Black Duck, page 9
It was still raining lightly but with a glimpse of watery sun every now and then. Rosco helped me finish the duck house, which I really appreciated. I find the heavy lifting hard these days. Ross Knight is a Wurundjeri man and also a member of the Gurandgi lore group and a great musician.
Then there was a Black Duck board meeting and afterwards I jumped on the tractor to work on the roads, but all the newly installed pipes had been washed out below the Water Ribbon Dam. The force of the water was so great that one of them was bent clean in half. I jammed it against a tree and straightened it out and it opened up like a resurrected concertina. Didn’t look too bad. They are large ribbed plastic pipes and easy to move about with the tractor but replacing the pipes is difficult and requires more gravel.
So much water comes over the road at that point that I think we will have to lower the profile of the road so that we don’t create an obstruction to the flow. It is disheartening to see so much work wasted. The crossing is now very rough. Two-wheel drives will have no hope. It was over the ute’s door sill the day before.
Mook and I reinstalled the overflow pipe from the dam and secured it by tying wire between two star pickets and then hammering down the posts to fix the pipe tight. Once again, I appreciated the help. The pipes are light enough but after a few hours slopping through water and mud, the funny side of it begins to pale.
The Wallagaraugh is rising slowly and the White-faced Herons are looping around the farm in their elegant courtship.
Last night two disoriented swallows battered my bedroom window and I had to get up and lead them away so they could find their old roost on top of the back door light. People look askance at the pile of guano that is building up there. But if you could see how comfortable they are you’d find it hard to evict them. They are friends and, like the dogs, they cheer me up.
Lyn’s road has been washed away but she is more concerned about an old spider, two of whose legs she inadvertently amputated with a fly screen. It has been around for months but since the rain it has been in the house constantly. Lyn’s sister-in-law is staying with her and she is a fervent cleaner and Lyn is worried the spider will get vacuumed.
Next morning the whole world was shrouded in a dense mist so it became a day for little jobs: final fix on duck house roof, weeding Munyang and Murnong gardens, tying up plants blown over by the wind, harvesting fruit.
While making a frugal dinner I fielded a lot of calls from Gurandgi who are doing their best to ensure Uncle is sent off with respect. I had to go down to fix the bilge pump on Nadgee and take her back to her jetty which it was now surfacing after the retreat of the river. I’m always amazed at how the rough old jetty copes with the volume of water going by. She is sheltered from the main current but even so, sticks and branches threaten to build up against her flank.
The jetty has a bit of give so she shudders a little as the water rises and I think that little movement helps shake off some of the flotsam coming downstream. She is always amazingly free of debris. She looks a fright but she lasts.
The Jacky Winters are back around the house after having spent summer around the Grey Box trees at the buna, the old dance ground. They are such good company. They talk constantly and vary their conversation from season to season. The twitch of their white-banded tail is an animated part of the day, eye-catching and encouraging.
Some visitors curious about the farm got blocked by a fallen tree so I had to go and rescue them. While I was doing that I came across neighbours Chris Parker and Patch Brackley musing thoughtfully on escaped cattle. Fences down everywhere. Bit of rain, bit of wind and trees fall regularly. Everyone is busy in a flood.
Inspired by Aunty Joy Wandin’s painting at Zena Cumpston’s exhibition, I painted Wurundjeri on an old bedsheet so I could use it as a Zoom backdrop when the light is too bright in my office. The butcherbird called the whole time. This is one of their most vocal seasons. It has an incredible song so while I was painting I listened to the most amazing Australian flute solo.
When Mark, one of our farm crew, comes to work he can impersonate the bird in uncanny fashion. One of the Gurandgi, Alistair Brown, amuses himself at lore camps by doing one bird after another and at times it is hard to pick the real ones from Alistair. It is an old-fashioned habit probably learnt from an uncle or grandfather.
