Fase de sistematización de la información

As the car veers from the bitumen, Caly leaves behind that place of childhood holidays. It happens so fast. The Toyota hurtles along the narrow dirt road. Low scrubby vegetation, bleak, dried up hills worn down with the years, these are alien. The gleaming white sand of the beaches morphs to red pindan dunes. All those years and she has never headed east, has clung, like everybody else, to the little township by the sea.

Caly sits in the back seat with Auntie Dolly. Beryl, sitting in-between, spills across the seat, melon-breasts and massive thighs barely contained by her worn cotton dress.

‘Always stay close to the land. Know it like you know yourself,’ Dolly says to anyone who’s listening.

‘Geez Mum. As if we don’t want to. But you still need the dosh to pay the bills.’ Frankie has heard it all before.

‘Money’ll slip through your fingers like sand. You mob always rushin’, rushin’.’ Dolly looks out of the car window at the trees and hills slipping by. She has seen them so many times they are imprinted on her; she could tell you about each of them one by one. ‘Land’s solid. Land’s goin’ nowhere. Them hills, them trees. The waterholes. Them things you can depend on.’

It had cooled down after the rain, but this morning it’s sticky and hot. Joyce, her face marked from battle, her hair untamed and smelling of mutton fat and smoky fires, steers the four-wheel drive, unfazed. She knows this road, negotiates with ease lakes of brown milky water, deep ruts in the mud from earlier travellers. Frankie, smaller than the other women but somehow more imposing, sits in the front passenger seat. Caly catches glimpses of them in the rear-vision mirror. Frankie is speaking to Joyce, but it is impossible to hear what she is saying. The car rattles and shakes over corrugations.

‘It’s the best time. Good tucker everywhere,’ Dolly says. Rain up here never goes unnoticed. Joyce drives off the rough road, weaves the vehicle through scrubby trees and kills the motor and the air-conditioning. Outside the car, a wall of burning air presses against them. Caly pulls on her calico hat. She glances at her cell phone. It’s still out of range. Frankie stands beside Dolly, shakes a cigarette from the packet, lights it, inhales deeply. She’s more worn than her mother. Prickly, tough, but at the same time more vulnerable.

‘Is it okay to take photos out here?’ Caly asks. To break the silence. To make something happen. It’s when she’s still and quiet she aches the most.

85

embankment of rocks above them. The wind catches in the branches of the mulgas and the paperbarks. It reminds Caly of time, of timelessness. She tries to identify various bird calls; anything to keep her mind busy. He’s like a microchip in her brain, a fragment of glass in her heart. Except for the birds and the song of the wind, there is silence. An unexpected shyness has settled in her, but all the same she’s glad of the company of the women, out here so far from anywhere.

Together they walk a short distance from the car. The women make camp in a large sandy clearing at the base of the escarpment. Caly can’t help but look upward along the ancient layerings of the red rock wall to the brilliant blue disc of cloudless sky. She wills herself to relax, to feel easy in the place. But the knowledge that she has no sense of north, south, east, west, that she could never find her way out of here, that she is in country so foreign, feeds her apprehension.

The women have a fire going. Beryl throws on a couple of kangaroo tails bought, fur and all, from the freezer in the store in town. The skin curls, fat sizzles on the coals. Lunch. Caly barely dares think about it. The heat pressing her skin, the patois of the women's talk. She understands almost nothing.

‘You go with Auntie,’ Joyce instructs. She juts out her plump bottom lip towards the direction they are to take.

The other women head off and soon the thud of spades and crowbars, the occasional burst of excited laughter, ricochet off the cliffs. Dolly Watson scrutinizes her charge, skinny and tight, as jumpy as a rabbit. The girl has a lot of learning to do.

‘Come.’ The Yamatji elder’s eyes survey the bare ground. Caly has known this woman all her life and yet she’s never appreciated it before; Dolly Watson embodies that certain strength, humour and warmth, a groundedness and self-possession that immediately commands respect. She has encountered this in indigenous elders in so many parts of the world. ‘We find one big perentie,’ Dolly says.

Though Caly sees nothing, Dolly has located footprints. She sets off at a brisk pace in pursuit of the creature. When the chase begins in earnest, Caly struggles to keep up. Fit as she is, Dolly’s skill and experience put her far ahead. Out here, it seems, her youth is of no consequence, or if anything, a drawback.

At the mouth of the burrow, Dolly grabs the spade and begins the laborious process of digging out the animal. Caly, tense, appalled, hovers back. There is nothing else she can do.

‘Not long now, soon we have ‘im.’

And then it’s there. The goanna’s head lifts proudly. About a metre from head to tail with strong muscular forelegs and haunches, the magnificent reptile calculates escape. But in a motion Caly cannot fully take in, Dolly deftly lifts and swings it by the tail from one hand. After a few

86

whacks on the head, the perentie is dead. Limp and lifeless. It’s that quick.

