Black Duck, page 4
Mundabaa also built the two 20 metre by 30 metre enclosed gardens, which are the heart of our tuber production. It was a hard build because of the sloping land but the result is a constant source of pride. We found a lot of stone tools when we dug the holes for the steel posts and an image of ten Aboriginal men gathered around an old chalcedony core will never leave me. How did that stone get here? Where did it come from? Which Yuin man carried it? Was it a relative?
The small axe head knapped from that stone must have been an incredibly beautiful object. Mauve, amber and pearl. You can imagine the whole community gathering around to admire it, just as we did, 150 years later. That stone, along with others found around the house, are still on a bench on the verandah. I show it to everyone who has five minutes to spare. We are not dead and neither is our history of art and labour!
Justin is very handy on the tools and plugged away during Covid, and finally I could sleep in my own room. The family could have the old farmhouse to themselves and I could make a cup of tea in the early morning without upsetting the whole apple cart.
Harvests and Cuckoos
The Channel-billed Cuckoo used to be a rare visitor, but it soon became a regular. I heard its call first in early spring but it was still here in late summer. The Scarlet Honeyeater used to be rare too, but climate change has made them common visitors. Muttonwood and Heart Plants used to also be uncommon but now find the warming climate to their liking.
The drizzly weather meant the fellas worked in the hayshed welding steel benches for the new nursery. Chris is a bit of a wizard when it comes to making things. A youth spent wrecking and repairing trail bikes means he looks at a job and can usually figure out a solution. He’s a deeply cultural man and can repair any machine.
While they were working, I wrote an essay for Indigenous Perspectives and then Terry, Nathan and I had to go to Eden for the monthly Twofold Aboriginal Corporation. Twofold manages housing, health and some education for the community and battles hardship and disadvantage every day. The staff are superb. No one wants their job but they do heroic work for little pay. I admire them immensely. Many talk about Aboriginal disadvantage, some people try to end it.
During a quiet day on the farm, I provided myself the luxury of sitting on the verandah on my new second-hand bench and reading Sylvia Hallam’s Fire and Hearth for the second time, just for the pleasure of it. I looked up from the book and wondered when I had last read a book for the sheer joy of it. The answer was thirty years ago.
Twenty of those were during our publishing and editing of Australian Short Stories magazine when we read 120 stories every week for nineteen years. It robbed me of the private pleasure of the book. I miss that luxury of spare time. Hallam talks about the agricultural organisation of Aboriginal people, so I suppose you could argue it was work anyway.
I let the book rest in my lap as I absorbed the luxury of reading and a moment of rest. There are so few moments to sit down and reflect that it allowed me time to be grateful. The word rest appears in the word restore.
In this moment of calm and reflection on language, I thought of Groucho Marx. I think Groucho constructed one of the world’s best jokes. ‘Outside of a dog a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.’
I analysed that joke with Julie Clarke a couple of years ago and her forensic knowledge of language and grammar brought the joke alive again. I thought of a time when we swam at Bronte watching children being taught to love water. We mused on children, water and hope. A poem from that day will appear in my collection of poetry, Bronte Babes.
It was restful considering these luxurious cul-de-sacs of thought on the new verandah, so thank you, once again, Bobby Maher, I think of you often with gratitude. Thank you to everyone who worked on these new rooms, I enjoy the fruit of your labour every day and every night. You have made a wonderful place. Thanks to Pete Ahmat too, because while he worked on the building, we spent hours poring over books of history and heritage and talking black politics.
The building took so long and was undertaken in such difficult times that I am conscious of all those who helped create this calm place, this haven.
While I read, the magpies warbled for the entire hour. Thank you Garramagang your company is appreciated, your soulful art understood.
Later in the week it was John Williams’s funeral in Eden and it reminded us that time is precious. He was an influential Aboriginal man but is now gone. The Eden community has been wracked by too many funerals recently, very sadly many of those were for young people.
