Black Duck, page 20
Never mind, Lyn and I went down to the Water Ribbon Dam and recorded Eastern Dwarf Tree Frogs, Peron’s Tree Frog, Common Eastern Froglet, Striped Marsh Frog and others and contributed the data to FrogID Week. You probably didn’t know there was a FrogID Week but I didn’t think we would ever be beaten by a Queensland football team either.
To celebrate I cleaned the fridge.
I also started to clean up the caravan because Ken Bridle is interested in buying it. I taught Ken, so he doesn’t know much, but he’s a very good farmer and decent fella. He helped me during the fires and taught me a trick about water pumps for which I am very grateful.
I bought a little pop-up van to live in while I had a new floor put into the house. My kids have used it on holidays and two farm workers have lived in her for months. But Ken wanted her more than I did. So, I washed down the old van all the while remembering how good she had been to me.
Lyn says the lyrebirds at her place have been getting raucous and a fully plumaged male dances in a shimmering feather veil watched by females and juveniles. The birds appear on Lyn’s verandah to ransack her potted plants and have nested around the house including the garage of the bed and breakfast next door. My lyrebirds stick to the bush around the property. They don’t like to cross the open spaces of the paddocks, too vulnerable to Bunjil and sparrowhawks and dingoes.
I took Noel and Trish for a boat ride. They love boats and Trish is an ardent swimmer. I have worried about them ever since they lost their house in the fires. Bad luck has pursued them even after such loss. I like to see them relax and water Country is a great healer.
I showed them the ochre hills where I get ceremonial ochre for Gurandgi and some of the Aboriginal dance troupes. Being on Country like that is deeply relaxing and I wanted them to know where that ochre came from. Passing on the lore.
Emus, Old Brass and Fire
Allan Clarke, director of the ABC film The Dark Emu Story, came to the farm to talk through script issues. I am keen that the archaeology behind the book is well represented, particularly as the work at Mithaka, provoked by Dark Emu, has such far-reaching implications for humanity.
After Allan left I worked on my new gardens. I have been adding nutrients to the gardens with mulch created at Lyn’s after the fires. It’s heavy work and I find it frustrating at how my stamina has dwindled over the last few years. (This year my doctor discovered I had a blocked artery. Drilling that out has made a big difference.)
While I was working, a Melbourne University forestry researcher turned up to talk about forest thinning. She was very enthusiastic about our method but I think she stands a snowball’s chance in hell of convincing her male superiors. I suspect they do small projects like this as window dressing for the horror they have created.
The wattlebirds and Rainbow Lorikeets are competing for the grevilleas. The wattlebird grew very impatient and flew beneath the lorikeet and latched on to its tail. Sugar eaters are very feisty.
I’d been working on the grapevine netting and track clearing and then writing a recipe for our bread for The Australian. While reading their paper that morning, however, I discovered more racial slurs against me, so I rang the editor to withdraw the recipe. I was happy to promote Indigenous food but not in a paper where some of the writing owes more to the Rottweiler than to true journalism.
Anyway, the recipe is not complicated. We combine about 50 per cent baking flour with 50 per cent of our own flour, either Kangaroo and Spear, or Mitchell and Button. Chris adds yeast and salt while Lyn uses her sourdough starter. We have a breadmaker but often cook it in a camp oven or straight on the coals. The aroma is a revelation. We sell our flour on our Black Duck website or at the farm gate.
I worked on removing saplings overhanging the track through the national park. The regrowth after the fires was incredible, but now those young trees are falling and blocking the road and creating firebomb conditions in the bush. February 2024 will be the start of many fires. We should have been cool burning in the parks and forests just weeks after the 2019 fires but now it will be very difficult. To drive from the farm, where we practise cool burning, to the national park is a real indication of the benefits of traditional burning. It worries me that our farm access is through such a dense tangle of regrowth.
