Diamonds and Dust Read online

  Some months later Dad arrived in Darwin and told me to pack my gear: I was to join the family in Arnhem Land. He’d been told I had a Greek boyfriend. It wasn’t true – all I’d done was go to the movies with a Greek girlfriend. I wasn’t interested in men at this stage and was far too busy with study and night school. But Dad was worried for my welfare all alone in Darwin, and so I was on a plane to Arnhem Land, a flight to the outback that would change my life’s direction. Aside from MacRobertson Miller Airlines’ DC3 doing its kangaroo hop around the coastal mission stations, the only way in and out of Yirrkala was Noondy Harritos’ coastal barge, which arrived once in a blue moon. The barge brought our wet season’s bulk stores. The mail came via the DC3 every fortnight. Its landings during the wet season were as exciting as any flying I’ve done since, including mustering cattle in a chopper. The more times I landed in the aisle with luggage piled on top of me, the more I enjoyed the trips. Maybe I should have applied to become an airline stewardess.

  Sunday was walkabout day and my Aboriginal friends had walked from Yirrkala Mission to our camp on top of the bauxite escarpment. Betty, Junie and I were roughly the same age and I looked forward to their company for walks through the bush. I was especially excited one Sunday as we were heading to Melville Bay, 28 kilometres west of our camp.

  Distance never meant much and, girls being girls, we always had heaps to talk about. Betty and Junie were promised to quite elderly men in their tribe and the ceremony was getting closer. Under their tribal law, a young woman was promised to an older man so she would hunt for him and look after him, while a young man was promised to an older woman, to hunt and look after her.

  In her broken English Junie asked, ‘Who you promised man?’ If they were promised, why wasn’t I? As far as Betty and Junie were concerned, I was a girl about the same age as they were. They couldn’t understand why I wasn’t promised, and said I ought to think about it.

  We were full of enthusiasm as we left the two-wheel dirt track the missionaries and my family used. Talking, laughing, we would yell ‘Galka!’, then run and hide. ‘Galka’ meant something like ‘madman’ or ‘mad bushman’, I was never really sure. All I knew was that if he was out there he wasn’t meant to catch us. Of course the more we yelled ‘Galka’, the more we spooked ourselves.

  We were heading in the direction of a claypan flat when we heard a low droning sound in the distance. Someone yelled ‘Galka!’ and in no time we were huddled behind the nearest anthill. I said to Betty and Junie that we should stop the game, as we were frightening ourselves. But the droning kept coming closer. I realised it was a light aircraft of some kind. We ran out from the shadow of the anthill, confident again.

  We headed into the open country and started across another claypan flat. My silent thought was about the danger of lone buffalo bulls, now that we were walking further out from any decent trees and anthills to hide behind. But we were in a happy mood, knowing that once we arrived at Melville Bay we would swim, dig up turtle eggs, collect oysters as large as saucers and refresh ourselves with a drink of fresh water from Macassar’s Soak.

  Out in the middle of the flat we stopped, silent for a minute, listening. There was that droning sound again, heading in our direction. We spotted the aircraft and, clinging to each other, kept on walking. It circled the flat and came in at us, only this time much lower. What the hell was going on? I never expected a plane so close in the middle of the Never Never. This was Arnhem Land, where you’d expect a mail plane once a fortnight.

  My heart was fairly pounding. The aircraft was circling the claypan and coming in once more, this time at treetop level. Now we really had something to panic about. We grabbed each other and huddled on the ground while the aircraft dived towards us. Turning my head skywards I imagined that the pilot hadn’t seen us and for some unknown reason was going to land in the middle of this claypan flat, or possibly on us.

  Screaming, I jumped up, Betty and Junie with me. Running as fast as our skinny legs would carry us, we headed towards a belt of timber on the edge of the claypan. The aircraft banked and approached again, directly at us. We fell in a heap once more. By now my heart was in my throat and I was having trouble believing that this was really happening. What was wrong with this bloody idiot? We ran towards the timber again. Junie went down, screaming in her own language that she had twisted her ankle. Betty and I grabbed an arm each, and without looking to see if anything was broken, we dragged Junie between us, still heading for the timber.

