Also by Tara June Winch

Swallow the AirAfter the Carnage

Copyright

HarperVia

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HarperCollinsPublishers

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by HarperVia in 2021

Copyright © Tara June Winch 2021

Cover Design by gray318

Designed by Terry McGrath

Map illustration designed by Tara June Winch

Title page art by gray318

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Tara June Winch asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

The Yield is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008437077

Ebook Edition © January 2021 ISBN: 9780008437091

Version: 2020-11-17

Dedication

For my family

Epigraph

“In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?”

Saint Augustine

Contents

Cover

Also by Tara June Winch

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

The Dictionary of Albert Gondiwindi

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Note From the Cover Designer

About the Author

About the Publisher

Map

Map illustration by Tara June Winch

One

I was born on Ngurambang—can you hear it?—Ngu–ram–bang. If you say it right it hits the back of your mouth and you should taste blood in your words. Every person around should learn the word for country in the old language, the first language—because that is the way to all time, to time travel! You can go all the way back.

My daddy was Buddy Gondiwindi, and he died a young man by the hands of a bygone disease. My mother was Augustine, and she died an old woman by the grip of, well, it was an Old World disease too.

Yet nothing ever really dies, instead it all goes beneath your feet, beside you, part of you. Look there—grass on the side of the road, tree bending in the wind, fish in the river, fish on your plate, fish feeding you. Nothing is ever gone. Soon, when I change, I won’t be dead. I always memorized John 11:26—Whoever lives and believes in me shall never die—yet life rushed through and past me as it will for each person.

Before I believed everything they taught me, I thought when all were dead that all were gone, and so as a young fella I tried to find my place in this short life. I only wanted to decide for myself how I’d live it, but that was a big ask in a country that had a plan for me, already mapped in my veins since before I was born.

The one thing I thought I could control was my own head. It seemed the most sensible thing to do was to learn to read well. So in a country where we weren’t really allowed to be, I decided to be. To get water from the stones, you see?

After I met my beautiful wife—although beauty was the least of her, strong and fearless was the most of her—well, she taught me lots of things. Big thing, best thing she taught me was to learn to write the words too, taught me I wasn’t just a second-rate man raised on white flour and Christianity. It was my wife, Elsie, who bought me the first dictionary. I think she knew she was planting a seed, germinating something inside me when she did that. What a companion the dictionary is—there are stories in that book that’ll knock your boots off. To this day it remains my prized possession, and I wouldn’t trade it for all the tea in China.

The dictionary from Elsie is why I’m writing it down—it was my introduction to the idea of recording, written just like the Reverend once wrote the births and baptisms at the Mission, like the station manager wrote rations at the Station, and just like the ma’ams and masters wrote our good behavior at the Boys’ Home—a list of words any fool can look up and be told the meaning. A dictionary, even if this language isn’t mine alone, even if it’s something we grow into and then, living long enough, shrink away from. I am writing because the spirits are urging me to remember, and because the town needs to know that I remember, they need to know now more than ever before.

To begin—but there are too many beginnings for us Gondiwindi—that’s what we were bestowed and cursed with by the same shifty magic—an eternal Once upon a time. The story goes that the church brought time to us, and the church, if you let it, will take it away. I’m writing about the other time, though, deep time. This is a big, big story. The big stuff goes forever, time ropes and loops and is never straight, that’s the real story of time.

The problem now facing my own Once upon a time is that Doctor Shah from the High Street Surgery has recently given me a filthy bill of health—cancer of the pancreas—which is me done and dusted.

So, because they say it is urgent, because I’ve got the church time against me, I’m taking pen to paper to pass on everything that was ever remembered.

All the words I found on the wind.

Two

By the river is where Albert Gondiwindi had wandered up to Prosperous as a little boy, wonder face, bare skinned, from the canvas shelter of Tent Town to the tin of the Mission, along with his mother, and his little sister inside her. Albert would remember how they walked, or marched; there were police officers on horses to show them the way past the red river, stained by tea tree and other things. Many years later, on the day of his death, Albert wondered once again how it must have been for the old people out by Murrumby when it flowed—a time when the air was as clean as the time before the words clean and dirty had ever been imagined. The river would’ve been clear twenty feet down, and the earth hummed its own reverent tune, day in and day out until one day. How quickly things change, he thought. In his final hours, Albert sat looking the same way all the remaining Gondiwindi would soon gather and look. Ahead of him on the foldout table was the almost-finished dictionary, beyond the table all the world. He suddenly felt a great wind blow from the Murrumby and instinctively slapped his hand atop the pile, protecting the words. In the distance he could have sworn he saw a gang of brolgas flying, further afield a swarm of locusts, the sky change color; all while the papers flapped against his will. He closed his eyes, wondered if he was about to go elsewhere, and then, as if encouraged by the wind, urged by the ancestors, took his hand away, and arced looking to the heavens to see the pages swirl and blow and eventually disappear in the air.

She hung up the phone. Poppy Albert was dead. So far away from the place where boys learned to kill rabbits and girls learned to live with the grief. Far away where people were born guilty but couldn’t admit it. Where whole years vanished from her. Days spent working thankless jobs or burrowed under a blanket, shunning whole seasons. The decade had aged her like a coin, all the shine gone. In that place on the other side of the world, she woke before the phone rang. Made coffee and a tumbler of aspirin. It wasn’t only in the mornings that she, August, was trapped between two states—sleep and coming to, yet especially that morning, on the cusp of being younger and older. She was about to exit the infinite stretch of her twenties and had nothing to show.

At the answering of the phone and the breaking of the news, she felt something dark and three-dimensional fall out of her body, something as solid as a self. She’d become less suddenly. She knew she’d felt that exact same way before, though she didn’t feel tears coming the way they burn the face and blur the eyes. Her face instead was cold to the touch, her heart rate lowered, her eyes dry, and her arms, chicken-skinned and thin as kindling, began to start a fire. She took the newspaper from the mail tray, took the crate of wood and knelt in the corner of the common kitchen. She spread the newspaper out, smoothing the pages with the side of her fist and held the hatchet and the cypress in each hand. Printed in the newspaper was a small photograph of a rhino. Above the picture it read in big ink block letters: GONE FOREVER—BLACK RHINO EXTINCT. An animal zip! Gone!

She could taste what she imagined was rhino skin, a dry warm thickness, muscle and dirt. She hadn’t told anyone about everything she couldn’t bring herself to remember and not about the things she could taste and smell instead, things that one shouldn’t be able to taste and smell.

Once, with a stack of textbooks on her lap—and knowledge of August’s hunger—a friend of hers studying social work at night school, and having not known what it was to experience a terrible inheritance, asked her simply about her school life. August had gone along with the line of enquiry, told her how she only knew she was poor at lunchtime. Told her when she lived with her grandparents it was always good food, always leftovers from the night before. She’d been the only student to use the microwaves in the teachers’ lounge. Before that? Before that she tried not to tell her that the lunches her mother packed were humiliating, instead she said they were just kooky. Kooky? August wound an invisible turbine at her ear. Her friend had nodded, had understood and closed her eyes in accordance with her training—a serene indication to go on. August had closed her eyes too and briefly let herself remember.

One day a jam sandwich, cut crusts, next day something the kids would make fun of—a tin of Christmas ginger bread in July, Easter buns in October. Sometimes a bread roll smeared with something incomplete, like ketchup. And a few times I remember opening the lunchbox and there just being imitation play food, a little plastic lamb chop, plastic-cast apple with no stem. It was my mother’s sense of humor.

August hadn’t seen the humor when she was a girl, but she had laughed about it then. They both laughed until something broke in August, and she did cry, the last time—but she pretended they were laughter tears. Afterward they went to the pub. August didn’t tell her any more, not how she was baptized by the sun, and not that as far, far away as she went from her country, from her home, she still couldn’t remove the scent and taste of dirt and diesel and flesh and muddied water from that grey hemisphere of her mind. How the worst thing that could ever happen had already happened. Time’s up.

The rhino in the news reminded August that she’d never been to the zoo, never seen a rhino in real life—it might as well have been a dinosaur. The paper listed other recent extinctions. And just like that she thought, zip! Gone! Poppy: Albert Gondiwindi was extinct. No more Albert Gondiwindi roamed the earth, and no more black rhino either. With an armful of sticks she fed the iron stove, close enough to redden her face in the eager first flames. Poppy Albert used to say that the land needed to burn more, a wild and contained fire, a contradiction of nature. He was talking about a different land though, not the one August had known for over a decade—in the grasslands forever wet, foreign forests of elm, ash, sycamore, hazel, and in the white willows that dipped into quiet canals. Where smaller birds in secondary colors flocked together and fires never licked. Where the sky fit into the reflection of a stone well, full with rainwater. Where low morning clouds played sleight of hand, and day never quite arrived before night.

She knew that she had once known the beloved land where the sun slapped the barren earth with an open palm and knew too that she would return for the funeral. Go back full with shame for having left, catch the disappointment in their turned mouths, go back and try to find all the things that she couldn’t find so many thousands of kilometers away.

August found a replacement for her dishwashing shifts, packed the one bag she owned and, before boarding, switched off her phone forever. During the flight she watched the GPS on the headrest screen, the numbers rising and steadying, the plane skittering over the cartoon sea. At the other end, having reached a certain altitude, crossed the time lines, descended into new coordinates, she’d hoped it would be enough to erase the voyage. Erase the facts of the matter, erase the burial rites to be recited, erase all the erasures of them, and that fractured family they once were. Just as they’d been for a century: godless and government-housed and spread all over the place, and then August wondered if there was enough remembering to erase. During the flight she dreamed of Poppy Albert. He was featureless in the dream, but she knew it was him. They’d arrived in the middle of the conversation, she didn’t know how they’d arrived there—in the field—he was telling her that there was a lot to remembering the past, to having stories, to knowing your history, your childhood, but there is something to forgetting it too. At the beginning of the dream, but as if at the end of a long conversation, he’d taken her hand and said that There exists a sort of torture of memory if you let it come, if you invite the past to huddle beside you, comforting like a leech. He was telling her more—that a footprint in history has a thousand repercussions, that there are a thousand battles being fought every day because people couldn’t forget something that happened before they were born. There are few worse things than memory, yet few things better, he’d said. Be careful.

Three

yarran tree, spearwood tree, or hickory acacia—yarrany The dictionary is not just words—there are little stories in those pages too. After years with the second great book, I figured out the best way to read it. First time, I went in like reading the Bible, front to back. Aa words first—there you find Aaron, and him in the Book of Exodus, brother of Moses, founder of Jewish priesthood. Aardvark—that animal with a tube nose that eats the ants of Africa. There are abbreviations too, like AA, Alcoholics Anonymous—where people go to heal from the bottle. That punched me in the guts. My mummy, she said, “The Aborigine is a pity, my son.” She said everyone was always insulted by her no matter what she did, so she let herself do the most insulting thing she could think of—take the poison they brought with them and go to town.