Camp oven bread
It was an incredibly windy day on 21 November and I stayed inside fixing brass handles to an old chest I bought Maggie and Rosie’s Antiques in Bega. I use it as a coffee table but it is hard to move and looks a bit blank, characterless. The handles dress it up a bit and make it easier to shift and it gives me an inordinate amount of pleasure to see the transformation of a very ordinary bit of furniture.
I did a bit of work on the boat after the wind abated and I was accompanied by a Gunyu family. The young swan was all tan and fluffy, obviously too young to fly, and the parents paddled sedately down the creek and around the corner, out of range of my knocking and clanking in the boat.
I flew to Sydney early on 23 November and it was a long day of filming. My good friend Liz Warning is the researcher for The Dark Emu Story and her presence reassured me. I am quite sick of the whole thing, but Liz tells me that Lyn was fantastic in the piece she did to camera.
Liz has been providing me with research papers on archaeological sites for years. She was quick to understand how this new knowledge could transform Australian understanding of its history. If we were able escape the closed gate of the naysayers.
The filming required me to fly to Melbourne to get more footage at Alia and Charlee’s school. Marnie has put in a lot of work in the food garden there and I was able to show the kids all the Munyang and Murnong the garden had produced. I love that little school. I have visited it often as the grandkids have progressed through the grades. The central hall area is real old-world education architecture, completely charming.
It’s a really well-run school and I never fail to be warmed by the inquisitive nature of the kids and the support the teachers give them. One deeply troubled girl found it too difficult to join the group being filmed but was fascinated by the camera gear and so the teachers and film crew ran her through a private lesson, just the way a compassionate school and world should operate.
We then went over to Melbourne University and I talked to the agriculture students under the gaze of the film crew. Afterwards Marnie and I had a lunch just to ourselves. I always appreciate those times when I can have the kids to myself.
I remember fishing with Marnie in Smellie’s Inlet a couple of decades ago. She just prattled away and hauled in fish after fish as if it was the only way fishing could be done. I loved it. Once when Jack and I went over to Tasmania to research the family tree we had some beers and scallops on a houseboat in the Huon River. I still think of it as one of the best afternoons of my life.
Lyn faces the camera for the filming of The Dark Emu Story (Liz Warning)
Back home I helped Lyn work in her garden. When we had finished I returned to the farm by boat but as I approached my jetty I noticed there was a water dragon basking there, the first time I had seen one on my own jetty. I was so encouraged by that sighting.
The film crew arrived later that day so it was intense concentration again. All the time we were working I could hear this year’s young Bunjil calling, kissook kissook kissook, while the parents glided over the duck pen avid-eyed.
The young Pipits were working the edges of the slashed paddock picking up grass heads and insects. The bird activity kept me patient during the protracted tedium of the filming.
The script called for a harvest of Munyang and Murnong. The tubers were wonderful and it felt like we were showing Australia the future of their diet and gardens. Perennial vegetables; no poison, little water, no pesticides.
The evening was gorgeous and just on dusk I saw a Garramagang (magpie) scream around the corner of the house in pursuit of some small bird. It was a real dashing and twisting dogfight. I couldn’t see what kind of bird it was or why the Garramagang was so intent but, in any case, the little bird managed to escape.
That night I was overwhelmed with Gurandgi business as we tried to reconcile ourselves to the passing of Uncle Max almost twelve months ago. His loss has created a huge gap and we have filled the void with disquiet. It is exhausting, but we continue because the old man anticipated all the unrest and gave us clear instructions as to how it must be handled. We persevere for the sake of the ancient lore.
Early Summer
The grass turns golden tinged with russet and in late afternoon
you can smell it ripening. The whole hillside dances with wind in
the grass and we are reminded that we are not the first to look
across the land and imagine bread.
Queensberry Rules
The first day of summer and the young male Buru box each other at dawn. They are holding their heads out of the way too. To protect their eyes? Males have much stronger forearms than the females and we speculate on why they tip their heads back out of the way. I have heard many theories but it is most probably to protect their eyes.
