Mullumbimby Read online

  Circles protect you if you let them, girl. But you gotta let em. Gotta not get in their way.

  ‘That you, Aunty Barb?’ Jo asked the eagle, hearing the waver in her own voice.

  The eagle gave one harsh cry – of dissent, Jo thought – and rose swiftly in the air, soon becoming a tiny black dot above the ridgeline. Couldn’t be, anyway. Aunty Barb’s meat was that slowpoke tree-dweller, boribi – koala. Couldn’t get much further from boribi than a wedgetail. It was just one of those things, one of those odd and striking visitations of nature, Jo decided, as she dragged her runners back on. Still, the feeling of having been seen by the eagle stayed with her. Her arrival on the farm had been witnessed, Jo felt. She had asked for a sign, and a messenger had welcomed her. She was Home.

  As the mourners turned to leave the mound of red earth covering the late Mrs Lacosta, Jo found herself face to face with Cheery Dan, Fat Tony’s offsider at the rural co-op. His permanent grin had been muted to a half-smile in deference to the occasion and, Jo now realised, he was standing alongside the same bloke who had driven past her farm in a yellow ute that morning.

  Yellow Ute Man was fit from outdoor work and he had a hard face, Jo thought, a hard face with intelligent grey eyes that wouldn’t easily look away from a fight. A bit of a dangerous character, perhaps. Then, as Dan introduced her, she amended this: it’s not so much a hard face, maybe just tough. Tough I can live with, she thought. Tough I like, in men and women both ... Even if he hadn’t stopped when she tried to wave him down.

  ‘G’day,’ she greeted him. ‘You drove past me an hour ago when I was looking at that cow on Tin Wagon Road.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah. Rob Starr,’ the man said, putting out a rough square hand for her to shake. His skin was freckled, and the hair on his muscled arm shone copper in the hot sun. ‘Yeah, I knew that heifer was already dead, otherwise I would have come down and shot it meself.’

  Starr made it sound as though Jo was a long-time resident who had been lumbered with the shooting of a sick beast.

  ‘I wasn’t – ah, I didn’t know how to make sure it was dead,’ Jo confessed. Starr raised his eyebrows, as if this was information hardwired into all humans.

  ‘If you can’t see any breathing going on, you just touch the eyeball, see if it jumps at that,’ Starr said.

  ‘And if you’re still not sure, give it a kick in the guts and see what happens,’ Cheery Dan added.

  Yeah right, thought Jo, wincing at the idea of kicking a dying animal anywhere.

  ‘Well, I haven’t got a rifle anyway, so it wouldn’t have mattered much.’

  ‘You might want to get yerself one,’ Rob Starr said mildly, looking to Cheery Dan for agreement. ‘There’s a fair few wild dogs in them hills up the back of your place.’

  ‘Oh.’

  This was news to Jo. Wild dogs. Did he mean dingoes? And how did he already know where she lived?

  ‘They’re getting real bloody cheeky, too. Darren Ferrier lost a good bull calf last month–’ Cheery Dan was on the same assassinating wavelength as Starr, it seemed.

  ‘Well, don’t go shooting any dingoes with collars on, will you?’ Jo interrupted these dugai histrionics. ‘If it’s got a collar on it’s our yellow dog.’

  ‘Any yella dog comes onto my place it takes its chances.’ Starr replied, deadpan. He shook a cigarette out of its packet, and felt in his jeans pocket for a light.

  They weren’t long on diplomacy in Tin Wagon Road, then.

  Jo nodded slowly and pursed her lips, jutting them out as though for the life of her she was trying, and failing, to see eye to eye with him. If anyone shot Warrigal, she didn’t know what she’d do. Poison their waterholes, probably. Steal their children. It was at moments like this that she understood the old Goories refusing to walk behind the dugais when they travelled together in the forests. Just in case the temptation to sink an axe into their ignorant European skulls became altogether too overwhelming.

  Rob Starr angled out a cloud of smoke. It faded into nothingness as the first of the mourners’ cars began to drive away to the Middle B to get on the hops.

  ‘So which is your place then?’ Jo asked him. A neutral response. Don’t start anything at a funeral, she told herself. She heard Therese: Remember to breathe, Josephine.