You could keep reading the dictionary that way—front to back, straight as a dart—or you can get to aardvark and then skip to Africa, then skip to continent, then skip to nations, then skip to colonialism, then skip over to empire, then skip back to apartheid in the A section—that happened in South Africa. Another story.

When I was on the letter W in the Oxford English Dictionary, wiray would be in that section, it means “no.” Wiray wasn’t there though, but I thought I’d make it there. Wheat was there, but when I skipped ahead not our word for wheat—not yura. So I thought I’d make my own list of words. We don’t have a Z word in our alphabet, I reckon, so I thought I’d start backward, a nod to the backward whitefella world I grew up in, start at Y—yarrany. So that is the once upon a time for you. Say it—yarrany, it is our word for spearwood tree: and from it I once made a spear in order to kill a man.

Four

The plane stopped on the runway and August disembarked into the heat wall, thirty-seven degrees—bathwater temperature. She was born into this, but she wasn’t accustomed to it anymore. Here, she remembered, summer wasn’t a season, it was an Eternity. Inside the terminal she overdrew her account when hiring the Budget sedan and drove seven hours west of the coast, along the City Highway, the Hinterland Highway, and finally the Broken Highway to arrive on the outskirts of Massacre Plains. Broken Highway slices right through the sand-budding grain fields, seas of sheep newly shorn, and oak scrub that had begun to grow in abundance into the drier clay earth. The biggest difference between before and now was not only the wearier livestock and thirstier crops, the extraordinary heat that had settled inland, but also that the distinct point between weather and desperation was tipping.

Rough Road Ahead traffic signs cautioned August’s arrival in the Plains. She caught the first signs of visual heat that radiated from the split bitumen and the sparse foreboding landscape beyond the road. That far inland everything was browner, bone drier.

The town of Massacre Plains was home to roughly two thousand locals and their children and children’s children. Half a town of wives tended counters and half a town of husbands were suicidal with farm debt, and most sons and daughters, seduced by a living wage, signed up as army cadets. All navigated boredom until the annual race days. Some made do on unemployment benefits and some had jobs though few had careers.

Murrumby River divided the people in town. Epithets were procured off supermarket shelves: Chocolate Milk were the old Mission Gondiwindi north of town, south of town in Vegemite Valley was where the blackfellas in the government housing lived, pegged after the salty sandwich spread, dark as molasses. In the center of town was where the middle class lived, according to a census like theirs, and were dubbed the Minties: named after the white, sticky candy sold in individual paper wrappers. The Minties’s houses had doorbells and locked gates. Only in Vegemite Valley were the doors left wide open on the houses. Love and fighting traveled freely inside and out onto the streets. Through some doors pitiless diocesan priests used to visit, those entrances that led to broken homes, where shame-filled single mothers brought up silent boys who became angry later in life.

August didn’t know and hadn’t remembered everything dealt to the people of Vegemite Valley. Her memory had been good enough to bury the bad thoughts, although reliable enough that the good were sometimes suppressed too.

Out on the old Mission at Prosperous a copse of gum trees had remembered everything for two centuries. August didn’t know all that the trees had seen. She didn’t remember the whirly-whirlies throwing dust about the paddocks, those small harmless tornadoes, that as a child were an almost permanent fixture. Most farmhouses in Massacre Plains were on the grid and buzzed endlessly; others further out, like Southerly and Prosperous, would come alive with the spit and start of the generator. She remembered the constant chug of electricity. And she remembered—or wanted to remember—the cool of the river Murrumby. Poppy used to call the Murrumby River the Big Water, and it had once flowed through the country, from state to state, south to north. August’s memory of the river was faint since the water had ceased flowing since she was a girl, and not just because of the Dam Built but because of the Rain Gone. And some say because enough people cry water in this whole region, Murrumby thinks she’s not needed at all.

August stopped for supplies before the turn-off, wanted not to buy cigarettes but knew she would. The outside of the convenience store was wrapped in green netting, like an art installation, she thought. On the pavement, more green mesh was for sale; huge rolls leaned against each other, just as bundles of fabric do, or she imagined, people starboard on a sinking ship. Beside the bolts of green were crates of plastic rip-ties that she recognized as those that policemen used to carry on weekend nights.

She fumbled with the mesh hanging over the shop doors as she exited and came face-to-face with another customer, keys in hand, entering the store. He was an elderly man, and he stumbled back, startled, as August drew the screen aside.

“Sorry,” she offered, and put her hand out toward him, suspended in the air. He steadied himself without her help and studied her face briefly.

“Now, you must be a Gondiwindi girl,” he said, saccharine as butterscotch.

August gave a short nod, clutching the bag of groceries to her chest, dipping her chin into the crumple of foodstuffs.

“I know a Gondiwindi face when I see one.” He gave a small smile as if it were a compliment. “Pass on our condolences from the church.”

“I will. Thank you . . .” she hadn’t known what mark of respect to bestow upon someone she didn’t know; she settled with, “Sir, thanks sir.”

August turned before he grabbed at the air like an afterthought were floating away. “God bless,” he added. August got a distinctly awful feeling of pins and needles and could taste the smell of his acetone skin. She walked away without another word. Locals who didn’t pay her any attention carried bundles for their own shopfronts. A couple of men crouched at their utes by the gas pumps, fixing mesh cut-offs onto their engine vents. August took in the clear, blue sky—the locusts were yet to arrive.

Inside the rental she could see the center of town nestled on the horizon. There, a lot of things had come to pass since she’d left. August had missed all the births, deaths, and marriages of nearly everyone. Enough time had turned to almost forget the town, though she’d kept a keen interest in the place that swallowed her sister up. She’d rung Nana and Poppy mostly once a month, checked the missing-persons database, and sent letters to her mother—bereft of replies. She read the online council bulletins that promised progress that never arrived—the fast train line that they managed without, the rural university that was almost built, the delayed library expansion. Even as August turned her back on the place, she still wanted it to own her. After some time, people seemed to get used to the sisters gone, and as much as August searched for the news of Jedda’s safe return, she’d hoped for a renewed plea for hers. Neither came.

From the convenience store she drove two kilometers down the ridge to the last turn-off, another two to Prosperous Farm. The rented sedan pulled up beside the twin tin letterboxes, disturbing a flock of pink-grey galahs. She noted that only the yellow box trees had grown higher and broader along the vast shoulder where the mobile library once threw up gravel. Their street had been too far out of town to be visited by the ice-cream truck, but twice a month the library bus arrived, with its shelves slanting up from the floor, its magazine racks secured with long strips of elastic. August peered through the peppermint trees, crawled the car past the roses that divided at the fork of the property where the entrance split into a dirt drive to Prosperous House which was set twenty meters back from the road, and the other divide, a hundred-meter-long concrete slope up to Southerly House. Southerly House was and had always been freshly painted and flanked by a small fruit grove. Beyond the entrance and the houses, a vast field, five hundred acres of ripe wheat, spread out to the brow of trees that always remembered, those gums that gathered at the river.

The Gondiwindi had lived at different points along the Murrumby for forever. And during the last century and a half—ten kilometers north of town at Prosperous, below the 300-meter-high rock of Kengal. At any spot on the property, whenever one of the Gondiwindi in the field took pause and looked north, they saw the ashen granite of Kengal unchanged in the changing sky.

To her right the converted church of Prosperous was ramshackle now. Only a small congregation would have fit where no more than thirty pews had once measured out the entire ground floor. Its single-story extensions had been built like splayed wooden puppet legs from the body of Prosperous. The dozen original scattering huts that dotted the property, where children once slept, were collapsed and worn to mounds of firewood.

Bottlebrush combs of red and orange hung defiant in the still, hot afternoon. Banksia blooms weighed down their branches, leaked sap into the kitchen garden below the veranda. The once-orderly rows of vegetables had turned rogue. Tomatoes sun-dried before picking. Willie wagtails quivered their feathers between the fatigued jasmine and weeping lilly pilly. Prosperous pine boards had been shocked and split in the heat and the paint shaved by time. Dust coated the windows, tiles slid from where they’d meant to be. Everything was yellow-green, sick with hot perfume. It was hard for her to see where Prosperous House began and the scrappy garden ended. August wandered the property, pausing only to listen more closely to the familiar soundtrack playing, encasing the world, in cicada friction and bird whip.

She looked out to the tin shed perched above the tractors in the heart of the field, five acres distant. Looked out to the roof of the sheep barn, the metal tops of the single-ton silos, the arms of the remaining trees that made a natural path to walk through. She knew that at a glance or in a stranger’s gaze, one wouldn’t notice everything here. Not the way she and her sister had known it once, not the secret hiding spots or the things to covet or eat if you knew where to search. Not all the bones of things she could still see. She scanned for Jedda. Jedda missing forever.

She gave the Prosperous grounds another lap and watched for snakes, for the shadow things appearing in the daylight, and having scoured the place, finally cooeed into the back veranda. A curled-up kelpie lifted its head from one of the paired cane chairs and howled a little in reply, then rested its nose into its paws as if it were work-shy. She bent and gave the dog an assuring pat between the ears. She took her bag from the car and back on the veranda, opened and let the flyscreen door slap behind her for the first time in over a decade. The screen hit the frame and continued to bounce as she dropped the keys on the wooden sideboard that was crude and dust stuck and overdue for stain. She pushed open the door to the big room, filled with cardboard boxes and tea chests, looked through the downstairs rooms and the bathroom. Outside the kelpie walked beside her past the empty workers’ annex. She peeked in the smaller garden shed, and, as she called out finally for Nana, meekly, she heard a voice bellow back, “Jedda?”

“It’s me, Nan, August.” She’d spotted her rounding the citrus trees, cradling a basket of pegs. “I’m sorry about Pop, Nana.”

August noticed her nana wince, and regretted offering the standard commiseration. Everything was quietened in both of their minds as Elsie instinctively pulled August toward her by her arms, like a hand-reeled catch, and kissed the ear. She placed her hand at her granddaughter’s cheek and looked at her as if to make certain she wasn’t the lost sibling. She ran her arthritic fingers into the creases of her collarbone, quickly down the length of her arms, before August pulled her body away from being measured. Elsie, like Prosperous, like August, looked different now too, aged, as if gone to seed.

August was reminded of when Jedda disappeared for too long, how the family had drawn inside, their sadness like a still life. But that, she’d known, was because she had only been a child and her nana and poppy had reason not to lose themselves to despair. Now, though, there were no little children around to be frightened of the great grief that possesses a person. But Elsie hadn’t reached hopelessness, the magnitude of her husband’s death had not yet bent her completely.

Instead, in those first days after Albert’s death, Elsie felt that he had still been there, napping in another room of the house, working in the garden, or cycling out on the road to keep his knees from aging. Elsie’s thoughts zeroed in on her granddaughter—it had been such a long time since she’d seen her. She found it difficult to look at August and to not look at her, because Elsie could see how sick she’d made herself, how she’d kept herself in a boy-child’s body all this time.

Elsie gestured for August to follow her into Prosperous and August took her outstretched hand as they walked inside. Inside, her Nana rested the peg basket on the dining table and sat on the day bed. She looked confused, but was lucid, when August stood closer to her.