They walk back to the camp in silence, the elder’s energy spent, Caly speechless. Back at camp, the women spread out their haul of grubs, bush tomatoes, yams and onions, a few smaller goannas. While the other women prepare the bush food, Dolly sits glowing with satisfaction in the shade. She pours strong black tea into her pannikin. Following the others, she dips chunks of warm damper that the women have carefully baked in the ashes into the hot liquid.

Caly smears tears and dust with the corner of her shirt. If she were alone, she’s sure of it, she could howl out here, a rabid beast. The women seem to expect nothing from her. Her credentials, her successes and failures count for zilch. All the years she’s been away have melted to nothing. Here time moves slowly. And nothing seems to matter but being here. Worn out, consumed by the heat, she feels the stirrings of a letting go, the contentedness of the women.

‘When we was kids go footwalk across country, a long, long ways. Parents teaching us all ‘bout right foods in them days. No rubbish food, no takeaway. We were one healthy mob,’ Dolly tells them. ‘In them old days lots of dancing, to make kangaroo, bush turkey, everything we need. Go get kararra seed, spinifex and grind ‘im up on the stone an’ make damper. That’s a long time ago when the rockholes were full with clean water and you could collect wild onion, good those ones, and wild oranges even, and there was wild currants, you shake the tree and get a pile from just one tree. So much good tucker all gone, them bullocks and sheep they take the lot. And when Yamatji get hungry and maybe take a sheep or two, terrible things happened. Flogging, shooting Yamatji. Cruel the whitefellas in those days.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Caly says.

‘Long time ago,’ Dolly says. ‘No good thinking too much now.’

‘But those stories, Mum, they shouldn’t be hidden,’ Frankie says. ‘People should know what happened up here in the old days.’

The perentie they bake slowly in a trench dug out under the coals. When Frankie hands her a piece of white flesh, Caly knows there’s no way out, bites into it cautiously but finds that if she keeps her mind still, it tastes much like chicken. She’s getting to like Frankie, now she has gotten over her fear. The woman has a quiet intelligence beneath her crusty surface. When Caly admits her ambivalence at the killing of the perentie, Frankie, rather than dismissing her, explains patiently about the traditional skills of hunting, and the value of bush knowledge to her people. The other women listen, looking proud of what Frankie has to say, proud of the easy way she talks strong with a wadjela.

‘Take walkabout,’ she says. ‘Walkabout is quiet time, a time to listen, a time to learn all about spiritual things. It’s in the wadjela religions, in the church, and those fellas like in India.’

87 ‘A pilgrimage,’ Caly suggests.

‘Yeah, like that. Walkabout is a wadjela word. For something they don’t understand. Hear most people talk about it and they make it seem nothing, just blackfellas being slack, lazy, shirking their obligations for some primitive urge to go bush. But it wasn’t like that.’ Frankie picks up a twig and smooths the rich, red sand with her hand. She draws a deliberate pattern of lines and circles on the blank surface. ‘It’s a time of devotion, a spiritual journey, when a man, or a woman too, goes walkabout, making maps in her head, through the songs. Learning her country, learning who she is. If you know the song, you know the country. Time for listening. To all things.’ Then she adds, as if to herself, ‘Even her aloneness, even her sadness.’

They sit without words for a while, hearing again the activities of the birds; wattlebirds squabbling, the ubiquitous crows, the rasping breath of parrots in the hot afternoon air. And the wind, weaving through the branches and leaves, recalling to them other lives, other stories.

For dessert, they take mouthfuls of delicious honeycomb, like bright yellow baked egg, and dripping with the honey of the native bees. Languid in the afternoon heat, they drink strongly brewed tea from large tin pannikins. So many questions Caly wants to ask float out of reach.

‘I’m going to learn you bush food and bush medicine,’ Dolly says firmly when they are in the car heading home.

‘We’ll take her to the paintings, eh, Mum?’ Frankie says. She turns, looks at Caly. ‘Thousands of years old.’

‘Better go quick, girl,’ Joyce says. ‘Before that mining mob grabs it all.’

The road home is a red ribbon unfurling before them. The Toyota skims over the corrugations through soft-hued vegetation, framed by purple hills patch-worked in spinifex, stitched with white stone. The early evening light illuminates pots of gold along the horizon, casts mysterious shadows upon the land. Privately, Caly chuckles. All that therapy has not been lost. She knows how the mind can turn everything around. Out of the corner of her eye she studies Dolly Watson, dozing in unreserved peace. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others. Whatever. Her heart is open and for the first time, for as long as she can remember, she feels ready for anything.

88