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INLAND STORIES
When the old woman at Wilson Street in Brewarrina died, all evidence of the white cockatoo would die with her. The scene outside the window in Brewarrina, which she had often stared into would die as well. I would never hear about that cockatoo, who hung in the cage on the tree in the dusty front yard. The only way I could hear about it, was by searching the orbs of the woman's eyes. They shone so brightly that at night they were stars, but during the day they were white cockatoos. I searched her eyes and listened to her mouth. Words came like a leopard wood tree spiriting through her. On colder days in June her long bony arms pulled the patchwork quilt up around her knees. She drank black tea in the hot weather during December. When she died you would not know these things about her and neither would I. I only know because I searched her spirit before it left. I needed her body to be living to retrieve her inland stories. We all have to go on something. No one would know these things about her because she didn't tell them. You only know this about her, because I am telling you now.
My uncle Walter who brawled at the pub has huge hands. His hands were twice as big as an average mans. That's why he won all the fights in the pub at North Bourke. No one knows about him. His hands died with him and were buried. My great great great grandfather is a silouette. He named Cobar after Kubber (meaning native water hole) with and Englishman and Irishman and two kooris and started up a copper mine. Already his part in the naming of Australia, is being wiped from the history books, along with the kooris. The Englishman and the Irishman in the fancy clothes have their portraits on display in the Cobar Mining Museum. My great great great grandfather's name is Gibb. It is engraved on the monument outside. But there are no photos of him. He was a poor white drunk, who hung out with the blacks. One of them drew a silouette of him from memory only. That's all we have. When the two kooris died they were never spoken of again. Only the silence of Kubba speaks. It's how they would have wanted it. It's the way the dreamtime walks through Kubber. There are more shadows on that land that could be hung in the musuem.
I am suprised when I visit the Twin Rivers homestead along the Culgoa Road on the way to Bourke. I lived there wilth my father when I was eighteen. It has since been vandalised and burnt down. No one knows the brown girl that wandered along the sand, and who swam in the river with the cattle dogs. The land doesn't tell me anything. It is only beause I know who she was, that I can feel her lost presence. It lives in the ashes, amongst the burrs and flies in the heat. The dogs live there with her. There is not a paw print or track left in the clay of their lonely walks, and anything that touches a river from a thought, to where a body might have been is swept away. The Birrie River revitalises itself. It passes everything downstream and the stories are told in the trees by the wind. The shearing shed is burnt down. The shearer's quarters and the old steam engine are gone. The local pub is buried deeper than its rich green bottles. Each person I have been remains in the area. Nobody knows about them or their silent companions. I want to embrace the girl I once was, but she is always walking away. She perpetually dies not knowing of my existance in the same way that I know of hers. She cannot see the future. In this way she will become me.
My grandmother on my father's side of the family is dead, but she was born at Collerina out at Twin Rivers. As children our parents took us there on school holidays. It was stinking hot, very barren and isolated. But it was the history of her and our family origins that came from out west. But who were those green tree frogs we went in search of? The shack was so dilapidated that it had the rising river swimming in its windows. Old coins such as pennies and six pence made bumps in the sodden old newspapers that covered the floors. The outdoor dunnie had twenty green frogs beneath its tin lid. They were not my grandmother as a child. They lived in themselves and had their own characteristics. Each frog is an individual inhabiting one old dunnie out of many. In a few months they would be gone. No one would know of the others existence. Except the frogs who had shared the same space, beneath the same lid, of the outback dunnie or perhaps a brown snake. They will only live on briefly because I have chosen to mention them. I would like to think of us all as stars, beautiful and bleak and so very far away from each other's orbits. We have inherited a tradition of oral histories, inland stories that continue to emit light down through time, long after the death of the original source. I wish it was like that. |