“Cuppa, Nan?”

Elsie nodded and steadied herself upright, leading August and leaning on her by the waist, thumbing at her wet eyes. August didn’t know if it was disappointment or sorrow she was feeling, and Elsie wasn’t sure either.

“Milk and sugar?”

Together they prepared the tea. Elsie moved easily around the kitchen, her trouble was beyond the wrist, not the rest. August watched her Nana take the cooking pot and place it on the counter and then waited almost fearfully as she stared into it for a beat or two. “Can I help, Nana?”

“You may.” She said after that uncertain pause where she’d been thinking of meat and two veg for dinner, “Get me the beans from the fridge, and you fix the potatoes.”

The beans were passed along with a paring knife and, in the cupboard under the sink, potatoes were found where they’d always been. Elsie took a straight-backed chair into the kitchen, sat and topped the heads off string beans, and from a distance she tried to hold August with a silent gaze, pursed her lips at what she’d become, willing her to speak. And why should Elsie speak? After all, she thought, she’d been here waiting during all the years August was too young to run away and then during all the years she was old and capable enough to visit but didn’t. Elsie thought again that August’s lack of appetite had spoiled her once-beauty, and August, having sensed herself scrutinized, turned her body away from her nana and looked out the back door where the dog snoozed.

“What’s the kelpie’s name?”

“Spike. Your pop bought her for me last month. She’s a good old girl.”

August felt anxious to ask things, but didn’t want to intrude right away. After some time she couldn’t help it.

“Is Mum coming?”

“Reckons she’ll get day release, but don’t count your eggs.”

“Is she okay?”

“Not since forever, girl.”

“Will everyone come here? For the funeral and stuff?”

“Yes, love. Get the butter ready.”

August opened the fridge and took the butter to the sink and returned to peeling the potatoes.

Elsie sighed aloud. “City folk are taking the house, Augie.”

“What’s that?” she asked, not sure she’d heard her properly.

“Council reckons there’s nothing to do about it. We said no but town hall meeting few months ago said there isn’t one way around it.” She lifted herself from the chair and walked back to the day bed, exhausted with all the surfacing sad things. “It’s not our land they say, not even this little house. It’s Crown or something. Use the sage from the garden, dear.”

August came back into the kitchen with a fistful of herbs. “How?”

“I don’t know, August. They just told us to wait and see—” Elsie corrected herself, “what they told me.”

“I’ll stay with you if you like? Should I stay, Nana?”

“Don’t ask silly questions,” she said as her eyes dropped closed, topping the head off the conversation.

August took her pack and groceries into the attic bedroom. Now an office. Albert’s papers and books were spread out on the glass top of a wicker desk. His chessboard sat without rank, a dish beside was filled with the wooden pieces. August remembered him teaching her, scolding her if she touched a piece and changed her mind. “Uh-uh—you’ve touched it, you’ve got to move it.” Over the desk there was a missing shard from the stained-glass window, a petal from the Lutheran rose. It was a small window, the length of an arm. For a second August wondered what God would think of her now. What Poppy would think of her up or down there with God? Quickly she knew they were questions without answers, they were roads without destinations. Religion had left her and that house a long time ago. August thought about how people would descend on the house soon, how everyone she knew before would be there. She took in the room. She thought to herself—I know this place, but it had bunk beds before; it was we back then. In her mind ten-year-old Jedda is backlit, running from the attic room, down the stairs, leaping off the veranda and through the fields before the cutting. The tractors approached November as if the year were a song, harvest the chorus. Afterward those sisters would run through the field again, the wheat cut to fine stumps, the boar-haired field of their childhood.

Five

Yellow-tailed black cockatoo—bilirr Bil-irr is rolled at the end, the most musical part of any word is the “rr”—I can’t think of any words in Australia like that, but if I was in Scotland then I could, they don’t speak with flat tongues there. Bilirr—it’s a trilled sound with the tongue vibrating close to the teeth. The bilirr is a magnificent bird, strong, eagle-wise. Black as a fire pit, the yellow feathers in the tail visible in flight. I saw the yellow-tailed black cockatoo all my life. All the Gondiwindi loved bilirr. Before Prosperous Farm, my mummy was living in Tent Town four miles downstream, where she birthed me there on the flat warm sand, below the caw of bilirr.

After Tent Town was flattened and the Mission turned into the Station, and me and all the other kids were taken away, I remember walking out onto the landing of the Boys’ Home, standing under the sign that used to hang outside—Think White. Act White. Be White. I was looking at the blue sky and down again. When I looked down into the valley, I saw a woman walk toward me, and she walked right through the stock wire fencing that ringed the entire home.

I walked down on the grass to her and said, “Good day.”

The spirit woman was empty-handed and showed me her hands, she looked like my mummy a little, and she said, “Wanga-dyung.”

“What’s that mean?”

She said, “It means lost, but not lost always.”

I said okay, and she told me to practice it. I recorded it in my mind as my first-ever time travel because the sky, when I turned back to enter the home not ten paces, was grey and hung low. The woman was gone, just a bilirr remained on the fence. I knew it could have never been cloudless just a few seconds before, and at that moment I realized I’d gone, not the world.

yet, if, then, when, at the time—yandu The first time I heard yandu, it was run on with a jumble of others, it was like spotting the meat in a soup of words, and lifting it out to look at it. My ancestors were coming to the Boys’ Home every day by then. A mob of them, old and young too, even little kids would arrive by the outhouse, any place—by my pillow when it was time for bed or even when it was time to make the bed in the morning. They’d look at me and wave, call me out to the river. The river would just appear wherever we were. Then we’d walk about and talk about this and that, and those ancestors were speaking English to me as well, so they could translate everything too. In the night there’d be a fire made, sometimes corroboree, and a big feed of kangaroo tail cooked on the hot coals or eels from the river cooked on the hot coals too. So it was around the campfire that I learned that word yandu—everyone was telling stories about this animal and that animal and this fella over here and that woman there, there were plenty of jokes and lots of laughter. My great-great-great-grandfather was there, and he’d do lots of the talking. I started to hear the music of the sentences, the pause, the d sounds bumping in his mouth. Most of the time around the fire with everyone else there I couldn’t get a word in edgeways, but when I did, when I could find that word yandu, I waited for the first pause in his storytelling, and when it came I said, “Yandu,” and he said, “When what?” “Yandu,” I said again, wanting him to tell me the meaning—and he just put his arm around me, laughing and patting me. He said, “Yandu, son, is the glue of your stories.” I remember that.

yield, bend the feet, tread, as in walking, also long, tall—baayanha Yield itself is a funny word—yield in English is the reaping, the things that man can take from the land, the thing he’s waited for and gets to claim. A wheat yield. In my language it’s the things you give to, the movement, the space between things. It’s also the action made by Baiame, because sorrow, old age, and pain bend and yield. The bodies of the ones that had passed were buried with every joint bent, even if the bones had to be broken. I think it was a bend in humiliation, just like we bend at our knees and bow our heads. Bend, yield—baayanha.

younger sister—minhi I went mustering when the droughts hit again and again and the skeleton weed took two years of crops and there was no work on any station for us. I loved mustering, being high there in the saddle, wearing the ten-gallon Stetson, relying on my stockhorse, leading the herd to water. They were fine years and I made friends for the first time in my life. There was so much I wanted to be talking about with people. I asked a roving man from our neck of the woods about his family, how his family were my relatives. He turned away threading the stirrups against his horse, sick and tired of my chitchat. I learnt that a lot of men on the farm and out in the bush like to focus on an animal or an engine to hide their faces before they tell their truths. “The family trees of people like us are just bushes now, aren’t they?” he said. “Someone has been trimming them good.” I wouldn’t ever forget these words because they sounded like sad poems. And I guess that’s a true thing, because all the years I’ve lived I’ve lost so many parts of the people that make me up. My mummy, my daddy, my cousins, and my younger sister, my minhi. When I was little and in the Boys’ Home, I never forgot our people on the river. It seemed every night the moon came to the dormitory window to remind me of my family. I’d think of my minhi across the country in the Girls’ Home, and my urine would run like quicksilver over the hessian cots, onto the stone floors to wake my schoolmates. I was just three years old after all. I never forgot her. She was just a baby, Mary was, when we were both taken away. That’s a sad story with a happy ending because we found each other again. She is different from me, we don’t hug each other and be affectionate like I’d want to be. But we got to be brother and sister again, which is special. I got to be the older brother again, and she got to be my minhi.

Six

August and Elsie couldn’t bring themselves to eat in the end, and Elsie, avoiding her marriage bed another night, had fallen asleep on the couch. August walked into the field and could see that the windows of the workers’ annex were darkened. She thought about Saturday when they’d gather together, imagined the lights on again. After Jedda disappeared, no workers came and stayed and the annex doors had been closed since, lights dimmed. Elsie and Albert had also let the preaching and karate room in the front of the house turn quiet. All the photos of Jedda were taken down and wrapped in muslin and put away. And just like that the home became just a house; they never really talked about Jedda Gondiwindi again. In the beginning people had shaken their heads in the street, and mothers wept, and at afternoon tea the few people that came by wondered aloud how something so bad could happen. How puzzling it was—that she could disappear without a trace. There were murmurs and tears, but no one had answers. After that, childhood wasn’t so carefree; it was risky. Kids got picked up from school, parent volunteers crossed names off lists and manned the bus stops, few were allowed to walk home alone, and playing on the street was mostly forbidden. In spring no one sold purple bunches of Paterson’s curse to tourists by the side of the road. Though, the thing about a small town in a place like Massacre Plains is they love their own. Or if they don’t love them, they at best stick by them; defend them against the outside world of troublemaking out-of-towners, tourists, big money. But the Gondiwindi weren’t their own. They never double-checked if they saw a Gondiwindi walking home alone. The newsreader said Jedda’s name and flashed the school portrait on the screen only twice over a pressure-cooked week, and Jedda, like the kids who went missing, the brown-skinned children like her, became a mystery manufactured to forget about.

But the Gondiwindi (and the Coes, Gibsons, Grants, and every other family like them) couldn’t forget. Almost every woman’s hair in the family then took a journey into silver and, by the next year, all August’s aunts looked old and grey on the tops of their heads. All the religion and the festivity of a full house became mute rooms, faded to white noise. That noise of the mind where all the questions restaged and all suspicion rehearsed. Over the once-comatose valley of town, their minds rattled with every combination. August, just nine years old—her heart stretched like bubblegum string until it snapped. And it stayed snapped.

Once August had run away from Massacre Plains and made something resembling a life, when someone would ask her if she had siblings, she’d tell them she had a sister but never said she was missing. August would furnish a space in the universe where she imagined she could have been; at twenty Jedda was at a faraway university, at thirty she was expecting her first child in the city. Or sometimes she’d just say she was dead. Life or death have finality, limbo doesn’t; no one wants to hear about someone lost. Someone that just went and disappeared altogether.

