Author: Also, I hope you can influence and have a part in the action, as well as challenging me. Anyway, please introduce yourselves.
The grandmothers confer amongst themselves and put forward two spokeswomen.
Wauwe Woman: I am Wauwe Woman.
Wauwe is Kaurna for ‘female kangaroo’. I am a ngangiburka, a wise woman elder from the central Adelaide area.
Wirra Woman: I am Wirra Woman – ngangiburka from the Kaurna Wirra clan, just north of Adelaide.
Wauwe Woman: So, you’re saying we can challenge you?
Author: Absolutely.
Wawe Woman: About your racism?
Author: My racism? What do you mean?
Wirra Woman: Were you brought up in Australia?
Author: Yes.
Wauwe Woman: Are you white?
Author: Yes.
Wauwe Woman: Then you are a racist. It is imbued in every cell of your body. Takes a lot more than some fancy reconciliation ideas to wash that clean.
Anyway, whack us with the first chapter.
CHAPTER 1
Impact
Adelaide Environs, 1820s
Kirrila scooped up crabs in the gentle surf of Ngaltingga. A movement along the shore caught her eye. She straightened her back and scanned the edge of the bay, shaded at this time of day by tall cliffs.
Just a pelican diving into the sea, she decided. Her daughter poked her katta into the wet sand, fascinated at the flurries of ‘surf vermin’, as her language described crabs, scuttling away from Kirrila’s net. An unusual sound distracted her mother, but before Kirrila could look around, an arm grabbed her.
‘Moorundie,’ she hissed, surmising wrongly that these enemy river men had chanced on her, a lone woman, while they raided the sea cliffs for red ochre. Her child let out a squeal. She twisted around and saw the girl slip from the grasp of a pale man with strange garb all over his body. Terror gripped her – ghost-skins from Karta: just as the Ngarrindjeri had warned. She screamed at her daughter to run. Both assailants bundled her roughly towards a boat that appeared around the edge of the rocks. Gagging at their odour she clawed at the sand with her toes, willing it to suck her back. A thumping resounded behind them. Could she be saved? A ghost-skin picked up what looked like a shiny katta, and pointed.
Crack!
Thunder ripped apart the blue of the sky. She glimpsed her uncle, a beloved wise burka, as he fell. Her head banged on the edge of the boat as it heaved into the sea. She retched.
Adelaide, 1950
Billy put on his cowboy suit and placed both guns in their holsters. He had an execution to perform. Reffos had dared move into his street. He swaggered out into the blazing sun that flooded Commercial Road. The other kids were waiting. He saw the refugee standing outside number 48. Gee she was tiny! Couldn’t be more than three years old. She smiled shyly. He hesitated.
‘We don’t like you,’ he heard his sister say. ‘We don’t want you here. Go back to where you came from. You smell. We’re gonna shoot you dead.’ Billy saw the uncertainty flicker over the small girl’s face. She obviously didn’t understand English. Spoke some awful gobbledygook language, no doubt.
‘We’re gonna shoot you dead!’ repeated his sister, pointing to Billy in his cowboy regalia. The reffo looked at him – looked at the guns in their holsters. Terror strafed her face. Billy’s hands rested lightly on his weapons. He knew what he had to do. The other kids stepped back. The asphalt of the road shimmered in the heat. Billy strode towards his prey.
Kua rushed on to the beach. His isolation in the Murlawirra gully, customary after his recent circumcision, had been interrupted by cries and explosions that shattered the peace of the summer day. He saw the boat disappear into the Wongayerlo, the water where the sun always sank. He saw the fallen body of his uncle, his blood staining the white sand. He rushed forward, but stopped at the old man’s signal, ‘There’s nothing you can do.’
Kua gaped at the hole in his uncle’s stomach. He watched the slow ooze of blood, remembering its warmth on his own body as it bathed him during his first initiation. How proud he had felt to be anointed by the grace of this precious fluid which was now draining away. The old man’s eyes steadily met his. Kua trembled at their power, his body still resonating with the chant his uncle sang during his second initiation. It charged his every sinew with potent energy, and overrode the searing pain at the core of his budding manhood. How honoured he had been, to be intimately branded by the male dignity and wisdom of his ancestors. The young man drank in what his uncle was communicating with his eyes.
‘It’s now up to you, Kua Kertamerru Murlawirra. A heavy burden is placed on your young shoulders. The white man is here in our sacred land. It falls upon you to take on this new and unknown challenge. Just look to the stars, look to the land, look into the wellsprings. All will be revealed.’ The lustre faded from the dark eyes. Kua was left implacably alone.
Svitochka was very excited about being in Adelaide. She had spent the first week in a Displaced Persons’ Hostel on the banks of the River Torrens. She was enraptured by the black swans that glided by. At last her endless travelling was over. Sharp imprints of a tumultuous past were beginning to fade. Glimmers on the water triggered flashbacks of the searchlights of border guards, when she escaped from Czechoslovakia; grunts of swans reminded her of two men who seemed to be hurting her mother, on a dark night in Austria; the azure of the sky echoed the blue monotony of the sea voyage to Australia.
She felt peaceful sitting by this river. The land was welcoming her, caressing her. She half shut her eyes and imagined kangaroos drinking at the water’s edge. She hadn’t seen any of these exotic creatures yet, even though fellow migrants on the boat claimed they would be hopping all over Australia. Svitochka was oblivious to the fact that she was sitting on an Aboriginal site, where Tandanya Rock once stood. For thousands of years this had been the sacred centre of the Tandanya, or Red Kangaroo people. In 1950, nothing commemorated the fact: no plaque, no sign. Unbe-knownst to Svitochka, the ancient energy was seeping into her bones, giving her a strength she would need for the arduous years ahead.
Kangaroo Island, as it was dubbed by white-skins, was known by Kirrila’s people as Karta – the land of the dead. It was uninhabited for generations before white sealers and sailors landed there. Kirrila was thrown into a loathsome existence; used at night for the carnal gratification of her captors, and by day as a slave. She was forced to hunt, cook, fetch and carry. Other black women on the island suffered the same predicament; harlots and slaves to a motley bunch of pirates and sealers, who, here at the end of the world, traded with passing ships. Some slaves had been captured from Van Diemen’s Land and others from Ngarrindjeri country. Many tried to escape, but were shot while running or savagely beaten when caught. Some drowned as they swam out to sea, their bodies washing up a few days later.
A child of one of the unfortunate women