  Once under shelter, we decided to head back to the billabong at the foot of the bauxite plateau, near home base. Too much had happened today and we decided to leave our walk to Melville Bay for another time. We were all too frightened to go on now and I thought Mum should look at Junie’s ankle, which was swelling. We eventually made it home to find Bruce, Darryl, Eric and Michael having a good laugh. It turned out that the pilot had mistaken me for an albino Aboriginal girl, out walking with her friends. It probably did seem funny when he landed at my father’s camp and they helped him out of his plane, babbling about this amazing find. But somehow I never quite got the joke.

  At the foot of ‘our’ plateau was one of the largest and deepest freshwater billabongs in the north-east corner of Arnhem Land. This massive open span of water, dotted with islands covered in pandanus palms, flowed gently through the reeds and sandhills, then emptied into the beautiful blue sea by Yirrkala Mission. One of the Aboriginal elders was kind enough to give my brothers and myself a dugout canoe. Bruce, Darryl, Eric, Michael and I just couldn’t wait to get the dugout down the side of the plateau and into the billabong. This was quite an exercise in itself, considering that we were only strong enough to roll it down sideways and the dugout was longer than the width of the track.

  We persevered, rolling it over and over, every so often hitting a tree and having to pull the dugout back on track. At times the four of us just sat on it and talked about the good times we would have once we got the thing launched.

  The boys had already constructed a jetty from gum saplings which they had tied together with bush twine. Each afternoon after school the boys would head off over the plateau to work on their project. I would stay behind only long enough to help prepare the evening meal or bake a huge cake. I was interested in cooking good solid meals, not the fancy stuff, and learned plenty from Mum. Ours wasn’t a traditional household – our living quarters were 100 metres or so from the cook house. The men’s quarters, office and workshop were each separate buildings. Mum had settled in well at the camp, although she battled most days trying to get the boys to put school lessons ahead of wild adventures.

  Once we had the canoe in the water, we all piled in, got our balance and paddled out to a pandanus island. From island to island we floated, gazing down into the clear, crystal water and gawking in wonder at these huge dark areas that looked like caves’ mouths. We found out later the dark patches were algae lifting from the bottom of the billabong.

  On one of our many fishing trips we found an old yellow life jacket on an isolated beach. I decided that we should teach Michael, who was five, to swim. After making sure that it would carry his weight in the water, we tied a length of rope to the jacket, dropped Michael in the water behind the canoe and paddled off, with me sitting in the dugout holding the rope while the boys paddled.

  ‘Swim, Michael, kick your legs and use your arms,’ I called from the safety of the canoe.

  We often banked the canoe at our favourite island, where we would have a little picnic and all swim together. It was wonderful to have our freedom, lots of space and our own dugout. What more could kids want?

  Even after Michael had learned to swim, we would still tow him behind; it was more fun. However, unknowingly we were setting Michael up as croc bait. Even now, the thought sends shivers through my entire body.

  One weekend while we were all away on a trip to Broome, an Aboriginal man from the mission was attacked by a salt-water crocodile in the same billabong. Luckily he survived. We d
idn’t know it, but saltwater crocodiles will occasionally go into a freshwater spring and follow a creek or freshwater seepage area to cleanse themselves of old barnacles. We never swam in that billabong again, and anytime we went near it we’d be looking over our shoulders.

  On one of my father’s trips to Darwin, my brothers and I got lucky. At a local auction Dad put in a successful bid on an old wartime Willy’s jeep: never been driven, one out of a crate of four. Six weeks later the Willy’s arrived at Melville Bay on Noondy Harritos’ barge, and you would have thought it was Christmas. What a gift! A quick lesson at the bay and Bruce followed Dad home to our camp on the plateau.