In the field now her skin prickled, that big organ remembering everything that happened before. She thought about what her nana mentioned—of losing the house, of all the Gondiwindi leaving here forever, and even though the bad memories were beginning to seep back into her skin, it still didn’t seem right to her to be forced off that place. Not, she thought, if they go all the way back to the banks of the river and further, like her poppy had always said. The air changed, a breeze pulled at the trees and August looked up from that dark field where stars were hidden. The possibility of rain was a simple smell, a good taste. She slipped off her shoes and within seconds the dirt that stretched out around her was covered in fresh scars from the sudden, heavy rain. It was a single burst. A thermal updraft but not enough to break the hard topsoil. August thought about what her poppy used to say, that rainfall after a dry spell is the perfect condition for good wheat yields and also, the perfect condition for locust outbreaks. Simply put, he’d say, sometimes there isn’t a silver lining at all.

In the walls of her former bedroom she smoked out the louvre window, fingering the packet of cigarettes. Her mouth ached for something more, wanted some unknown balm, not a kiss, or a meal, or a drink, but something long denied. Since she was a girl the ache had scratched further inside her, for something complete to rest at her tongue, her throat. The feeling that nothing was ever properly said, that she’d existed in a foreign land of herself. How she saw home through the eyes of everyone else but her. The feeling had begun before Jedda vanished. She stubbed the cigarette out, looked at the block of telly rehomed in the corner of the room. On the same telly, that was once downstairs, the newsreader had initially encouraged people to search their properties, dams, silos, and abandoned wells. Some people searched with dogs. August had wandered down to the flats of the Poisoned Waterhole Creek and ate roots and tubers for the first weeks without a sister. She’d taken slices of stringybark gum and let the paper melt on her tongue. Sucked at the bulrush reeds. She’d been compelled to eat the earth, become immune to it so it didn’t hurt, eat up the whole place where Jedda was lost. Forever? If she could eat the entire earth, be of the earth, she thought she too wouldn’t disappear that way. A month later when Jedda was still missing, Albert baptized August himself in the field under the hot cracked sun while she cried. Everyone was gathered and talking about the sanctity of childhood, the kids they kept saying, and then her poppy poured water over her head and recited the absolution of the dead:

“Suffer the little children to come unto me, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. For unto Thee are due all glory, honor, and worship, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.”

He told August that it was to protect her, and she, feeling all the weight of blood rushing to her head in his hands, saw the world as she always felt it was—turned, upside down.

Seven

war—nadhadirrambanhi There was a big one here, that’s how the town got its name in the end. The war lasted one hundred years. Everyone was fighting that war, even the Ghan cameleers and train-track fettlers were there and fighting alongside the Gondiwindi. It all started when the Gondiwindi were sick of the settlers taking over their land, digging up their tubers, ruining the grazing work they’d done forever. The Gondiwindi were farmers see, farmers and fishermen, and they cultivated the land here long before, they stayed even through the rare winters. They’d keep warm by turning their possum-skin cloaks inside out and rubbing the fat of the pelican on their skin.

So when the Gondiwindi were fed up, and hungry because their kangaroo wasn’t coming in their hunting ground anymore and because their lore said that even during change, the land still owned them. That they could use the land how they needed—they got into the cattle then. They rounded them up with their mutts and dingoes and chased the heifers until they became tired, until it became a hunt and they’d spear them. Must’ve been frightened, those cows, so it was a good thing they never ate the meat—would’ve been tough as a chop from the Boys’ Home. They ate the fat, and the liver and the marrow. The settlers got mighty angry that the wild Gondiwindi didn’t respect their new fences. Then came retaliation. Thousands died, even the Gondiwindi babies too. Well, the river ran with blood then, and the dirt turned forever from yellow to pink. Massacre Plains had been born and the Gondiwindi, looking down the eye of a gun’s barrel, were scared.

water—galing, guugu, ngadyang The Reverend wrote it in his journals as culleen—he was listening that fella, listening as close as he could. All my life I’ve been near the water, and we come from the water too, us people. First we were born from quartz crystal—that’s hard water, we are kin of the platypus, that’s the animal of the water, and then, my wife Elsie and I made Missy and Jolene and Nicki, born on the banks of the water, the Big Water—Murrumby.

a large waterhole, a watercourse downhill—nguluman There’s one near the property, just there at the corner of the wheatfield, a little shoot off the Murrumby. The waterhole never fills all the way anymore. If the river ever gets going, it’s only running a little, and the whole thing is never deep enough to fill the wetland and then trickle into the waterhole. They call that one Poisoned Waterhole Creek.

wattle flower, acacia tree—yulumbang The ancestors told me about all the plants and trees and how to use them. They told me that the plants were pregnant with seeds, that the plants were our mothers and so I was only to use them for the Gondiwindi, not for selling, just for living. Remember that, wherever you go and touch the trees and plants, they are sacred. The yulumbang is a great plant for lots of things, the green seeds can be roasted in their pods on the fire, then you eat them like you eat peas. If you roast them and make a paste, it tastes like peanut butter. The light-colored gum from the yulumbang can be sucked like a lollipop, but not the dark-colored gum—that one is too bitter. The gum is called mawa.

weak, hungry, depressed—ngarran You should never say this word too loud because it’ll catch you hard. When you say the thing, sometimes you become the thing. August, when she arrived to live with us, would scream and weep, and yell out “I’m hungry,” but she was ngarran, she was all those things. I knew she had ngarran from this life and the past too. We’d say, Close the voice, because it’s telling you wrong. Anyone can say that, I’m not ngarran, because I’m in control—I can make it small and put it into the palm of my hand. I don’t think it always works, but it gives the spirit a chance to rest. In the end, ngarran is part of life—we can’t make it disappear, it doesn’t vanish overnight, but we can tell it to shush in the meantime.

well/to make well, to make good—maranirra If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to drop one. Mistakes were made and I want to make maranirra now. We should all make maranirra.

wheat—yura My entire life has been galing and yura. Even in the Boys’ Home we used to have to bless our meals, mostly served with johnnycakes, or dense bread. We’d recite, “Blessed by God who is our bread, may all the world be clothed and fed.” I quite liked saying that aloud. Many people know the wheat firsthand, not just in this country. Every person knows bread one way or another. The Gondiwindi had their own flours, and they were meant especially for the body of the Gondiwindi. We have always worked in the wheatfields too, my daddy did, and his daddy too, and if the world ever stopped turning, it’d be the last grain on earth, I reckon. Prosperous acres were fertile for the most part and although us mob lived on rich land—we never became rich.

where is your country?—dhaganhu ngurambang? The question is not really about a place on the map. When our people say Where is your country, they are asking something deeper. Who is your family? Who are you related to? Are we related? There’s a story I read about someone who wanted to build a map that was the scale 1:1 so that the map covered all the oceans and all the mountains and land at its true size. That made the girls laugh when I told them—imagine walking underneath and holding the thing above your head in the dark? That’s a little what a map does, takes the light out so you can’t see. The map isn’t the thing, this country is made of impossible distances, places you can only reach by time travel. By speaking our language, by singing the mountains into existence.

wooden dugout, or bark container or dish—guluman Elsie and me—we celebrated our marriage anniversary when the grandkids were little. Mary babysat. We took the Greyhound bus like they did in American blues songs. We went all the way to Alice Springs and then to Uluru—right in the middle of the country. We met some proper blackfellas out there, and there were women that were making their own guluman there too, and we bought one to bring home. It made me want to do things like that back at Prosperous. The guluman we brought back reminded me what the ancestors showed me and said, that our family had our own, used to carry fish to waterholes. Our people used to farm fish too! And after that trip, the guluman was a reminder of a bigger story of our people—how far we’d come that we could revisit ourselves, be proud of our culture again.

world, all over the world, everyplace—bangal-ngaara-ngaara Once, the ghosts came when I was meant to be doing chores, and away we went to shake a leg. I had never been to a dance in my life, I must have been about thirteen years old. All my family was at the corroboree and there they showed me the dance of the crow. We all danced and while we were dancing we flew into the sky, doing things that humans can’t do. We went bangal-ngaara-ngaara and the ancestor, my great-great-great-nanny was there, and she was teaching me about dying. We were flying and she said, “No one ever dies.” I said, “I’m sure they do because my daddy died.” She took her claw then and ripped a feather off my wing and she said, “This is not you. If I rip all the feathers off you, it is not you.” “What is me?” I said, and she said, “You is only electricity and electricity cannot die. You go somewhere else, but your feather is not you.” We went to a thousand and one places in our dance, and she showed me that dust to dust is just where we are resting—in the ground some places, in the water other places, burnt in ashes other places—she just said, “They now soil, they now water, they now lightning.” Afterward we flew back to the fire. All my ancestors danced through night, and we ate quandong fruit by the fire. It was sweet and I stayed awake a long time after dessert. But then it was time for bed and they took me back to the Boys’ Home. When I lay in bed that night I was very scared that I was going to die, that they showed me dying for a reason. But I didn’t die that night. I think they just wanted to tell me things, but not always in the way I thought. I realized I was just learning. It didn’t need to be in a special order, they just had me learn what I needed for all the days, not just the one I feared.

Eight

August’s compulsion to eat began before she came to live at her nana and poppy’s. At her parents’ home there wasn’t much edible to a child, only devon meat if they were lucky, white-bread loaves gone too fast, fruit that was too old and destined to be thrown away, and food bank goods that needed to be worked into something else. Jedda and August both used to snack on uncooked sticks of spaghetti, dipping the ends into the sugarbag. Chewing them to a paste. Every now and then, though, once every few months, cheese would appear. A large block of cheddar wrapped in thin aluminum foil and soft blue cardboard. August would wait it out until her parents had settled in front of the TV and slip herself along the floor to the fridge. She’d jimmy the electrical plug first from the wall, slide around to the door, gently pop the seal open without the fear of the light coming on. Then she would bite hunks and hunks of cheese until it had gone and she was on the verge of tears from the ecstasy of it all.

When August’s parents found the fridge bare they’d scream, bang things, slam doors. Her father, who had a hard face, would take off his leather belt and loop it, make a fish mouth with a fist at each end and whack! the leather strips together. Though he never hit her. He’d just scare the girls. They’d rinse her mouth with black soap and water and say, “Where’d you bloody come from! Were you born in the gutter?” She’d known she wasn’t, but knew they weren’t really asking her that. She knew where she’d been born, the birth certificate was protected in a plastic sleeve beneath the bottom bed of their bunks. She knew it was April Fools’ Day in Massacre Maternity Ward when August Gondiwindi was born (feet first, Nana later told her). Parents: Jolene Gondiwindi, unemployed. Mark Shawn, unemployed. Siblings: Jedda, twelve months.

Their family had moved from Massacre Plains five hours south to Sunshine for those first years, into the tumbledown, long rows of fibro cottages where some of her father’s family lived too. They had visitors all the time. August remembered always trying to hear what they said. Everything was strange to Jedda and August at home, not just the food and the disorder of days; it felt like life was muffled by some great secret. They just went along with it and made do, would hold out their hands and ask visitors for twenty cents or a piece of gum if they really wanted the girls to go away. They’d collect their loot and run into the small yard; make tents from dishcloths; play dance teacher, Jedda the instructor, August the novice. Inside the house, when August held her tongue out, she could taste cigarette smoke and flyspray in the rooms. She wanted to taste everything, even then, even the acrid air.

