Extract from Listening to Country

 

Ros Moriarty’s husband John, whom she married in August 1982, in Melbourne, is a member of the Yanyuwa people of the Gulf of Carpentaria. On their honeymoon they return to John’s home country, Borroloola.

I could see a well of knowing in Tim Rakuwurlma. He was over ninety when he named our Tim, and his memory was a chronicle of the twentieth century in the Gulf. He remembered the visits by the Macassans to his family’s islands when he was a small boy at the turn of the century. Long before the British colonised Australia, the Macassans from Sulawesi, Indonesia, came to trade, bringing technologies like the dugout canoe and metal nails for hunting dugong. They set up cooking camps along the coast and on the islands to process the trepang—marine cucumbers—they harvested from coastal mudflats and deeper waters. Sometimes they took Aboriginal men with them on their voyages. Their camps are still marked today by the towering red-wooded tamarind trees they planted, and the stone piles where they hung their trepang boiling pots.

 

For the Yanyuwa, connecting with the Macassans changed their horizons. It began to challenge the way things had been when clans moved from place to place—a few months at one camp, a few weeks at another, returning to the old camp the following year, when the seasons had replenished the place and it was fresh with life once again. Now the stone-lined wells the Macassans dug at their cooking stations provided permanent drinking water and the enticement of a more settled life. Availability of water often dictated the time to move camp. Now the Yanyuwa were able to stay longer in their seasonal places, even into the late Dry, when natural waterholes had dried up and the Macassans had sailed home. Temporary camps became semi-permanent, and while European settlement of southern Australia was more cataclysmic in its demolition of traditional life, in the remote north the Yanyuwa were just as surely seeing the beginning of the end of tens of thousands of years as nomadic wanderers.

 

When I think back to those three days when I watched Tim Rakuwurlma with our baby on his lap, I feel in awe of the generations of spiritual life on the Australian continent he embodied. In the blink of this old man’s lifetime, the secret sacred world of his generation, and all the generations before him, was flickering passively, silently, towards its ending. Late twentieth-century Australia would mark the point of no return.The riches of mind, body and spirit that Aboriginal people had painstakingly nurtured and passed down for thousands of years would fade from memory and practice for ever. The spectre of this passing brought for me confronting questions and an unease about the folly of denial among those of us who embrace an Australia that only began when the British arrived. 

 

It was an understanding that I would come to later. I would be lying if I said that travelling in the Gulf on that first visit was a Utopian revelation. Yet the steady calm and patience of John’s mother and Willie left me wondering. They had no vehicle in which to drive to town for food and, in any case, the scant money of their pension every second Thursday wouldn’t go far at the ludicrously overpriced community store. Kathleen and Willie depended on younger people and families living at their outstation or nearby to share their bush tucker when they could get some—fish, dugong, turtle. When there was food to eat, they ate. When there was none, they drank water and tea and waited. The waiting had its base in traditional life, when elders were respected and cared for, their wisdom and knowledge recognised and valued. But by the early eighties in Borroloola, the system was beginning to disintegrate, drinking was accelerating, and old people often went hungry and cold.

 

As a young wife and mother, the world of my new family was beyond my comprehension. I had seen disadvantage in my research days with the department. Borroloola, though, was a different sort of deprivation. It was as if different rules applied because there were no windows in. Authorities in town seemed unmoved by the endemic sickness and poverty. By the hunger. People’s passive acceptance of it all made it sadder. It was humbling to see the communion and joy of family in the face of it.

 

John’s blending back into the Yanyuwa was seamless. He was in tune with the subtle shifts in the bush around us.

 

The way things smelled, the sounds at dawn and dusk—insects with wings that rubbed softly together, birds that squawked the daylight in, the splash of a particular river fish. John’s uncles Mussolini (Musso) Harvey Bangkarrinu and Leo Finlay Wurrawurra were there that trip. They were the ones who’d taken John back into ceremony when he’d returned to the Gulf almost thirty years after he was taken away. While it is not for women to know, I could imagine the leaders they were at sacred corroborees on moonlit ceremony nights.