  From that day, when we went picnicking, fishing, or out after a buffalo for beef, the boys and I would follow behind Mum and Dad’s Land Rover with our little jeep, taking turns behind the wheel and keeping a watchful eye out for buffalo. On sighting one, Dad would signal for us to stop while he silently slipped out of his Land Rover, rested his .303 rifle across the bonnet, fixed the buffalo in his sight, then pulled the trigger. The rest of the family sat elbow to elbow, hands planted firmly over our ears . . . Bang! Dad was a good shot; he never used more than one bullet to put a buffalo down.

  Dad cut its throat to let it bleed while Mother collected kindling to boil the billy. Our job was to follow the tracks back out of the scrub and timber and head back to Yirrkala Mission to notify the Aboriginal men that we’d shot a buffalo and to come on out and get some fresh meat. It wouldn’t take them long to gather their knives and steel, hop in the mission Land Rover, and take off, all laughing and talking with the thought of the feast to come. By the time we returned to the kill, Dad had boned out the cuts of meat we needed to keep our family going. On hearing our vehicles approaching, Mum would build up the fire and cook a few strips of buffalo meat for the men to sample while they were boning out. We did this a lot in Arnhem Land. The Yirrkala people are coastal, but loved to vary their diet with the odd piece of delicious buffalo meat. Towards the end of our time in Arnhem Land we discovered that the mission had done very well out of all this buffalo meat. As soon as the men arrived back at the mission, the meat was taken and sold back to them through the mission store. The day Dad found out he grabbed the red-faced reverend by the collar and gave him a darn good shaking, which left him sputtering and trembling. He promised to let the people share the meat among themselves with no money exchanging hands. To mollify Dad, the reverend pressed four packets of hard-boiled lollies on us.

  There were two tribes of Aboriginal people at the mission that I can remember, both distinctive. I recall how very black they were, with shiny black curly hair down past their shoulders. Proud with their tribal markings, they carried an assortment of spears, each with a special purpose and meaning. The older women were naked to the waist with markings between their breasts, and the young girls were clothed, like the boys.

  The leader of one of these tribes was a wiry old man with white hair and a long white beard. Mawwellen and his people would hunt for kangaroo, lizards and honey bees as they travelled through the bush. When on these walks they would call at our camp on the bauxite plateau, standing back the customary hundred metres. Dad would have to greet them at the edge of the clearing. Only then would they advance closer to our camp.

  Gunnamullie, the elder of the other tribe, was tall and slim and much younger than Mawwellen. He always walked in a dignified fashion, a handful of spears in one hand and a .22 rifle in the other. His taut body proudly displayed his markings for all to see and his narga cloth covered his genitals.

  The difference between these two men was that Mawwellen had never been outside Arnhem Land and probably never would have wanted to. He knew only Aboriginal law and custom, and was a content and happy old man. Gunnamullie, on the other hand, had flown to capital cities to dance for the Queen and Prince Philip on their visits to Australia. Gunnamullie was a wonderful tribal dancer. When he danced he captured total attention. He was also intelligent, and easily able to master the ways of the white man’s world.

  One lovely clear blue sunny day, with little humidity, we were preparing for a family fishing trip to Melville Bay. Bruce and Darryl went off discussing what fishing lines and nets they’d take, and I stayed in the kitchen to help Mum pack the tucker box. At Melville Bay, I’d keep her company walking along the shoreline collecting shells while the boys and Dad fished.

  Suddenly a vehicle came racing towards the camp in a cloud of red dust. The mission Land Rover came roaring to a halt directly in front of Dad, showering him with bauxite gravel. Out jumped old Bob, the handyman from the mission.

  ‘There’s really big trouble at the mission! Gunnamullie just danced the stingray dance and all hell has broken loose.’

  The state the old man was in said it all. Dad grabbed his .303 and off he went. It didn’t take too long for Dad to confirm Bob’s story. He saw a crowd: there was screaming and wailing from the women and spears were sailing through the air with one tribe trying to pay back the other, and not a missionary in sight. Dad bailed up a boy, and asked him what was up.

  ‘Gunnamullie has been speared,’ was the frightened answer.

  Dad raised the .303 skywards, fired, reloaded, and fired again. As the sound of the shots echoed around the mission, there was deathly silence. The combatants lowered their spears.