And how they came to leave Sunshine and arrive back in Prosperous House was the confluence of all the shambles of their childhood. How they had to be reminded a million times by the teacher to have their parents bring them to school on time, or to sign this and that, or to pick them up because the school guardian couldn’t wait at the gates for no one all afternoon. Mostly their parents were more like playmates, their mother usually. Jolene would snuggle with them when she was high and play with them when she was drunk, run around the house below the wet walls that gave them asthma and the mold that grew like a grotty birthmark in the folds of wallpaper and across the ceilings.

When the sisters were playing like that everything was perfect.

Sooner or later their mum would leave the room. Then they could hear nothing but the Rolling Stones through the house until Jolene would forget to feed them dinner and they’d go and rouse her. Then it took a long time because their mum was always doing everything from scratch in that state and last minute and halfway through she’d forget and fall asleep. So Jedda and August would finish cooking while she slept, they’d make their favorite beans on toast, and when she woke they’d have washed their plates, brushed their teeth, and they would be tucked in; Jedda tucked August first and then herself. Hours later Jolene would come in and kiss their foreheads, unravel the hair from across faces. August pretended to be asleep. She loved her the most she ever would at exactly that moment. They were never mean and bad parents, just distracted, too young and too silly, rookies, she used to think.

Then, one winter an unusual fog cold engulfed the suburb, and it snowed for the first time in decades. Every tiled rooftop was frozen white except for theirs. The police noticed this when they drove by that bitter morning. Inside their house they found ninety-five marijuana plants beyond the manhole, kept vibrant by long fluorescent warming lights. When the police came to the door they knocked loud enough that the girls shook. And their parents were handcuffed and marched off to holding and then gaol, all before breakfast. The following day the house was in the newspaper and the social worker drove them to the emergency foster house. They shook there for days until their nana and poppy drove down and didn’t leave until the girls were safe. While Elsie and Albert were gone, spiderwebs strung out into corners, snakes explored inside the empty house, and the whirly-whirly arrived to warn children away. But the duet that left returned as a quartet, singing “Wheels on the Bus” and playing “I Spy” all the way back to Prosperous. From the age of eight and Jedda nine, they lived with their grandparents, Albert and Elsie, back in Massacre’s Prosperous House—the Mission church turned farm workers’ quarters, that had an old coat of lemon paint and an extension built for shearers. Five hundred acres of not being able to shake the past, of where everything had gone wrong, over and over. They’d been returned to their birthplace, and it seemed as if their lives had become best-case scenarios.

August thought nothing could change as much as it did as when she was eight years old.

She was wrong.

Nine

worship, bend low—dulbi-nya I reckon Aboriginal people loved the Lord that the Reverend brought so much because they needed him the most in their lives. I think we always thought that there just had to be something better. Worship came easy, so this news about a fella Jesus from the desert on the other side of the world who had all the instructions for heavenly ascent—well, that was alright with us. Problem is they didn’t let the Aborigine straddle the world he knew best—no more language or hunting or ceremonies. No more of our lore, only their law was forced. We were meant to be saved but we were still in bondage. We worshipped though, we bent low, dulbi-nya. We’d done it before in front of the giving honeybee, the generous possum, the loving sun, the plentiful waters—our lives were filled up with dulbi-nya long, long before.

underneath the earth—ngunhadar-guwur What’s down there? Why those mining mob want to rip it all out and then it all belongs to them? I think all those shiny things ngunhadar-guwur shouldn’t belong to anyone, only our mother. I think that currency should return, make a balm from the wound. It’s strange isn’t it? That word, fortunes. I think we don’t have that word at all.

understand—gulbarra Our whole lives are spent doing that, trying to understand and be understood. When you’re between young and old though, that is the time for deep thinking. The thing I came to understand is that the world didn’t just begin when I was born. It’s a certain moment in life when we realize that—when we can see that divisions were made when we were just some milt in a fish in the chain of life and death. I’m leaving a complicated world soon, a world up in arms, and I see so much fighting. Love thy neighbor that’s a commandment from the Bible, bilingalgirridyu ngaghigu madhugu—that’s our commandment, it translates to: I will care for my enemy. They both mean gulbarra.

teacher—yalmambildhaany At the Boys’ Home is where I got my education, so they tell me that’s what it was. I learnt to write and read there, but not like I know it now—learning the Queen’s English came later. Back then we only wrote little maxims in learning cursive on our boards: I love to sit in the sun. God made the sun. Our yalmambildhaany name was Ma’am Sally-Anna Mathews, and she had the disposition of someone to match such a beautiful name. Ma’am Mathews had the iodine and boiled candy in her purse for all our punishments from the manager, for whom there would be no dew nor rain, except through him. She would even hug us! What a thing it was for us children without parents around to be hugged. I think my sister Mary never got a hug at the Girls’ Home because in a warm embrace she froze. I’m sorry for my sister that she didn’t have one little hope like Ma’am Mathews—a good-natured, but wrongly instructed nonetheless, yalmambildhaany.

time, a long time ago—nguwanda It’s not always a good thing, looking all the way back. Nguwanda was a time of peace, they tell me. In other people’s stories nguwanda was peaceful too, they’ve been told. Things change for good in many ways, so looking back to nguwanda is important—but it’s just for understanding, not to stop moving forward, not to return completely.

to return—birrabuwuwanha I wasn’t a very good father. I was distracted or I was working out on the field. When the Station was eventually closed down and the property went out to ballot for a Homestead Farm Lease, Bernard Falstaff, good man, let the Gondiwindi stay on in the sheds and work the field and run the cattle in exchange for a sort of ownership of Prosperous. Word got to me that they were looking for a manager for the seasonal workers. I rode out to Prosperous for the first time since I was taken away. The ancestors were with me and talking to me when I rode out there. They said I was going birrabuwuwanha and some were worried, and some were happy. I spoke to old man Falstaff, who was a science man who later taught me to play chess and was not keen on farming. He asked if I was married yet, I told him I wasn’t but I hoped to be one day. He hired me to oversee the workers and to manage the old church. Not five years later I met Elsie and there we settled into our own corner. Even if I wasn’t an attentive daddy, I think the girls had a good life where we lived. Mr. Falstaff let me plant the trees and treat that corner as our very own. So that’s how we got to come home, to stay on country, thanks to Mr. Falstaff we all got birrabuwuwanha. How the ancestors loved it there too, we didn’t even have to go out into the secret bush, we could stay right there and they’d show me everything I needed to find.

saltbush—bulaguy, miranggul There’s the old-man saltbush, cottony saltbush, creeping saltbush, thorny saltbush, and the ruby saltbush. They are good bush food: the leaves of old-man can be used to flavor meat and the ruby saltbush stems and leaves can be boiled and eaten like vegetables; the berries are big and red and sweet. The ancestors used all of the saltbush in different ways. The plant also takes the salt out of the soil, it can heal the ground while growing. That’s something.

sap of trees—dhalbu The dhalbu of the bloodwood tree saved some of the Gondiwindi. When we were being gathered up to be taken away and taught the Bible and be trained as laborers and domestic servants, my great-aunties were frightened and ran. Tried to hide their light-skinned babies in the bush. Some did get away and were never seen again. And some couldn’t leave in time and disguised their babies as full-blood by painting them dark with the dhalbu. Some of them were later captured. They wander around the river that appears when I travel with the ancestors, blood and sap soaked, hiding in plain sight now but still frightened.

say, speak, tell—yarra I asked Doctor Shah to yarra—tell me all the bad news. He obliged. “No worries,” I said to him when he offered the place in Broken hospice. “I’ll be leaving the world the same way I came—out by the river.” He didn’t much argue with me, just a few minutes, I think because he may have had to, but that fella has known me a long time, so we settled it like men and shook hands and he let me go on my way. Elsie’s been crying since we got back to Prosperous, so I took her beautiful face in my hands softly and I said, “Aren’t you glad you met a fine bloke like me?” She nodded, even if she was crying and laughing at the nerve of me. “I would’ve died happy the day I met you, Elsie, and now we have all this other time together. Aren’t we lucky?” I said. And then we kissed and hugged and kissed and hugged until she came around to the fact that we’re still alive now and still in each other’s arms. When she was peaceful again, I came outside to finish my work.

scale a fish—ginhirmarra The ancestors taught me all the things I wasn’t taught at the Boys’ Home: they taught me men’s business; they taught me where to find food, the names and uses of all the plants and animals. My favorite was eating the freshwater eel and the Murrumby cod. You can put the eel or fish—guya—whole, just as it is on the hot coals and break into the skin when it’s done. You can put it on as it is, or you can scale and gut it with a sharp knife first. You take the back of the knife and scrape the scales toward the head, wash it, and then leave the head on. From under the tail to the top of the stomach, cut along and then remove the insides, wash it again. The skin will just come away when its cooked. If you eat the fish, it’s important to know how to treat it after it’s died for you.

scars or marks, little holes left by smallpox—gulgang-gulgang Lots of the ancestors who visited me had this on their bodies, not everyone, but plenty did. “What’s that?” I said, when I was little and hadn’t yet learnt not to ask someone about something different on their face or body. One of my great-aunts said it was gulgang-gulgang. Then she drew a picture with the end of a stick from the fire. She drew it up in the sky above her talking, and all the stars beholden to help her draw out her story. She told me sickness came in the wind, with the shepherds and in the wool of their sheep, and it was a cold time then. “Every day and every night was chilly cold even with the sun out. Everyone was going through the shivers. They couldn’t speak about it either because their mouths were filled with blisters even though they hadn’t been eating hot things straight from the fire. And some of them couldn’t see because the blisters grew in their eyes too. The smallpox were all over the feet and the hands and the face, but not much everywhere else—so it was hard to walk or touch things, or eat. Impossible to see. Well everyone got sick then, and many people died,” she said. “Forever?” I asked. And she said, “Never forever, but it was still not the right time to go for so many babies, nannies, and poppies, the weak ones. The old people, old people with mouths filled still with things they needed to teach.” “That’s sad,” I said, and Great-Aunty said, “You’ll tell them I told you and then they’ll never do things like that again.” I asked her, “Who do I tell?” and she said, “Just tell the truth and someone will hear it eventually.” I guess this is what I’m doing, finally.