  ‘Right at the end of the valley, where the ridge loops back on itself.’ He gestured north-east. ‘I back onto the World Heritage. Our places meet up near the old abandoned banana winch – the corners meet, or near enough. Old Jim Mooney’s kids used to walk through my place to get to the Pocket school, years ago.’

  ‘Run cattle, do you?’

  ‘Brahmins.’

  ‘Rightio, well, I better get cracking.’

  Cradling a bowl of Weetbix the next morning, Jo looked out to where a shiny Land Cruiser troopie had pulled up in her driveway. Daisy and Warrigal were sniffing around the wheels, lifting their legs and issuing a few tentative barks, still unsure of the rules on the new place. A fiftyish blond bloke sporting an akubra and permanent sunburn had his elbow sticking out of the Cruiser window. He was looking down at the dogs.

  ‘You’re right, mate, they won’t bite,’ Jo called from the yard. The man didn’t get out. He cast his gaze around at the ongoing work in the paddocks, the ute full of junk and the smoking rubbish pile, then came back to Jo.

  ‘G’day. You got a teenage girl here that rides horses?’ he asked, pushing his hat up to show more of a face that had drinker written all over it.

  ‘Yeah, my daughter.’ Jo took a sustaining sip of good sweet coffee, and kicked a dry dog turd off the lawn and into the dust under the house. ‘Why?’

  ‘The name’s Darren Ferrier. I live up on the last bend before Nudgel there, place with the stockyards. Anyway, me neighbour reckons he seen a girl riding my horses there, round about dawn the last couple of mornings. You know anything about that?’

  ‘Riding your horses?’ Jo said, astonished.

  ‘Yep. Bareback, he reckoned.’ Darren Ferrier looked a lot less than pleased.

  ‘I dunno ... she can ride, but–’ Jo stopped. Wouldn’t put it past the little bugger. ‘–we’ve got our own horses. I dunno why she’d go and do that.’

  ‘Well, it only started last week, when you moved in and Mooneys moved out.’

  ‘Are they quiet?’ Jo asked abruptly.

  ‘They’re broken in,’ he replied. ‘Blood horses, too. But that doesn’t mean I want them ridden. Specially not by some kid I don’t know. Put yerself in my position.’

  ‘Nah, well, I’ll have a word with her,’ Jo said slowly. ‘But I can’t see it really. No one else around here it could be?’

  Darren Ferrier shook his head. His expression said that he was pretty damn sure who had been mucking around with his stock, and he wanted something done about it, pronto.

  ‘Kids’ll be kids,’ he said, softening an iota. ‘But I can’t cop it, hey? If she fell off and got hurt, or whatever ... Or if my horses got hurt. Plus the whole trespassing thing.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Jo told him, ‘I’ll get onto her about it, don’t worry.’ The word trespassing out of a dugai mouth didn’t sit happily with her. But Ellen hadn’t left her in much of a position to begin an argument with Darren Ferrier, horseman, Longbeach smoker, and offended new neighbour. Jo paused, wondering how to get the truth out of Ellen.

  ‘You’ve been doing a fair bit of yakka here.’ Ferrier complimented. Understatement of the fucken year. Everywhere she looked was hard work done, or hard work still waiting to be finished.

  ‘There’s a bit more to do yet,’ Jo said drily. ‘But we’ll get there–’

  ‘It’s always the way on a farm, eh, it never ends. What was your name?’ Ferrier asked belatedly as he stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray of the Toyota. Jo gave him her name and took the hand he proffered through the window, shook it hard, the way whitefellas liked to.

  ‘Where are ya from, anyway?’ Why are you brown of skin and hair and eyes? he meant. Why don’t you look like
me?

  ‘Brisbane. I grew up in South Golden as a kid, though.’

  Ferrier was nonplussed, but Jo didn’t relent in the pause that followed.

  ‘Oh. Okay. Well, I’ll let this horse business slide, if you manage to knock it on the head.’ Ferrier advised her. He started up then reversed out past the hibiscus bushes onto the narrow bitumen of the road, he raised a forefinger in farewell, and roared off.