Lyn had to do some interviews for another film on the bushfires and, of course, they wanted to film outside the fire shed in Mallacoota. Some members grizzled. The brigade is sometimes negative and, in the past, has shown almost no interest in the years of work Lyn has put into engaging the town and government agencies in a program to make the town safer. It’s like herding blowflies into a lemonade bottle and I don’t know how she has the patience. One day someone in the CFA will realise that this was the project that brought the town to actively counteract fire without recreating Dresden.
Chris Parker called in. He is one of my old students from the seventies. Chris has just bought Walker’s old house upstream from me. We talked floods, fires and Aboriginal heritage. He’s a good bloke, Chris, and one of the few not to curl his lip when the word Aborigine appears in a sentence.
We watched the swallows coursing over the grass in the front of the house. They almost stall as they hover. They must be feeding on hatchings of insects but I don’t know which ones. I saw a Jitti Jitti catch a brown and gold butterfly a few days ago and as Chris and I watched we saw the bird catch two more.
Chris remembers the camps we took our students on as the best days of their lives. We thought they were pretty good too. We must have been a sight for the town, us mad hippies leading kids away from the school room and down to the beaches.
We ran a bird elective and often took kayaks out on to the lake to count shore birds. We saw a really unusual bird one year and Steve Wadsworth, an old mate and photographer, got a very grainy photo. The school was a member of the Bird Observers Club but when we posted the photo to them they wouldn’t believe us.
We thought it was probably a Beach Stone-curlew but the BOC couldn’t be convinced. They sent down an earnest party of twitchers who took their sensible shoes and binoculars all up and down the coast and lakes and came back scarlet of cheek and green of chagrin not having seen hide nor feather of the mythic bird.
They were about to call wrath down upon our heads until one of their wives who had been reading a book while sunbaking on the beach and eating Tim Tams came back with a photo. The curlew had strolled past her feet. Our school was famous for a year in bird circles because, before that, the bird hadn’t been seen further south than Newcastle.
Our fame was cemented when another student photographed a Cape Barren Goose striding around the shallows of Devlin’s Inlet. Some of our kids were so wild they came to school with straw in their hair and surf wax on their chins. Locking them in a school room for too long each day was a cruelty a hippy couldn’t contemplate.
The school kept losing principals so frequently that Oscar Wilde would have called it carelessness. Too frequently I was left in charge of the commune. We experimented in education more often than we practised it but we did create a newspaper that fifty years later is still going, the infamous Mallacoota Mouth.
The kids researched and wrote the stories and in editorial sessions we’d be standing around with teenagers wondering how to phrase a delicate story. Yes, the child was saved from the savage dog but why was the saviour naked? Constructing those sentences so as not to offend were a constant part of our school day, the best English and social studies lessons you could ever invent.
The kids really grew up quickly. You couldn’t do it today because the risks are so great the Education Department wouldn’t tolerate the scandal, but in those days we had no policeman, no doctor, no chemist and no real church so we had to officiate the town ourselves. Someone was pinching boat motors. Some large fisherman caused the thief’s teeth to become autumnal. Thereafter the culprit was called Onassis after the shipping magnate.
Yes, the Mouth reported on that too without referring to autumn or Greek tycoons.
There was a house fire, which aroused some suspicions, but the counsel of the bar was sought and as people sipped beer and the unusual circumstances were considered it was decided that while several events bordered on the criminal it was thought that the ultimate outcome would be equivocal. The town came to the conclusion that it was best just to help rebuild the back of the house and pretend the fire and other activities hadn’t occurred. Justice was served with cold beer and delicacy.
The Mouth’s editorial committee, average age fifteen-and-a-half, considered the story and decided not to mention it at all. Was it poor journalism or exquisite discretion and solid justice? The kids’ sense of fairness was really refined and compassionate. Journalism today often fails that test.