Ten

To Dr. George Cross,

The British Society of Ethnography

From Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf, 2nd August 1915

I

I felt the great desire to address you, so late in the hour and—as is suddenly apparent—at the late hour of my life. The last time we spoke was many years ago now, in the Banquet Hall of the World’s Fair mirage in that compelling city of Chicago. I think on the evening with a golden warmth hung around it, though I had still been a confused man of the cloth, and of the Empire. We spoke of your wife, and I send my best wishes to her and your family at this turbulent time. I feel compelled to clarify why I refused to bring the measurements of my residents to the New South Wales exhibit, refused to catalog the minutiae of my brothers’ lives for all to see there against the ebb of Lake Michigan. In looking back, indeed, they are my brothers—we are bound by what we have undergone together all these years. Of course I mentioned none of this at the time, but no man would in those circumstances. Yes—no man would tell all the things I’ve come to know. Perhaps to tell all might be the sure way to ruin the great work we’ve accomplished here. But we live, Dr. Cross, in different times now. I admit to striking out some pages in my journal, and at times not having transcribed all events—anodyne nonsense at any rate? Yet I remember all the events more palpable than anything before or after. Only today I thought on it again and wondered briefly if it should be noted before handing over my living body. Perhaps.

In leaving this world it is my hope it came to something, salvation in some small part, and that the work remaining to do and undo will prosper on and save those wretches from themselves, even if my doubts have remained stronger than hopes.

You may be my last hope, Dr. Cross. I seem to be drawn to expunge the past to you. Alas, the state of affairs awakens truths in the spirit long denied. After many years I have recognized that in times of stress tongues either fold or flap, and having a crisis of the latter I hope you can find forgiveness for such blasphemous indulgence. Perhaps I have reached a place of understanding where I feel I must jeopardize everything so that I might be heard. And so, I have no choice but to write of the things that I have witnessed and known to have occurred on these dark plains since my arrival. Dr. Cross, I hope these words might reach someone in your influence who may rectify this situation. Calamity befalls the congregation of Massacre Plains and, furthermore, the decent Natives whom I have lived amongst. You are my last sane chorus.

Before I was detained I tried to assemble my personal possessions. In doing so I unearthed the Mission’s early records and also my childhood Bible, which was the only thing I came to Australia with besides my father and mother on The Skjold, the final ship to the Colony. The Skjold rode the seas that had little kindness. Aboard in addition was master carpenter Mr. Huber, and master miller Mr. Schmitt. I remember them both more clearly than my parents or myself—I think perhaps because of how many had died on the journey to the New Land, and because it was always Mr. Huber and Mr. Schmitt who fashioned the coffins, lowering the Earth’s furniture into the sea. On reflection, I suppose those boxes must have been the least masterful thing they ever made.

Concealed inside my child’s Bible was a newspaper cutting that had survived the many years lived there in the dust bowl of the interior, clipped from The Gazette on the day of my thirteenth birthday in 1851. There in plain English was the news that physicist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault released his Pendulum from the roof of the Panthéon in Paris, France—proving that the Earth rotated. I have to hark back to my earliest hopes to wonder why I’d kept the one birthday clipping of the many my father saved for me, but I know the reason—how I too had always wanted to prove something. That the Heavens rotated, that they could rotate and light upon any man. Even a man here.

From the ever-flowing Murrumby River of this country, I had for nearly thirty-four years labored to ameliorate the condition of the Native tribes. Here, a peculiar place: searing-hot days, cool nights, cattle runs, and more cattle than the eye can grasp, and filled with the flora and fauna one would have classified only by the imagination. Other curiosities too, though unimaginable, that comprise of deeds too dark to remark. I’m noting all this in the recent past, since by force of hand, Prosperous Mission has been taken by the Government. I have done my best by The Book—all deeds will stand alone for judgment, eventually.

A month prior the only good news came from my Bishop via the Postmaster-General—a fob watch in recognition for my services. It was silver and heavy in the hand before confiscation, no matter it would have not brought pride noting the years coming after all that has happened. Perhaps I regret having built Prosperous Mission—where I had hoped to labor long in bestowing the benefits of the Glorious Gospel of the Blessed God upon those to whom we owe so much, but for whom we have done so little. What irony there is in the namesake itself, for my ambitions for the Mission’s prosperity was to be all my faults.

Unsavory as this opinion is, and for reasons I cannot quite understand, there is no other place I would rather be. The night before removal I had a dream that I was trying to build something, though with faulty hands that no matter my pleading would not do as instructed. The task seemed to carry on to no end. The dream was finally ratified when I awoke to the sound of the townsmen gathered again outside my hut. I believe it was weapons they dragged across the outer walls. They’d departed, but I feared I may myself hang from the peppercorn tree for who I am, what I had done there—and now I fear I may hang abounded by wire. Because of the weight of time upon me I have decided not to be a man sent to the gallows of the secret bush or these internment fences without having said all the things I need to. To tell how wrongs became accepted as rights. I realize now that no matter what ruin befalls me, this is my pledge: I will tell that unhandsome truth, even if it will amount to last words. The circumstances of the times demand it.

Eleven

At first when August and Jedda had arrived at Prosperous they were distracted by the chaotic comings and goings at the house: on Mondays and Tuesdays, mothers’ groups; on Wednesday afternoons, karate instruction classes; on Thursdays, needlework; on Fridays, Bible study; on Saturdays, field and garden work; and on Sundays, a free day. Church in the morning for Elsie and Albert and the girls, and then before lunch, Elsie would prepare afternoon tea in case anyone dropped around, which they nearly always did. Strangers sometimes, old people, whom Albert used to take on long walks around the property. Elsie would make a large pineapple turnover cake, lamingtons with coconut she shaved herself, or scones with cream that she beat in the chilled metal bowl before her hands turned permanently stiff. Elsie was the captain of the house and Albert the storyteller, but it was the food that they lived for, the food that they shared with every person who stayed or worked in and around the house—food was the center.

Elsie had tried to get August to eat normal, but something animal would come over her, even if she knew deep down they would be fed Every. Single. Meal. So, Elsie taught Jedda and August how to cook her way, cook more than just the toast, pasta, and potatoes they knew how. In near-perfect condition on the sideboard, Elsie had the twenty-seven volumes of Cooking the World. On weekends and nights, she’d usher the girls up on stools by the kitchen basin like they were giving confession. Sleeves rolled up high, no need for aprons, their nana said, because “We’ll be exact, see?” though nothing was ever measured, just a roundabouts pinch, handful, shake, dollop; there was no need for an egg timer either. Then they’d shave this and that, then chop with their thumbs tucked in. August remembered that the best jobs were mashing with butter or stirring with cocoa because of licking the bowl. Volume One through to Volume Five was called Home Cooking, which her nana used the most, but it seemed to her like a bit of everything from everywhere else: shepherd’s pie, fettuccine, vol-au-vents with asparagus cream, satay chicken skewers, feta and spinach triangles and—one of their favorites—curried sausages with rice. Curried sausages with rice made them weak at the knees. That was until Jedda and August snuck into the sheep shed on the other side of Southerly and saw tens of lambs being castrated, baby hooves hanging from the beams of the shed, blood down their legs, mewing for their ma’s. Then the girls, the first in their family, never wanted to eat animals again. Volume Six to Volume Ten was Italian and Spanish food, Volume Eleven to Volume Sixteen was French and South American, Volume Seventeen to Twenty-Two was African and Asian Cuisine, and Volume Twenty-Three to Twenty-Seven was Desserts of the World. If they were studious and helpful and polite, then Jedda and August were allowed two scoops of vanilla ice cream from the tub. Served with tinned peaches and raspberry sauce just like the picture from Volume Twenty-Six, page fifteen.

Elsie also taught them how to greet people at the front of Prosperous and escort them into the big room for highlighting passages in the King James. In the same room Aunt Missy would come and teach karate, which Jedda and August were allowed to join in on. They weren’t very good students—August would daydream and Jedda would be swinging her arms and legs too loose for karate, and that’d turn into a dance and she’d be out the door. Shaking up the hallway, a tune in her head. She never could stay still; she was always dancing how she liked, moving to music no one else could hear.

At their nana and poppy’s place they got lots of hair washing and their grandparents talked to them, watched over their homework. But then they couldn’t protect them from everything—not the bull ants, or the rock snakes, or the sun without sunscreen, or a sore tooth if they didn’t remember to brush twice a day. Just like they couldn’t protect them from Mrs. Maine, the schoolteacher, who clipped August upside the head when the answers weren’t forthcoming, or Ashlie from Jedda’s grade who was mean and nasty and spat on her shoes for no reason at all. Not from their feelings when their parents could never come back. When they were sat down and told that brief yarn, that their daddy was needed in heaven and their mummy was busy getting better, but couldn’t yet get out of the shut place.

It was true, everything changed when August was eight years old.

But it all changed more at nine.

When she was nine the whole world flipped inside out.

After nine she could see all the bones of things, the photo-negatives, all the roots of the plants, inside of the sky and all the black holes and burning stars. After nine she could see the little pulleys and gears inside people’s brains, see their skeletons and veins and blood and hearts and the whole of the town’s air coursing in their lungs. It was too late to tell anyone. How she was scared to leave, even more scared to stay. Because of the things she saw, those things that changed her tongue. Those things that were dead and done.

August woke late in the morning with the taste of mercury in her mouth. With her eyes still closed the smells wafted through the open window—the great early heating of the first Edible Things from outside. The oil in the gums, warm karrajong fruit splitting, the hot flesh-baring seeds, banksia flowers heavy with sugar—the syrup seeping off stuck stamens, and stigmas and ovaries. On the branch there was a tipping point, just as there seemed to be in the town. Days were getting hotter. Other wafts from inside the house—Dettol and hot steam rising from the staircase—soap and pine and castor. Dettol had been the familiar aid for every weekend lost to cleaning. Through sleep-blurred eyes August saw the room. The room and all the noisy years of a childhood that had slid through fingers. Out of bed she began to dress, with her footfalls the floorboards labored. Everything breaks away from its joints, she thought, windows, walls, floors. She imagined how the house was slap-sticked together back in the old days, with glue and hessian and then putty and plasterboard, all the while the Gondiwindi inside.

She imagined running her fingers into the heavy grooves of wet floorboards, running up the stairs on all fours like when they were kids. As much as she felt at home in the couple of days she’d been back, she understood, after all the time that had passed, that she was now a visitor there. There was an entire world that she only used to know. All she wanted was to be taken back to before she was nine years old, to that time before she woke one morning and noticed the strange skin luggage she carried around. Before she knew her body and all the pain and joy and thirst and hunger and fatigue and sweat and blood and shit and the things it could taste.

She held the handrail down the freshly mopped stairs and crossed the clean floor to the kitchen. She made coffee and tiptoed past Elsie asleep again on the couch and into the garden. She noticed the sky, blue and spotless after the previous night’s flash downpour, as if the clouds had fled, ashamed of having made the farmers leap from beds in the night, into the anxious expanse, crossing their fingers for more.

Her nana still slept on, even after the sun rose bright and quick and heated the house. August took another coffee outside and spotted Eddie coming down the hill from Southerly House, limping through the peach heath, sweat-slicked shoulders, shoulders that had grown, August thought, an entire dimension of their own.

Her chest tightened and when he was close enough he called out, “Stranger.”

August chuckled, she couldn’t think of anything to say. There wasn’t anything to say, there was no more childhood, no more Jedda, no more Poppy Albert, only the haunt of the past. Eddie looked at August with his blue eyes and leaned in for a hug.