And speaking of precious time, Lyn worked with our ninety-three-year-old Gipsy neighbour as they wrangled an insurance claim after Pat hit a kangaroo. The roo lived but the Subaru was cactus. Pat has been such a good friend and a great supporter of Aboriginal people.
March is the season of fruit and so, in the midst of cooling preserve jars, I began writing a kids’ novel about ducks and eagles. I lost the manuscript for a while but eventually found it under a pile of tractor repair bills. I called the story Ducks and Drakes.
The garden hits its straps around that time of the year and I harvested tomatoes, cucumbers, plums, lemons and Vanilla Lilies. I will make cordial from the lemons and chutney and stewed fruit from the plums. The kitchen will smell of boiling fruit for a week but right through the next nine months I will have the flavours of plums, apples and rhubarb on my cereal every day. Never forget the bounty of Mother Earth.
Lyn made a loaf of bread for the Twofold Aboriginal Corporation AGM. The memory of the first loaf made about seven years ago remains sentinel in my mind. Bread made from our grains. When was the last time that had happened? The responsibility of closing that gap in history weighs heavily on us and I don’t think a day goes by when someone on the farm doesn’t refer to that duty.
We had early help from Ben Shewry (Attica Restaurant), John Reid (RedBeard bakery), Michael James (Tivoli Road Bakery), Richard Cornish (food writer for The Age) and Max Allen (wine writer), and many of them were in the kitchen when that first loaf came out of the oven. There were cheers and raised glasses so conscious were we of the history of the moment and what it could mean for Aboriginal communities and all Australians.
Sentiment and duty went out the window, however, as the bread was broken. It was superb. The aroma filled the kitchen. A handful of seed smells like a summer dusk; Australia will love cooking with this flour. Bakers will make a fortune from selling its wares, but how will Aboriginal people benefit? Some government minister, public servant or patriot will read this, so I plead with you to work out an answer to that question. Not just from your own brain and experience but after inquiring from Aboriginal people how they see the community’s involvement. Sit across the table from us, break bread together, be equal.
Birran Durran Durran
I saw two young plovers on 15 January. Tiny beige fluffs with long legs. Slightly ridiculous. Despite their vigilance, the Spur-winged Plover loses a lot of chicks to eagles and foxes. I can’t see how dingoes would have much success because the racket made by the adults when a dingo is within a kilometre breaks their cover immediately. Foxes are stealthier and patient and probably have success while eagles torment the birds with casual fly-bys seemingly aimed at wearing down the vigilance.
The plovers often nest right on the road at the big corner above the dam. I have seen three sets of eggs over the years, right in the median strip; dull green eggs camouflaged by the stones and grass where they are laid.
The birds feign injury and totter and stumble in front of the ute in an attempt to lure us away from the nest. They are probably encouraged in this manoeuvre because, in their opinion, we always fall for it. I have seen Australian Pipits do the same thing, but I have never found their nest, whereas a casual stroll will normally reveal the plover nest.
Their calls are ever-present on the farm. If the horses gallop, an eagle passes, a dingo wakes or a car arrives, you hear about it instantly. You can’t make friends with Birran Durran Durran because everything is a threat in its opinion. The helmeted yellow face gives the bird an appearance of suspicion. I love them but they do not love me.
If I shoot at starlings they go berserk. Starlings have tried to set up a colony on the farm every year at the beginning of spring and so I take pot shots at them with my ancient Lithgow .22 rifle.
I rarely hit one, but the report of the gun has the horses plunge into a gallop at the first sound. Every bird seems to react too. You can slam a car door or drop a steel saucepan or bucket and they don’t even look up. What is it about the rifle report that causes such immediate consternation?
Camouflaged plover’s eggs
The Spur-winged Plover
Many Australian bird names reference military regalia: riflebirds, Albert’s Lyrebird, frigatebirds to name a few. But the plover with that masked face and distinctive tan, black and white is not one of them. I think they are a vastly underrated bird for character and appearance. They are so neat and so stiff in their bearing.