Forest Dusk and Last Chances
Lyn often drives to the farm at dusk and the forest road is so much higher than the paddocks that the full magnificence of the sunset is revealed. One day she recorded that she was struck ‘by the late afternoon light of apricot and deep purple bruises that get more intense as I approach the farm, sometimes just enough light to enjoy on the deck upon arrival’.
Soldiering on despite the loss of two of her legs
Lyn’s spider is safe but amazingly industrious.
It begins its day in the bathroom and ends the day in the lounge. The passage of the day is just as intense for the currawongs and bowerbirds who feed on the dogs’ leftovers at both houses. Because Bell has been away with Lyn for a few days the dog bowl is empty and the birds stand around on deck rails with a sense of uncomprehending injury.
April 8 and the mist is not as profound as recent days but the trees on the hills are spectral in the dawn light. The Grandfather ceremony I do every day causes me to look closely in each direction and give thanks to Grandfather Sun. The discipline forces me to take notice of the world; observation is not a leisure activity but a daily responsibility.
I had to replace the batteries in the wildlife cameras put in place by a PhD candidate. He sent me a thumb drive of the first six months and it turned out to be a video of someone’s wedding. Not a wombat in sight.
The fellas harvested food for the Giiyong Festival but Lyn and I headed to Goulburn for a book event twice postponed by Covid and the fires. We had to stay in an ordinary motel because we had poor old Bell with us. The restaurant was a treat. The manager had a tangle of unwashed hair and puffy eyes and her son served the meals but couldn’t stop picking his nose. The steak was inedible so we squirrelled some out to Bell who sniffed it once and looked up at us as if we were passing off last year’s dead cat. Perhaps we were.
It was very, very sad; as if this was a family on their last chance. Made us bleak to think how that chance might end.
The book festival sessions went well and it was great to meet the local Aboriginal families who showed us about their town. Afterwards we tried to find the famous lagoon so we could give Bell a good walk. We couldn’t find it so ended up having our picnic on a dead-end road, but so quiet that we were surrounded by little birds; honeyeaters, thornbills, Silvereyes and all feeding on agricultural weeds. Mesmerising. Then seven Jitti Jitti turned up and all wanted to speak at once. We wondered if that was an ominous sign or one of solidarity.
The festival panel involved a group of writers wrestling with the idea of misappropriation of Aboriginal culture. Those sessions are stressful because I am supposed to have all the answers and take no offence at any of the questions.
We drove home and got back with an hour to spare before I had to join Brian Nankervis’s music show on ABC radio. Lyn drove on to Gipsy Point doing a slalom between various groups of kangaroos and wallabies having group therapy in the middle of Gipsy Road.
Brian let me play Woody Allen, Pete Seeger, The Long Johns and Brenda Gifford. In between we yarned about cricket, the farm, children.
When I woke in the morning I had a shower on the deck that looks down toward the dams and swamps, and two young male Buru were boxing each other studiously like two professors having a dispute about a footnote.
There was a big tree across the track so Chris and I cut it up and I shared the wood with Lyn.
There has been a severe blow-up in one of the local Aboriginal families so tomorrow I have to go to court in Bega to offer support. I have a photo of Uncle Max’s grandfather, Uncle Muns, sitting in the front of the same courthouse. I wonder why he was there because, every time I go, the majority of people at the court are Aboriginal and the extent of their crimes is often so minimal as to appear like intimidation of the race. Or guilty of a bad lawyer or no support. We got a good lawyer, a generous listener, and the result was the best that could be hoped for.
Uncle Muns outside the Bega courthouse
Lyn had to attend a Mallacoota and District Recovery Association meeting at Genoa. Her reception was cool because the town is still insulted by the fact that nobody came to help them. Lyn copped the cold shoulder for other people’s crimes.
When locals went to access the fire-fighting water tank during the fire it had been locked. The stupidity of that is hard to comprehend but it was not Lyn’s fault, she was in the fire station at Mallacoota as it caught alight. I remember driving a tanker into Genoa a day or two after the fire and I couldn’t believe the stiff reception we received. We weren’t to know we were the first CFA vehicle they had seen.