August wasn’t used to him, so the hug she braced for was more awkward than lifeless. It had been such a long time since she had been squeezed so easily, so familiarly, that through the feeling of fish hooks in her guts and the sudden smell of blood, she smiled.

“August Gondiwindi,” he said to her eyes, “as I live and breathe.”

“In the flesh,” she said, avoiding eye contact, “pretty jet-lagged though.”

Eddie Falstaff, heir of Southerly House, old friend, her first real kiss. Eddie had stood out in Massacre more than a Gondiwindi even. He had always been tall and protected in a frame like that. He was born at a short-lived time of abundance when children in Massacre enjoyed a period of fortuitous rainfall and plenty. For two good years people snapped ripe black plums from branches, stained teeth under mulberry trees; they took hunks of food into wide mouths. Mosquito-bitten legs ran year-round evenings under the stars, whipped through the lush wheat and barley and canola. August remembered when it was drier and Eddie Falstaff was ten, almost eleven, and how he’d told all his schoolmates that in his basement at home they had a golden cannon. This big!—as he arranged three of his friends, side-by-side, their arms outstretched. He’d forgotten about the lie until his eleventh birthday party when, after the birthday cake and chaff-bag race, the boys complained enthusiastically as one to his mother. “When do we get to see the golden cannon?” Eddie’s mother had cocked her head and mouthed the words “golden cannon?” at Eddie before going in the house and leaving him to explain his way out of it. Eddie told August all about it after, but she’d already known since she’d been hiding in the bushes watching. August hadn’t been invited to the birthday party because it would make other people uncomfortable, Eddie’s mum had told him, and he’d relayed to her. Louise Hong from the Hong’s Chinese Restaurant couldn’t go so neither could August. Eddie thought his mother was talking about girl-germs, but August knew it was something else.

Eddie Falstaff didn’t need to lie about the contents of his home—even during the drought, he was almost the richest kid in all of Massacre Plains, second to the Gadden kids whose family ran the local garage. The Gaddens that worked with all the best Holden and Ford lap cars every Grand Prix, when a hundred thousand bomber-jacketed blow-ins descended on Massacre. Barracking from the bleachers. It was the highlight event of every calendar year, and effectively, during those thin seasons, kept the region the barely oiled machine it was. Eddie’s family owned the grain of Prosperous Farm, a thousand head of cattle, and also the pharmacy in town, before it burned down.

“How’s your folks?” August asked, leaning into the veranda column.

“Ah, what are you gunna do . . . they’re old. Mum’s in Broken hospital.”

“She alright?”

“Cancer.”

August looked up at Southerly, imagined Mrs. Falstaff during her perennial spring-clean, holding the straw broom aloft, clearing cobwebs from fascias. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Sorry about your pop too, aye.”

“Thanks, Eddie.”

“I gotta bring down some of his books I borrowed and whatnot . . .”

“Books?”

He glanced at the wheatfield. “Well, your old pop must’ve rubbed off on me.”

August was surprised, raised her eyebrows.

“He was out here writing that book, wasn’t he?” Eddie gestured toward the never-dismantled folding chairs.

“A book?”

He held his hands apart in front of his face. “Big thing.”

“What’s in it?”

“Dunno. He was writing it while watching them survey.”

“Them?”

“Rinepalm—strip mining.” He rubbed his fingers together to sign money.

“Nana and Poppy never told me.”

“S’pose there isn’t anything we can do is why. They’re a tin mine company, real boss—they’ve been looking everywhere but they’ve settled here. Whole town’s rolled out the red carpet for them. See there!” He pointed out into the field where August saw only the rust-spotted tops of wheat stalks.

“Can’t see nothing,” she said.

“Look along my finger. Here.” He drew her in with his free hand to see what he saw. And then she saw it, maybe half a kilometer out—three metal domes that looked to her like the heads of pins.

“What is it?”

“Drill sites—measuring or something, they reckon . . .” he dropped his arm, flinching. “They’ll be here soon, you can ask them all about it. Seen them lot at Kengal too?”

“Who?”

“Protesters,” he smiled, and widened his eyes. “They’ve been trying to get in here for months!”

A car pulled into the shingle driveway of Prosperous. August couldn’t make out the people in the front and turned back to Eddie, but he’d already stepped off the deck.

“See ya soon, Augie,” he said, going up the ridge, back to Southerly through the still-rising light.

“Yeah, I’ll come see you soon,” she called to his back and he raised a hand in agreement as he went.

Out of the car stepped the heavy frame of Great-Aunt Mary. August noticed right away that her face had taken on sadness year by year, her mouth turned down like the gob of a Murrumby cod. With her was Aunt Missy. August thought she looked less spry and even more grey in the head than she’d been before. She was still tall, but everyone was—everyone still had their height.

“AUG-UST!” they yelped in unison.

August had always felt strange around Great-Aunt Mary, not just because she was so blunt that the sharp things she said hurt, not just because a stare could rock a boat right out of its mooring, but because she didn’t know about the bad in her own son, and August felt she had to be sad for her, that her boy was gone.

Great-Aunt Mary and Aunt Missy dashed silently to the house, heads bowed, as though they’d realized by closing the car doors, with those final thud thuds, that Poppy Albert was dead, and the sole reason August had returned.

“How are you, darl?” Mary asked.

Under the awnings Aunt Mary briefly took August’s neck into her arms, and August held her tentatively at the waist like they were slow-dancing.

“Niece,” Aunt Missy said, before taking her turn to slow-dance August, too. August fell into the hug. “You are teeny-weeny in my arms!” she said and leaned out, interrupting their choreography, holding August by the elbows, shaking her a little as if her body might change back like a Magic 8-Ball reading.

“Els up?” Aunt Mary asked, as she entered through the opened back door.

“Asleep on the couch.”

“Good flight?” Aunt Missy said, letting her go and measuring her up and down with eyes instead.

“Still tired, but it was okay.”

“How many hours was it?” Missy asked, wide-eyed.

“Lost count.” August smiled, and Missy poked her playfully.

They followed each other inside. Elsie was asleep on the couch still, the sheet twisted at her feet. Aunt Mary stood in the kitchen and held coffee mugs in the air and nodded at August like a response.

“Black, no sugar—thanks,” she whispered, and gently took the stairs to the attic room for cigarettes. Also, she thought, she wanted to find that book.

The book, August recited in her mind and turned to address the room. “Big thing,” Eddie had said. She rifled through the papers on the desk. What exactly she was looking for in the book, she couldn’t be sure. She felt, though, that Poppy had known something, had something to tell her. August felt that it was only he who had understood why she’d left without a word, yet he who wouldn’t have himself left without a goodbye. She felt that her poppy had been the only one, unspoken as it was, who knew why she’d never stayed.

The book was second to food when August was little, then the book took the lead. Her books, though, were different from Poppy’s. The mobile library had been stocked with yellowed romance paperbacks, dog-eared murder mysteries, and well-loved children’s books. Staff always located a book for her—first, all those possibilities, all those happy endings; afterward, the perfect order of series, the succession of worlds for a while, until she’d needed more or grew out of others. They recommended Goosebumps, The Baby-Sitters Club, to Roald Dahl, Judy Blume, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Austen, Dickens, Faulkner. But in every mobile-library book, she could never find herself or her sister. Never a girl like August and Jedda Gondiwindi, not ever. She’d been reading nineteenth-century books, characters in which good and evil are clear, the books where time is evenly distributed throughout a life, and then the books where the characters could be both, times changed. In the pages she sometimes found those characters that lived in her childhood too, in the town where a person’s life fits and flits and ends. She loved her books, the pages filled with company when she was all alone, having those few movable possessions that were often lost, waterlogged, or never returned yet had a way of replacing themselves. She was her grandfather’s granddaughter, August thought, looking around the room at the comforting stacks of bound spines.

Albert’s desk seemed littered with stuff—electricity bills, water rates, books on birds and beekeeping, childhood encyclopedias, pamphlets from the national grain board, notices from the local grain stores, charts for aerial spraying, Bibles, dictionaries. But there was an order to the chaos—Post-it notes were on everything, appearing to be illegible scribbles though they were his own careful script, all in her poppy’s handwriting. One read S116 of the constitution—consent to destroy and was underlined several times—yet it sat beside a pile of books with no indication which one was relevant. August felt suddenly dizzy and placed her palms on the glass top and rolled her neck. The desk shifted easily with her slight weight. She inspected the other furniture more closely: the lightweight single bunk, the chipboard closet, and thought of downstairs too; the furniture could all be moved with a small heave, nothing was rooted to the floor in this Packawayable Forgettable House.

“Cuppa!”

The mug of coffee sat alone. The Aunties were out on the deck and Elsie was awake and with them. August took a plastic kitchen chair out to join the women.

“Feeling better, Nana?” she asked as she approached.

Elsie hummed and lip-smiled and nodded all at once.

“So what’ve you been up to in sunny England?” Aunt Mary smirked, sitting her coffee cup beside her.

“Washing dishes, mostly.”

“Is it ever sunny there?” Aunt Missy asked, as she swatted a locust from the side of her head.

August looked into her coffee cup and shook her head. She reasoned that of course the sun shone there, but it had felt like a long winter. Each year she’d lived in England the locals had talked about the arrival of winter as if it were a baffling thing, though she had always been ready for the relief of cold, as if her entire life she’d willed that frost on the rooftop. August honestly didn’t remember the sun in England; instead she remembered the things she couldn’t place in Massacre, those low clouds from the late morning until the early evening. The trees turning bare, ice on the windows. The narrow lanes, the stone buildings, and fancy old things that they didn’t have back home.

“Joey will be here Saturday,” Aunt Missy said, folding August into the familiar while looking down at her phone.

“How is he?” she asked.

“Deadly, aye.” Aunt Missy shifted her chair to sit closer to August while Aunt Mary descended the steps to the vegetable garden. Aunt Missy propped her phone out between them. “He made an app, had this idea in juvie. They let him study computers and stuff. True god.” She flicked her fingers gracefully on the screen, trying to find what August’s cousin had made. “It’s so good, it’s called Get ’Em. It’s this game where you fight the colonizers—you can pick your weapons and which country you want to fight for and everything.” August looked alongside into her aunt’s hand as colors blipped from the screen and the phone became a smooth stone in her palm. “Fuck—battery’s dead,” she said, dumping the phone into the mouth of her handbag, staring out away from the house. Then Aunt Missy let out a big sigh as if, August thought, suddenly her body remembered to breathe. “Dad had a good life,” Aunt Missy added to the breath as she crossed her arms and patted the tops of her elbows, “And a hard life, too.”

Aunt Mary was pulling up the slender stems of the potato bed at the edge of the garden. August imagined Jedda, believed for a moment she saw her and herself in the same spot with her bare eyes; they were burying chook eggs in the garden in order to grow eggplants, the way they had before their childhood seemed rigged. And then poof! She and Jedda disappeared.

Her aunt called out to the three of them on the veranda with her head and shoulders dipping in the work, “This all needs to go, Els. Get it all out and into crates before—”

“Before what?” August interrupted, surprising herself.