The Garramagang (magpie) chased a little bird again this morning but it looked more like displeasure than hunting. I think the small bird was a Yellow-rumped Thornbill. The thornbill nests in the callistemon near the kitchen window and feeds in that tree and the Lucerne tree in the backyard. I couldn’t see how that would make the Garramagang cranky. Surely the thornbill wasn’t competing for food or nesting material. I have seen a butcherbird attack, kill and flay a Red-browed Finch and I know Garramagang can eat nestlings of other birds, but to chase and kill, I’m not sure.
The politics of the garden is fascinating. After the chase the thornbill flew to the top of the dead tree in front of the house. It is a mystery.
There are a few frictions amongst the farm employees too and we are hoping it can be sorted out. I worried about the tensions as I drove to catch the plane to Sydney. When I arrived I blobbed out with a meal and a beer while watching cricket. Sport is really calming for me. I take the results seriously when I have a vested interest but if they lose it is just a game. No one dies. Because I have played so much sport I get enjoyment from watching the tactics, some of which I used to employ, but at about 10 per cent the skill level. The abilities of top-flight sportspeople make my jaw drop. Watching any of the Rioli family playing AFL makes me marvel at their athleticism. I treasure a t-shirt their aunty gave me forty years ago. It is so old it has fallen to pieces but I use the logo of the Tiwi Tigers as my computer cleaning cloth.
I thought Maurice Rioli Snr was the best footballer I had ever seen. When I saw how quickly he understood a play situation and then spun and weaved a way through the congestion it just made me shake my head. I would try to emulate it at training for my own club but I just didn’t have it. My brain didn’t respond quickly enough and my legs weren’t nimble enough. Sad but true.
I had more success at cricket but enjoyed it half as much. But today, sport is a solace for me as the rest of my life is so full of responsibility and threat.
We filmed The Dark Emu Story all day in the Mitchell Library and it gave me the chance to read the original notebooks of Sir Thomas Mitchell and the first editions of journals by Mitchell, Sturt and Grey. It really fascinates me what these people recorded and what our early educators and historians deemed unfit for our children to learn.
The next morning, I shopped for Christmas at some kind of mall. I shop quickly and efficiently and really enjoy thinking about what individuals will like. I like second-hand shops most of all because you can match a quirky object to a quirky person. Sometimes I get strange looks from my family on Christmas day but I know I’m right, they just haven’t realised who they are yet!
I headed back to the wonderful Mitchell Library but I dragged my feet because I was going to film with the anthropologist linguist Peter Sutton. I found it hard to believe how rude he was and how resistant to the idea of Aboriginal achievement. We looked at the same texts and what I saw as genius he dismissed as aberration.
I was unsettled and deeply disillusioned by this day. I am attacked so frequently I was hoping not to experience it again in my second favourite library in Australia. When I got home Lindsay was replacing some posts in the horse paddock. He is one of my best friends but I just couldn’t bring myself to go down and help.
Instead, I listened to the first Striated Pardalotes of the season and later went and had a swim to calm myself. My neighbour Kate dropped off some toolbags she had sewn to the design my mother made to hold Dad’s chisels. I still have a couple of the original bags and so I got Kate to make me a dozen for Christmas presents for the family. I am so pleased with them that I have asked her to make me another twenty and I’m going to give one to each of the Black Duck workers and board and each of the senior Gurandgi.
My mother was an extraordinary woman. She was deaf, blind and epileptic but her spirit compensated for all of it. She only went blind later in life, as a result of the epilepsy perhaps, but she embraced her new condition and took on executive roles in the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind and taught herself to play lawn bowls and won several gold medals for Australia at the Paralympics overseas and in Australia.
But those things weren’t the half of her. She had the biggest heart. We always had people living with us that Mum was looking after. We lived for a time in an old house where three rooms were built directly on to the dirt but that didn’t stop Mum filling that house with Dutch migrants and hapless drifters.
