BUSH TUCKER PHANTASY
we ate a lot of murray cod, yellow belly, silver perch, catfish and
black bream/ we were that poor that i often attended my school
with no shoes on and a rope tied around my waist for a belt/ i was
called bindo/ but the catheads, burrs and hot ground did not worry
me because my skin went hard like leather/ same as the wise old
aboriginals/ the government issued a few coupons to buy food/ no
coupons no food/ one coupon bought one pound of butter for ten
people to last seven days/ that didn't worry us/ we made damper
dipped in fat/ or smeared golden syrup or treacle on it/ made
our own soap, toffee etc/ also had about two hundred emu eggs in
large tea boxes stored in the bathroom which we cooked cakes
with and scrambled eggs/ scrambled with curry was my favourite/
one emu egg was equated to one dozen hen eggs/ we had about
fifty fowls and when the chickens grew up we chopped their heads
off and ate them/ we caught wild pigs in the bush, fattened them up
on scraps, then killed them and ate them/ the largest pig was cured/
dad made ham and bacon out of him/ we had a vacant block next
door where we grew our own garden lucern and had two milking
cows and two horses/ the big dark horse was called 'nigger' and the
small dark horse was called 'darky'/ we used the horses to round
the cows up out on red hill every afternoon to milk the next morning
before the calves got their milk/ also had about twenty various
fruit trees and six mixed grape vines/ when the fruit got ripe the
flying foxes would come in after dark and feast on the fruit/ rabbits
and wild ducks were the other source of food/ rabbits: there were
thousands of them/ i used to go out to red hill with two abo kids
with sticks and dogs (no guns)/ we used to get about 20 as many as
we could carry/ ate half and sold the other half to the hospital, hotel
and café/ mum would say: gary go down and catch two cod/ one for
us and one for the doctor to pay our bill/ since no refrigerator you
could only catch one at a time or they would go off/ we were poor/
but we had our limits/ did not eat kangaroo or emu/ (this hunger
came with my father to the suburbs/ a photo of him standing by
the electric frypan/ after dinner scrapings out of what he called
'the tasty burnt bits'/ buttering up another slice of white bread
to wipe the plate/ generations of westies scraping out the bottom
of the barrel/ and the unquenchable working class poverty/ of my
father's bush tucker phantasy/ the dirt poor fattened on animals
sentenced to death/ the feast of dough and fat that turns skin into
soft crackling/ years of sedation that eats away at your insides/
insists on oppression and false hopes/ drives forward the hungry
determination/ makes doughnuts out of human beings) |
