firefighting. One day, standing close to a fire, she thought: This is what hell must be like. This is what whoever killed Cameron will feel. Where they’ll go. Just imagine how dry it will be. You’ll want to drink and drink and drink.
A FTER DINNER , the lawyers and I walked down to the jetty. It was eleven o’clock, the Milky Way was close above, and people sat along the jetty’s edge holding their fingers, with baited strings attached, over the water. They were mainly women and children, perhaps getting away from the drinkers. One child lay in the centre of the jetty, asleep on a pillowcase; two others were dozing in their strollers. I wouldn’t have thought there was much to catch at low tide, but the children used a torch to spotlight the dark water. If they found a fish they tailed it with the light while their friends dropped in lines nearby.
I sat on the jetty’s edge, the sea breeze a balm after the heat of the day. Water lapped around the wooden pylons. There was no horizon: the sky was connected to the water. It too was liquid, its stars like phosphorescence. In an article on Aboriginal astrology, I’d read: “Like the stained glass windows of medieval cathedrals [the night sky] provided, in effect, an illustrated textbook of morality and culture during the thousands of years when the only means of relaying the accumulated wisdom of the tribe was oral tradition.” People navigated and predicted seasonal shifts by the stars, but they were also the subject of religious stories. The Milky Way was commonly believed to be a river, with the brightest stars fish, other stars waterlily bulbs, and the dark patches lagoons. Some tribes thought that the dead lived in this sky world of great bounty.
Around Australia, as the frontier spread through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, the Aborigines believed the white invaders to be the spirits of kinsmen returning from the dead. In northern Queensland, the ethnographer W. E. Roth wrote in 1903, many names for “white person” translate as “bogie man”, “ghost”, “corpse”, or even “grave”. And the names, of course, took on a terrible irony. The Aborigines showed these white ghosts where the water was. The white ghosts brought sheep and cattle and occupied the traditional hunting grounds and sacred sites. They took black women. And in North Queensland, as in many other places, every act of Aboriginal retaliation was answered with violence far exceeding it. “Shoot those you cannot get at and hang those that you do catch on the nearest tree as an example to the rest,” exhorted the
Northern Territory Times
in 1875. The Aborigines of the Gulf region, where Cameron’s family came from, called this frontier period Wild Time. The survivors were cleared onto missions; and this period was called Mission Time.
When I was at school in the 1980s, we never learned about Aboriginal history; we didn’t know the name of the tribe who’d inhabited Melbourne pre-settlement, let alone anything of Aboriginal religions or cosmology. Somehow we picked up basic facts. We knew that land was central to Aboriginal identity, that in fact blackfellas saw themselves as inseparable from the land. No land meant no Dreaming, and no Dreaming meant no identity, no meaning. Wild Time was, among other things, a violent religious upheaval. It meant the smashing of those stained-glass windows in the night sky.
Palm Island was settled with refugees from Wild Time; they lived cut off from the religion and culture of their traditional lands, and the despair that went with their removal was often fatal. Around the turn of the twentieth century, W. E. Roth heard old people on a mission singing a song: “This [country] made him die. The place he did not belong to. It was this [that made him] die.”
On the jetty a thin, white-haired Aboriginal woman sat with three of her daughters, one of whom was a hopeless alcoholic, of the kind the islanders call “drones”. The mother
A FTER DINNER , the lawyers and I walked down to the jetty. It was eleven o’clock, the Milky Way was close above, and people sat along the jetty’s edge holding their fingers, with baited strings attached, over the water. They were mainly women and children, perhaps getting away from the drinkers. One child lay in the centre of the jetty, asleep on a pillowcase; two others were dozing in their strollers. I wouldn’t have thought there was much to catch at low tide, but the children used a torch to spotlight the dark water. If they found a fish they tailed it with the light while their friends dropped in lines nearby.
I sat on the jetty’s edge, the sea breeze a balm after the heat of the day. Water lapped around the wooden pylons. There was no horizon: the sky was connected to the water. It too was liquid, its stars like phosphorescence. In an article on Aboriginal astrology, I’d read: “Like the stained glass windows of medieval cathedrals [the night sky] provided, in effect, an illustrated textbook of morality and culture during the thousands of years when the only means of relaying the accumulated wisdom of the tribe was oral tradition.” People navigated and predicted seasonal shifts by the stars, but they were also the subject of religious stories. The Milky Way was commonly believed to be a river, with the brightest stars fish, other stars waterlily bulbs, and the dark patches lagoons. Some tribes thought that the dead lived in this sky world of great bounty.
Around Australia, as the frontier spread through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, the Aborigines believed the white invaders to be the spirits of kinsmen returning from the dead. In northern Queensland, the ethnographer W. E. Roth wrote in 1903, many names for “white person” translate as “bogie man”, “ghost”, “corpse”, or even “grave”. And the names, of course, took on a terrible irony. The Aborigines showed these white ghosts where the water was. The white ghosts brought sheep and cattle and occupied the traditional hunting grounds and sacred sites. They took black women. And in North Queensland, as in many other places, every act of Aboriginal retaliation was answered with violence far exceeding it. “Shoot those you cannot get at and hang those that you do catch on the nearest tree as an example to the rest,” exhorted the
Northern Territory Times
in 1875. The Aborigines of the Gulf region, where Cameron’s family came from, called this frontier period Wild Time. The survivors were cleared onto missions; and this period was called Mission Time.
When I was at school in the 1980s, we never learned about Aboriginal history; we didn’t know the name of the tribe who’d inhabited Melbourne pre-settlement, let alone anything of Aboriginal religions or cosmology. Somehow we picked up basic facts. We knew that land was central to Aboriginal identity, that in fact blackfellas saw themselves as inseparable from the land. No land meant no Dreaming, and no Dreaming meant no identity, no meaning. Wild Time was, among other things, a violent religious upheaval. It meant the smashing of those stained-glass windows in the night sky.
Palm Island was settled with refugees from Wild Time; they lived cut off from the religion and culture of their traditional lands, and the despair that went with their removal was often fatal. Around the turn of the twentieth century, W. E. Roth heard old people on a mission singing a song: “This [country] made him die. The place he did not belong to. It was this [that made him] die.”
On the jetty a thin, white-haired Aboriginal woman sat with three of her daughters, one of whom was a hopeless alcoholic, of the kind the islanders call “drones”. The mother
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