She once told me a story of her horse, Silver, which pulled the milk cart her family used to deliver the milk and cream from their little dairy. Silver reared one morning and spilled all the milk cans. When my grandfather got home he was furious and he jumped on Silver and thrashed her all the way to Greensborough and back. The poor horse was in a lather of sweat and trembled from top to toe. Mum was inconsolable and even telling the story sixty-five years later poor Mum had tears rolling down her cheeks.
It wasn’t Silver’s fault, according to Mum, but my grandfather was a big knockabout bloke and had his theories on horse training. He spent a lot more time at agricultural shows than he did on the farm but when he was home he was boss. He churned through brownie points with his children but I idolised him. He showed me how to operate a carbide lamp and it was like the work of a magician. Those deep glowing lenses of ruby and emerald still appear in my dreams.
Poor Wangarabell had a terrible night. Vomiting, wandering around outside dazed. I walked with her as she tottered and fell. She had her head on one side just like her poor brother, Yambulla.
I watched over poor Bell but she really was removing herself from life. I had to leave her for a while so I could search the bush for orchid tubers and send some to archaeologist Judith Field for her research on the grinding stones at the Australian Museum. Some archaeologists have been a bit prickly since Dark Emu came out but Michael Westaway’s Mithaka dig has changed the atmosphere quite a bit. When Judith asked for orchid bulbs I thought it was a great opportunity for the black and white sciences to work together. I look forward to her examination of the starch residues in the dishes. It will tell us so much about the diets of people from different regions.
When I first wanted to see the Cuddie Springs grindstone that I wrote about in Dark Emu there was quite a bit of resistance, but Liz Warning’s charm enabled my access to the stones and I was able to look at them with the young Aboriginal researcher Laura McBride. The stone came from Laura’s mother’s Country so the museum’s reluctance to allow her to see an artefact housed in the museum where she worked was deeply troubling.
Why were they so afraid? It was a really unfortunate impasse because when we were able to explain to the staff why we were interested in the stone they realised our interest was very close to theirs. The impediment was created because they felt they were the owners of the stone. I watched them as I explained that Laura’s heritage meant that her great extended family owned the stone. I saw a light go on in a house where thousands had access to the switch for centuries.
Bell was really crook and I carried her onto my bed where she slept all night so soundly that I had to feel her heart from time to time. It was her best sleep for months and I realised how much warmth, comfort and reassurance she gained from the contact.
She was still wobbly and distressed in the morning and I knew the time had come but I had arranged to go up to Yambulla to meet with Jim Osborne and Cooma about Jim’s offer to endow Gurandgi with a piece of land. It was such an important meeting for Yuin people that I could not let the moment pass.
I met Cooma near Walla Walla trail. We drove into the property and we were met by a large golden Mirrigan (dingo). This is dog dreaming Country, so Cooma and I looked at each other and stopped the car. The dingo walked toward the ute and sat down as if to formalise our access.
The dog kept looking over his shoulder and we knew there was another dog close by. Eventually we concluded the interview and began driving again. Soon there were two dingoes beside us and they followed us all the way into the property.
We visited a couple of the ceremonial sites we had seen before and speculated on where we might establish a Gurandgi camp. Jim arrived and we shook hands to fix our arrangement and discussed how we might care for the country together. Black and white in a compact of care.
Months later, when I returned to this site on my own to prepare the way for a Gurandgi lore camp, I was met by two Gungwan (emu) who walked in a complete circle around me as I worked. I went on with the job but the birds were so relaxed that they kept on eating blackberries as they sashayed about. On our way out of the camp a few months later I was escorted off the property by a Gungwan who ran in a slow and relaxed lope in front of me before turning on to the track where I had to turn right. The bird then disappeared as if by magic. These moments are precious to us. They are our contact with Country.