  Apparently Gunnamullie had been the only winner of all card games for some time, and one of Mawwellen’s boys had had enough. He demanded that Gunnamullie show his hand of cards. Gunnamullie refused. Instead he went for a spear. The boy was up out of his seat, spear held high. In an instant he drove it into Gunnamullie’s kidney. Not one to give in easily, Gunnamullie pulled it out and fired it back with all his strength. But at that instant his body took another shovelnose spear, and this one killed him.

  For weeks Dad seemed to be the only calm person among us all. Tension was in the air, especially among the tribal people, who were anticipating a round of payback: ‘a body for a body’. Every man was carrying more razor-sharp spears than usual. I was never aware of anybody being killed in retaliation, but it took some months for the situation to get back to normal.

  Two Swiss doctors of geology were boarding at the homestead while conducting a survey and taking samples from the undeveloped bauxite lease that Dad was caretaking. They were well educated, quiet gentlemen, very white-skinned, with enough English to get by and not a lot of knowledge about our Arnhem Land bush. Maybe they were a little too quiet for my brothers and me.

  We took any opportunity for fun, and this looked like one. With no television, no phone and not a lot to do in the humid January evenings, Bruce, Darryl, Eric, Michael and I would often take long, leisurely walks down the track. The track was heavily lined on both sides with spear grass which rose well over our heads. Huge clumps of pandanus palms thrived in the humid atmosphere. The dragonflies were busily trying to keep their distance from Darryl’s widely waving stick, which he said he was carrying to protect us from venomous snakes and the odd roving bull buffalo. The buffalo liked this track and so did we, and an old bull who had been pushed, or ‘beaten’, out of the herd by younger bulls could sometimes be unpredictable and dangerous.

  At this time of the year – three months into the wet season – we could only walk more or less in single file, not knowing what was a foot or two behind the walls of spear grass and pandanus flanking the track. The boys and I were about halfway down the track when we heard the camp motorbike in the distance. Soon we were in fits of laughter listening to it coming along the track in unique style, starting and farting, revving high and low.

  I knew it wasn’t Dad taking Mum for a ride because Dad would have had it in control. It could only be our Swiss doctors of geology, trying to keep the bike going on the muddy track through the spear grass.

  I had a brainwave. As the bike was lurching along the track and getting closer, I grabbed Michael.

  ‘Lie low behind the clump of pandanus and wait for them to pass!’

  Out of sight, we lis
tened to our Swiss friends wobble past. Lying down in the mud, we gave no thought to a taipan or two that could have been up to the same trick.

  Once they were past our hideaway, out we came. We couldn’t possibly let them return to Switzerland without some excitement. The track was the only way in and out of the camp. It wasn’t too long before we could again hear the nervous laughter, the revving high and low of the bike on its way back down the track. I outlined my plan to the boys, and then back in behind the pandanus we went. I beckoned to Bruce, Darryl and Eric to grab hold of the tallest pandanus palm with me. We waited for the bike. I then gave the boys the nod to begin shaking the palm as vigorously as they could. In between shakes we grabbed handfuls of dirt and grass and threw it into the air, all the time bellowing like a raging buffalo bull. We gave it our very best and tried to contain our laughter.

  The effect must have been authentic. Dr Alexander Somm gave the motorbike an almighty rev out of sheer terror. The bike was all over the track now, revving high and low and fast and slow all at once. Screams of excitement and laughter, or maybe fear, echoed down the track as they belted towards camp pursued by an imaginary wild buffalo. We watched in fits as our Swiss visitors disappeared into the distance in complete disarray.

  I was laughing so much I was crying as we wandered down the track homewards with the last light fading. From the clearing around the camp, we could see the lights and headed straight for them. I looked through the kitchen window. Both doctors were talking and waving their arms excitedly. Dad was handing them whiskys. Mum turned and spotted us, quickly came out of the kitchen and sent us off for showers.

  ‘No need to hurry back,’ she said. ‘Dad is calming down our doctor friends. They have just had the most terrible experience with a raging buffalo.’

  Well! It’s something they can tell their kids about some day.