I am still trying to find out the meaning of their name, Birran Durran Durran. I keep wondering if it means stop-start. The birds often dash stiff-legged for a few metres and stop suddenly as if in a game of musical chairs where the prize is greater than a Mintie.
One of Uncle Max’s many names was Dulumunmun (short legs). One of his totems was the Red-capped Dotterel (plover), a shore bird that also runs in fits and starts. It’s funny, but I never thought of Uncle Max as a short man because I was always looking up to him.
The plover alarm raised when the eagles invaded the duck pen must have been dramatic, but no one could help these helplessly domesticated birds. They might tilt their head toward the sky in search of prey but they are no match for it. Even if you steal eggs from beneath a sitting duck, the tap from her beak is like she’s testing your reflexes rather than trying to hurt you.
They had been so intimidated and traumatised by the avian attacks that they barely left the hutch, but when I went in to mow their grass they followed me everywhere despite the noise, as if there was safety in numbers.
Gamelan
A rainy period inspired the frogs. The nights were full of riot and every now and then the low honk of a swan lent an air of Balinese gamelan to the orchestra. The plovers’ voices interceded on a need-to-know basis and when the sun began to rise the butcherbirds and magpies took over. I don’t have a sound system in the house because I’m so tuned in to what the rest of the farm family are saying. I don’t want to miss any of it.
Lyn used to teach dance and she was meticulous in her search for the right music. One night a few winters ago I rowed her into the very end of the backwater where a flock of swans had their own gamelan underway. It was entrancing. We recorded it and we had planned to use it in a performance on the sandflats in Mallacoota’s Bottom Lake. The idea was to acknowledge the fact that the place has been Aboriginal land and always would be, but the hope was that all residents could live together here in peace. Because the only other option is denial and argument.
There is a map of Mallacoota’s lakes drawn by the government surveyor Francis Peter MacCabe in 1847, soon after the first entry of Europeans into the district. All place names on it are Yuin words so MacCabe must have been accompanied by an Aboriginal guide. I have often wondered if it was Mallacoota Kitty who was later murdered, by repute, by Captain Stevenson after whom the location of Mallacoota’s first white settlement was named.
Locals told me in the seventies that Mallacoota did not have an Aboriginal population. This map should dissuade anyone from that view. A copy of the map was found by Russel Mullet being used as a drawer liner in the Lands Department. Russell gave it to me and later I found the original map thanks to a friend of Chris Solazzini, one of the farm workers. I copied it and had it mounted and framed and tried to give it to the East Gippsland Shire Council.
I could tell there was some resistance when they asked me about the map’s authenticity. Apart from the fact that it is clearly produced by a government surveyor, anyone wanting to find it could discover its bona fides in the government records office.
It wearies me that we have to argue these things to the very death with government officials. It’s also true that some local Aboriginal people want to argue the toss on the language, who owns the land and what that land is called, but these arguments arise in an atmosphere where groups compete for far too little money and influence. The legacy of colonisation. People who despise Aboriginal people and who want Australia to remain a white colony love any sniff of division and use it as a mallet to squash the opinion of those who have more diplomatic and generous opinions.
It was only in the 1960s that The Bulletin, Australia’s most popular magazine for 130 years, dropped the masthead, ‘Australia for the White Man’.
Mallacoota should celebrate the map that proves black people lived in this paradise, but it has been a long and depressing saga. Eventually the Mallacoota Bunker Museum took possession of the map, ironically, in a building administered by the Shire.
We should be using names on that map too. The lakes have been imaginatively named by Europeans Top and Bottom, the islands, Rabbit, Horse and Goat! The map shows the real names of those islands and a name near the entrance is Mallacoota. Mallacoota means white pipeclay which erupts at several points on the lake and is still collected ritually and used in cultural ceremonies today.
When the groups with cultural authority come together one day, I hope we can use our voice to replace the insult of Rabbit, Horse, Goat, Top and Bottom. It would allow us to celebrate the land and agree to share it because sharing is the only way; neither black nor white is going away.