Aunt Mary tossed a stem onto the dirt behind her and straightened her back, hands eased on her hips. “Before the move, darl,” she said.

“So it’s official—Nana has to leave the house?”

“Yep.”

“I don’t understand why. It’s because of the mining company, right? But just out in the field, isn’t it?” August threw a single nod to where Eddie had pointed.

“You know what they’re mining, Aug?” Aunt Mary’s eyes were wide and her chin drawn to her chest like she had a story for her. “T-I-N—tin. You know what that looks like?” She was laughing, shaking her head, “This whole thing . . .” she stretched her arms out beside her, fingers spread wide, and then turned on the spot, shuffling her feet in a circle, “is gone.”

“How big?”

“Two kilometers.”

“They can’t.”

“They can.”

“Southerly?”

“Gone.”

“They own the land?”

“Nup.”

“Why?”

“Crown lease, ninety-nine years.”

“When?”

“When Eddie’s granddaddy got back from the war, I think.”

“What war?”

“First one.”

“What about the wheat?”

“How much you think they make a ton?”

“Don’t know.”

“Diddly squat.”

“What’s a tin mine look like?”

“Big hole.”

“Is it bad?”

“’Member Wizard of Oz?”

“Yeah.”

“’Member Tin Man?”

“Yeah.”

“Well there’s a reason he doesn’t have a heart, darl.”

“What’s that mean?”

“That tin don’t love anyone or anything back.”

August took a sip of coffee and looked at Elsie listening to them. August felt that her nana was young and old at once, but masking that, that she was full to the brim with the type of sad that makes the face look otherworldly, as if returned from the River Styx. Elsie looked at August square, choked for a moment, and put her hand to her mouth, blinking with the drought in her eyes. Successfully swallowing back tears. Aunt Missy rested her hand on her mother’s lap and winked at August, “Let’s see if they can get us to leave first.” She flashed a cheeky grin just for her niece.

“Do you know where you’ll go, Nana?” August asked.

“Not yet, honey.”

August felt for words, but they all seemed clumsy. August wanted to take her nana’s hand in her own and kiss it, tell her that she wouldn’t let her lose the house, that she could make everything better. But that wasn’t true. August couldn’t say anything of consequence, she knew she hadn’t paid her dues; hadn’t lived through the house buckling in the years, or been in the streets where she’d double-take, swore she could have spotted Jedda, or stayed in a town where she second-guessed even a smile. August hadn’t given the time of day to the sorrow they’d meant to be united by. She could taste the guilt then, it came from her throat, thick and wet and as black and dirty as diesel, welling up around the tongue. She looked around for the smell and the taste, but there wasn’t an engine turning in sight.

“I need a toothbrush and stuff.” She stood and gripped the back of the chair. “Do you want anything from town?”

“No thanks, Augie,” Elsie said, as August lifted the chair, and with her free arm lightly held Aunt Missy and waved to Aunt Mary. “See you on Saturday,” she said, and her aunts yes darl’d in unison and let her leave, each bending into the dirt and the handbag as she turned.

Twelve

Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf’s letter to Dr. George Cross, 2nd August 1915, continued

II

I was once a simple clergyman and almost thirty-five years ago, in 1880, I opened Prosperous Lutheran Mission for the Native inhabitants of that particular cattle town, and its surrounds.

Officially our Mission will now come under the authority of the Aborigines Protection Board, where I believe it will be run as a Station, and no doubt run in order that the child of God become useful and where the teachings of the Bible, Mathematics, and English instruction might be put aside for other economic practicalities, as is the case at Stations and Reserves I know of in the district. On learning of the impending change, I might have left the Mission then, having done little to unburden the Natives for whom I have come to care deeply. I might have returned to a small cottage and lived the rest of my days on an acre of peace, though with scant peace of mind. Alas, it seems the past is not dead and I am being made to suffer for this war that Britain has declared against the place of my birth—a situation I had no say in. Yet it is not my fellow countrymen of German and Prussian descent that suffer this war at a distance the most. It is, as I will detail in this letter, the Natives—mere children!—who have been forced into servitude because the Government wishes them to fill the gulf in the industrial labor force. I challenge you to scrutinize what I will detail on these pages and not agree.

As I mentioned previously, my family arrived on The Skjold from Sachsen, Prussia, in October 1841. My Father was to join the vinedressers with his abundant knowledge of tilling the earth and producing table wine. My mother, in the role of homemaker and with the backbone of an immigrant, another set of working hands. We rode on the bullock wagon on that first journey through the inland to the south, my mother and father leading me toward our destiny. On that voyage I saw vividly—through young eyes perhaps—the Natives in a state of nature among the verdure and plenty of the land. It made a quaint impression on my mind. When we finally reached our new home, there was already an established community of good people who spoke our language. The townspeople were made up of those who had escaped religious persecution from Prussia and Germany and were willing, and able, to begin new lives in this great country, a country that promised opportunity and safety to the dispossessed.

In our new homeland we were assigned fifty acres and Father worked the land of the rocks, cut the trees, and dug up the stumps until the ground was flat and workable. Having no dray, his work was laborious, and yet he was full of faith that our small family would increase, and that this country would be his beloved and final home. Mother conducted her own business in town on Wednesday afternoons, when the wives brought their homemade butter, cheese, and honeycomb to sell. In that way the week was measured twice by nourishment, from Sunday morning mass until the produce market, and I, I was preoccupied always by my study of the Bible.

We settled very amicably into the town’s life. My early years consisted of learning English at school and speaking it at home with my parents; only on special occasions, with vinedressers and their families gathering for particular meals or prayer, did we employ the language of my homeland, or ever discuss the politics of a place that all agreed remained in the past. Perhaps fifteen good families were known to my own. All were very fluent in the English language, and their interests at all times were to be enfranchised in the fine country where we’d settled—where we had pledged beneath Britain’s flag and with full hearts, the laws under Queen Victoria. As a further show of respect, my parents soon made the arrangements to anglicize our name—our passage had been inscribed on the ship’s logbooks as we had been known: Grünblatt, and on the 1st day of June 1844, we had officially and henceforth sworn ourselves as the Greenleaf family. I say all of this particular information because it is the truth, and because one must be reminded of this given the circumstances we are now facing.

By the time I had grown and was ready to pay heed to the Word and face the world beyond, I had become a religious man. Owing to the vastness of Australia, and as with most young apprentices of God, I had been traveling from Station to Station in the wilds of the interior. Myself alone covering great distances of thousands of miles, scattering the incorruptible seed of the Word amongst the White settlers, when, unexpectedly, I came into contact with the Blacks of Massacre Plains. There I found them in a condition most shocking to behold. I visited their camps and entered their wretched bark and bough gunyahs where they slept in cramped and vulgar conditions. I went from place to place, a spread of shambles a mile deep and wide, and each time I met with the same wretchedness and woe. In some instances, on making a first visit to a camp, the children ran away from me, terrified at my presence, whilst their mothers—some of them, alas! only children themselves—cowered in their little dens like so many wild beasts, doubtless afraid of my ghostliness. Such helplessness, such woe, caused by Christian White men! Yet this situation, I soon learned from good authority and from personal observation, was but an index to a ponderous volume of inequity existing throughout the interior. I believe it was then, having seen those depths of desperate subsistence, that I felt sincerely compelled to help the Aborigine of the camps. I was as sure of this as I had been of the Holy Spirit, my calling guided there by St. Jude himself.

The camps I speak of were run along the outskirts of the town, where nothing, I suspect, in the shape of a township, could have been more unprepossessing to a stranger than the province of Massacre Plains. The town of low-biding hills covered in gray volcanic boulders, sparse of vegetation except for the great white trees that appeared muscular from the hundreds of miles surrounding, marked purely for pastoral endeavors. In drawing comparison from the wet southern Colony it had given me the impression of sheer and onerous squatting country. What great difference I had witnessed from the bustling towns of the south; there hills and mountains were lush and many, and a crop took to the sun and frequent rain with the knowledge there would be continued good weather. Yet in Massacre Plains only a small number of houses had been established; two hotels and three stores, each bathed in the dry heat and endless clear skies. On strong recommendation I made my way to the most aristocratic of the two hotels, where a room had been engaged for me by the resident police sergeant, which was all that could be desired in being clean and comfortable.

I subsequently reported myself to the indisposed Bishop of the Uniting Church, whom I soon judged to be a gentleman in the true sense of the word. My first duty was one connected with my functions as a clergyman, when I was called away to visit a dying lad. After which, with a Native police guide, I rode two and a half miles down the Murrumby River to a Station where I was engaged to hold service. On returning to my accommodation, I told the lady of the house what I had heard and what I had seen earlier in the day. She replied, “Reverend Greenleaf, I have often thought what a sin it must be for Christian ministers to pass through these parts and never to speak a word to the poor Blacks. I can assure you that of all the clergymen who have called here, you are the first who seems to care anything about them. If some earnest and kindhearted minister would only take the matter up, something might be done to induce the Government to take steps to alleviate their condition.”

A long conversation followed, in which this lady, a resident of Massacre Plains for twenty years, drew a picture most sad to contemplate. The conversation sent me to my room filled to overflowing with the wants and woes of these unhappy people.

I threw myself upon my knees, and wept before God, and said: “O Lord, show me Thy way, teach me Thy path, tell me what to do for these perishing Aborigines.” The answer did not come freely, though I knew that if I followed the right and just path I would be instructed. I rose from my knees calmly resigned to the Divine will; but not even then for a moment thinking it was my duty to become a Missionary. If I had known then what great burden would befall me, would later exhaust me, then I think I wouldn’t have rested on my knees that night at all. If I had known the dark deeds, and if I had heeded the words of the apostle John when he said: “Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil.” And if I had realized that in the vertical sun of the interior, in all its dazzling light, that none shone from the Great Sun of Righteousness; instead, hidden within the blinding light were beliefs opposed to the principles of justice. Rife here are the darkest deeds ever performed by man upon his fellow man, which makes countless thousands mourn. That vile inhumanity practiced by the white-skinned Christian on his dark-skinned brother in order to obtain land and residence, for “peaceful acquisition”—that includes capture, chains, long marches, whipping, death on the roadside, or, if surviving all these—the far more terrible fate—being sold like brutes of the field as unpaid labor to the highest bidder.

How could it be that Australia, professedly the new home of liberty and light, had become a theater of oppression and cruelty? A land not only blessed by the Great God, with cloudless skies, and widespread prosperity and happiness to those who have been privileged to make it their own. And moreover a land that professes to reflect the noble institutions of Great Britain, those Godly and philanthropic fabrics, which are not only England’s glory and boast but the envy of all the world beside—is shrouded in dark deeds? That a land so circumstanced and blessed by Divine Providence, had become the nursing mother of injustice. That deeds of infamy should be encouraged. What I have seen constitutes the foulest blot to rest upon the emblem of Australia’s fame. If I had known, I would not have knelt that evening. I would not have called out, O Lord!

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