  The dogs erupted noisily – and suddenly old Granny Wotsername appeared from nowhere, cycling down Tin Wagon Road at a rate of knots. Her dark legs pumped up and down, peddling hard, nearing the front gate where the Goorie flag hung in dewy folds of red, black and yellow. The old girl would never see seventy again, and she wore the sort of clothes that said she shopped exclusively at St Vinnies and Lifeline. Her hair was a cap of short tight grey curls, and while Granny was solid around the middle she still had the slender limbs and the rounded features of a Bundjalung showing beneath a paisley headscarf. She rode a thirty-year-old sit-up-and-beg bike, and was dressed in a poor woman’s clothes, but nothing poor showed in Granny’s bearing: her back was straight, and her face took the world square on, saying quite clearly that she was nobody’s fool, thank you kindly.

  Jo grabbed two dog collars quickly, and brain-scrabbled for her name – Granny what now? Granny Nunn kept coming to mind but that wasn’t right.

  Granny’s eyes met Jo’s for a moment as the old woman drew level with the gateway. A pair of blue fairy-wrens that lived there had a lot to say about intruders so close to their bottlebrush tree, flitting up and down in brief alarmed parabolas and giving their high-pitched ratcheting call. Jo let go of Daisy just long enough to give a quick wave, but Granny had a fair pace going and she didn’t slow down. Nor did she wave. There was a brief formal nod from her, that was all. Barely even a nod, and then she was past the pine trees, halfway to where the road dipped for the creek crossing.

  Jo straightened up and scratched at her cheek, wondering whether to be offended. Had she just been snubbed? Hard to tell with somebody of that vintage. Jo knew that she’d been introduced to the old girl years ago at a function. Granny hadn’t been too friendly then, either, come to think. But to give her the benefit of the doubt, maybe the woman was just shy, or absentminded, or even half-blind, nodding to shadowy indistinguishable figures all day long.

  According to Chris there weren’t any other Goories living on the road, hadn’t been for twenty years or more. Still, Jo couldn’t help feeling affronted. Had the old lady failed, despite the flag hanging right there in front of her, to realise that Jo was a blackfella? Or was she just not very friendly, period? Social complications seemed to be multiplying by the minute. The cemetery had been a very simple place to live, Jo reflected. You knew where you stood, with the dead, since for all their failings they had that sterling virtue of consistency that others so frequently lacked.

  Jo drained her coffee cup and went inside to bang on Ellen’s door. Bloody teenagers. Just when you think you’ve got em sussed, they turn around and get you all over again. Riding the neighbour’s horses! Bareback! After a week!

  ‘We don’t let it bother us,’ Chris said later that week, stirring Tyagarah honey into her cup of tea. ‘The few rednecks on the road. Not when it’s this beautiful.’ She gestured at the African tulip tree flourishing beside Jo’s garden shed. Three king parrots, a male and two females, bobbed in their gorgeous bright crimson and green plumage. The male stood on a narrow branch in front of one of the females, dipping his head first to the left and then the right. It must have meant something to the hen-parrot, because after he completed the ritual, she let him nibble briefly at the back of her neck.

  Jo was struck afresh by her friend’s ability to be grateful to life when she had enormous buckets and shitloads of Nothing. Nothing except long black curly hair and money problems, that is. Chris lived in a caravan high on the ridge that overshadowed Tin Wagon Road, three creek crossings up among the rainforest. Leech country, and ticks. And a cranky white neighbour who regarded the long-established dirt track up to her home through his front paddock as a personal favour he was doing her and her father, allowing him to dictate everything from when Chris’s nephew could ride his motorbike to refusing them the use of the prettiest little bogie hole for fifty miles around.

  ‘So tell us about Rob Starr.’

  Jo related the conversation she had had at the funeral with her new neighbour. Chris looked pensively at Warrigal sprawled on the veranda.

  ‘Oh, Warrigal, ya better look out, lad.’

  ‘I couldn’t believe it, eh?’ Jo continued. ‘No beating around the bush, just if I see any yella dogs on my place I’ll shoot em. I felt like saying, yeah and if I see you in my paddock I’ll shoot you too, ya dugai prick ... Only I’d already said I don’t have a gun, so it would have lacked a certain something,’ she added lamely.