The townspeople of Genoa saved the town themselves and were feeling let down by the authorities. The firestorm was so horrific and the sense of abandonment so profound they still haven’t got over it.
We drove in from fighting fires for forty-eight hours straight and drove up there the first chance the Duty Officer allowed. It was awkward and sad.
I could understand the feeling because one morning, weeks after the first attack, I radioed in for support while I was fighting a fire at a remote house. After I had finished, I drove out to the crossroads and found six CFA trucks waiting around in a paddock. I had to swallow hard.
The CFA rules are clear about what roads large tankers can safely access but my sense of abandonment was similar to that of the people of Genoa.
On one occasion, I brought a supply of diesel to the upper reaches of the Wallagaraugh. I found an old mate hosing down the edge of the fire but as soon as he saw me he started swearing and waving his arms. He’d been at it on his own for days.
‘Where’s ya bloody truck, ya mongrel, where were you when we needed you?’ He was beyond angry, inflamed by the sight of my uniform. I wore it unchanged for weeks. He wouldn’t believe I hadn’t come by truck so I had to show him my boat and the diesel I had brought him.
There was so much pain and disappointment in the district that friends sometimes swore at friends, patience rubbed raw by extremity. Most of the time however we just worked together in dogged silence because we knew we’d still be filling backpacks and hosing trees at midnight.
One day, at that hour, I stood in the glowing forest and felt absolutely alone. Later I realised I was right, I was the only person left on that part of the river.
So, I could understand the anger and pain but it didn’t mean it was any easier to cop the splashback.
That day in Bega court had me thinking of Uncle Muns late into the night. His father had been the only survivor of a massacre but he still ensured his son received the lore and for the rest of Uncle Muns’s life he walked between Bega and Bairnsdale trying to support his people. He walked the whole way, perhaps wanting his feet on the ground, like his old ancestors.
Wednesday 13 featured butcherbirds calling and two Buru boys boxing each other down near the Water Ribbon Dam. The young males are practising what will become full-on warfare when they are older. Right now, they cuff each other and try to find the higher ground. They are not kicking each other yet but later they will lean back on their tail and use the coiled energy to punch out with a hind foot at the other’s belly. A strike there can do a lot of damage but this morning they are still prancing about the stage like Shakespearean actors with plywood swords.
Cool, patchy burn
I worked on the roads all morning and my clutch foot is sore but in the afternoon we had to do a cool burn on the flank of the south paddock, so there was a lot more walking. It was a lovely slow burn through four acres and we laughed to see a praying mantis moonwalk in slo-mo away from our fire. It was a perfect example of the process of cool burning. We see dunnarts and antechinus skipping out of the way and plenty of grasshoppers take to their wings but the sight of that sloth-like insect in stately retreat proved to us that this type of fire is good and safe for Country.
The Grandfather ceremony that morning was graced by rays of light radiating toward the house from the top of the east hill and, at this time of year, there were spider webs everywhere. They cling to the netting of the enclosed gardens and the dew transforms them into nets of jewels.
The dew is our safeguard for the burning regime. This is the lore handed down to us by Jinoor Jack. Jack gave the formula of how to burn to the person who massacred his family, such was his determination that Country be looked after. I often think of his state of mind. So determined to care for Country that he’d share the secret with a heathen.
The formula was to light the fires after the prevailing wind has turned to the west and there have been three dews in a row. Light late in the afternoon and let the cool, moist air put it out as the sun begins to dip.
The fellas helped me enclose the grapevine with netting and put a hood on the woodshed to keep it dry. In the arvo we had another cool burn, which was even better than the day before.
Jinoor Jack’s plan was for Wangarabell, but that is just down the road so it’s perfect for here too. We’ve been really pleased with the results and the training going into the fellas. Next year we want to bring out busloads from the community so they can experience the pleasure of the work.