While the weather was cool Lyn covered bunches of grapes with little socks to keep the bowerbirds, possums and honeyeaters away, but looking out the bedroom window one night I saw a Brush-tailed Possum (Goomera) enjoying a bunch on top of the Muslim Gate, for all the world like Bacchus.
The Muslim Gate was built to stop the Garragagan (west wind) burning the tree ferns poking through the deck. I bought the grills and doors separately from Jason and Sylvie at Maggie and Rosie’s Antique Emporium in Bega. That store is a solace for me. After the building got close to being finished there was little left for furniture but I found wonderful things in Jason’s Aladdin’s den. I furnished the house for much less and more to my taste than buying new.
I have a little writing bureau in my bedroom which has about forty tiny drawers where I put all the bits and pieces that come out of my pocket at night. Coins, screws and washers, fishing hooks and sinkers, bullets, shells and stones. I reckon there are over 200 dovetail joints in the desk. It would be impossible to pay someone to make a desk like that today.
Furniture from Maggie and Rosie’s Antique Emporium
I love putting my hand on it, the wood is like silk, but I pity whoever has to clean up my room when I’m gone. Suck it up, there’s sure to be something worth saving. I cleaned up for my parents and in-laws, so I’m setting land mines for my own kids. Set aside a week, you mob!
When I brought the doors home Lindsay was too scornful to mock. He was silent while I scraped them back and gave them a rough paint with the dark blue of the house trim. I could feel his eyes judging me as I smashed out the awful yellow bubble glass in the screens so that the grills could stand out.
Whoever previously owned the gates had pasted Koranic verses all over them and there were two peepholes and several chains and locks. I often wonder if Goomera finds the peepholes useful. Is there an owl on the other side? A fox? A grapevine?
I love coloured glass and have done so since I was a child. I loved looking through bottles at the transformed world. Seaglass was collected every day. Yes, there are dozens of pieces in the writing desk. I bought some faceted glass sphere in a second-hand shop in Blackheath and I stuck one on the top curve I had planed and fitted above the gates, but Goomera had it off in two days.
When the whole family collected for pre-Christmas at Warrnambool later in the year, I stopped at a second-hand shop in Terang and at the front door there was a crate of brass door furniture and coat hooks. Five bucks each, mate. I got some hinges, handles, drawer pulls and a few other things so mysterious their use is pure speculation. But they’re lovely. A lovely brass doorknob is now on the top of the gate and is fixed with screws and it has defied Goomera’s best efforts.
The Pombomart is a huge old butter factory and is held together by cobwebs and dust. It is a rambling mess of objects. After Terry, Lyn and I attended a whale festival conducted by the Couzens family in Warrnambool, I asked Terry and Lyn to choose items to remember our journey by.
Terry chose a wooden Mirrigan (dingo), Lyn a butter dish and I was delighted by my two Chinese lion bookends. They are really heavy for their size and I think they’re wonderful on top of the old desk. Every time I look at them I think of Gurawul, the whale, and the families who asked us to join their celebration in Gunditjmara Country.
I wasn’t to know it then but in 2023 we had a second whale ceremony at Apollo Bay with the Couzens family, Gurandgi and ninety other whale people from all over Australia. While we were dancing, a whale and her calf breached several times. Locals couldn’t believe it, having never seen whales in that stretch of water before.
Bell interrogates the possum, Goomera
But back in 2022, when we were in Warrnambool for our Christmas gathering, I badgered everyone into going to the Fletcher Jones second-hand market and gave them orders to choose something. Marlo got some anime shirts, Alia got the best burgundy Mock Martins anyone has seen, Marnie a tea set in a wicker basket, which we have used three times on river picnics already. It lends itself to ceremony.
Lyn got a set of beautiful jugs, Jack and Shell have enough junk already, Justin was trying to preserve space in the car, Lily got some books, but Charlee chose a stuffed giraffe taller than herself. I could see Justin trying to interest her in smaller, more aesthetic objects, but true to her nature she declared it was the giraffe or nothing.
