colonising destruction, are welcome.

With these words, ‘Kaya, Wanju,’
the relationship between humans and the country began to heal.
With these words, ‘Kaya, Wanju,’ Noongar and wedulah began to reconcile.

With these words, ‘Kaya, Wanju,’
we hear with fresh ears the knowledge keepers of Noongar booja.
wise men who become to us wedulah as uncles in their kinship system.

With these words, ‘Kaya, Wanju,’ we saw the land with new eyes.
We began to discern song lines
from Derbal Yerrigan, the Swan River,
to Kepa Kurl, Esperance, in the southeast.

With these words, ‘Kaya, Wanju,’ the land opened up and began to sing.

Sticks and Stones: Adam Goodes and Australian Racism

First published on Starts at Sixty website, August 12, 2015.

I’ve never told anybody this story before.

61 years ago on the veranda of the Infants’ Class Room at Tambellup School, I called Valma Eades ‘a black boong’. I remember the year precisely because the Infants’ (Year I) Room was separate from the rest of the school, and I sought out Valma on the veranda. This veranda was up two steps from a bitumen path. I was a skinny five-year-old white boy, and Valma must have been seven. She loomed over me.

But where on earth did I find the expression ‘black boong’? It was not a term that our family used. I think I had heard the town kids whispering it, and I wondered what the reaction would be if I used it directly on an Aboriginal person, so one play-time, I sought out Valma Eades and I called her ‘a black boong’. Her reaction was instant and strong. Her fist landed under my jaw and lifted me off the veranda into the air. I landed on my back on the bitumen path.

In that instant of painful encounter first with Valma’s fist and then the hard bitumen path, I learned that Valma was right and I was wrong. Even though I was only five, I learned that it was wrong to use racist names against Aboriginal people. Even though issues between children should not be resolved through violence, in this case, Valma was right to give me a swift, sharp lesson.

You see, I lived on a 4,000 acre (2,000 hectare) family farm that until 100 years before had been the summer range of Valma’s great-grand-parents and their family group. On our farm was a freshwater lake that we called Lake Toolbrunup. Each year for forty, maybe fifty thousand years until just the end of the 19th Century, large groups of Noongar people had gathered at Lake Toolbrunup at the end of summer to enjoy its water,the freshwater crayfish they called ‘gilgies’ and cool shade. Now it supported our sheep.

How this farm had come into the possession of our family, and the white people from whom we had bought it, neither Valma and I had any idea.

Valma, on the other hand, lived with her parents and brothers and sisters in a canvas tent, 6 foot by 4 foot, on a reservation on the edge of town. A trough at the end of the line of tents boasted one cold water tap between two tents. Their only heating in the bitter Tambelllup winters was an outdoor wood fire. To keep warm, kids burrowed into the sand near the fire. Valma’s mother cooked over this fire.

There were Aboriginal children at the Tambellup school who camped with their families on our farm, as on other farms. They lived in tents and brush shelters. Their diet was kangaroo, sheep and damper. We knew, vaguely as six-year-olds, that the feared Mister A.O. Neville, Protector of Aborigines, had prescribed the places where Aboriginal families could live and who they could live with.

However this exchange of land had taken place, Valma and I were brushed with this history. There was unfathomable sorry business between us. And this history was, and is still, inscribed on every Australian girl and boy. None of us can escape the fact that we live in the shadow of a gigantic land swap.

White Australians booing Adam Goodes is always wrong, just as calling Valma Eades ‘a black boong’ was always wrong. And if Adam Goodes is strong enough to stand up and fight back, it hurts, just as Valma Eades’ uppercut hurt. So it should.