  ‘Geez, it don’t take long, eh? A week on the Road and already you want to shoot the whitefellas.’ Chris went off in a fit of laughter, and Jo joined in. They both knew Jo was about as likely to shoot Rob Starr as she was to run off and join the National Party.

  ‘Come to Bruns tomorrow night and see the full moon with us,’ Chris proposed.

  ‘It’s not full already!’ Jo said. She swivelled in her seat looking for the pale disc in the afternoon sky. No way was it full moon already.

  ‘Time flies when you’re having fun!’ Chris looked meaningfully at the paddock in front of them.

  Four sagging strands of rusty barbed wire fence framed a view of thistles, billygoat weed, dismantled sheets of corrugated iron, lantana thickets and other assorted old farm junk. Jo’s ute was parked at an angle to the house. Its tray overflowed with pieces of nail-riddled timber destined to go on the fire, and rusted metal junk for the skip that was yet to arrive from Bangalow. A doorless fridge stood squarely beside the twin tyre tracks to the front gate. Its open mouth gaped at the passers-by; on the grass around it were scattered a collection of various-sized fuel drums, big lumps of broken concrete with rusted wire sticking dangerously out of them, anonymous car parts, and what seemed like a never-ending supply of empty beer bottles found beneath the house, the trees, the grass, the car bodies – everywhere. A makeshift fire circle beyond the ute was smoking a billowing white cloud into the sky, telling them that the prevailing breeze was headed south-east towards Ocean Shores. The fire had been burning nonstop for the past week, and Jo wasn’t about to run out of fuel for it any time soon.

  Fun, Jo considered, picking at a long morse code of scabs on her left forearm. Was it fun? She decided that yes, despite her aching muscles, shredded hands and yawningly empty bank account, it actually was. Except that it was so much more than fun. This was her farm. Unbelievably, she and her brother Stevo had together bought back a patch of Bundjalung land, reclaimed a fragment of their country. It wasn’t so much fun as a deep, solid vein of primal satisfaction that flooded through her day and night whenever she gazed about her in wonder at the paddocks and trees and mountain. Dawn on the bottom dam made her catch her breath; the evening light along the ridge brought tears to her eyes. Her paddocks. Her trees. Her mountain.

  My country, right or wrong.

  ‘Well, it sure don’t feel like work,’ she said. ‘Not on your own land.’ Chris nodded in agreement, and Jo continued.

  ‘I’m cleaning this endless shit up for us mob. Making somewhere for me and Ellen, and Stevo when he comes home – and Kym and Jase and the boys eventually, I hope. Get the place in order and look after it the right way. Keep the old people happy.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s right. You’re doing it for the family. And the old people. And you’re a workaholic,’ Chris teased.

  ‘And I’m a workaholic,’ Jo agreed cheerfully. Then made a snarling face to tell Chris that she was getting a bit too bloody cheeky. ‘Aaagh, you’re just jealous cos you’re never gonna be able to buy back any Gadigal land,’ Jo told her.

  Chris laughed. ‘God, would I want to? All the womba dugai down the
re – anyways, I’m officially Bundjalung now. Aunty Sally told me at Wollumbin Dreaming that they’re claiming me. I’ve been here long enough now after thirty years, she reckons. So how about you knock off busting ya hole and come down to Bruns?’

  ‘Can’t, tidda,’ said Jo. ‘Can’t get the horses here till I replace that fucking horrible excuse for a fence. Congratulations on joining the tribe, though.’

  ‘Ah, the work’ll still be here next week. Full moon won’t,’ Chris urged.

  ‘Christ. Alright ... what time?’

  ‘I thought head down just before black o’clock hey, and watch the sunset at the rock wall.’

  ‘Yeah, orright. Pick us up on the way through.’ They stood and Jo stretched a weary, weary back. There were a couple more hours of daylight, and several more decades of Mooney junk to be chucked, stored, burned or recycled. She stuck her hat on as they went outside. Once more into the breach, dear friends. Then a sudden thought occurred to her as Chris was leaving.

  ‘Hey, who’s that old aunty round here who rides a pushie? I can’t think of her name.’

  ‘Might be old Granny Nurrung,’ Chris said, after a moment’s thought. ‘Sam’s Nanna. She’s got a treadly that she rides to church in Ocean Shores.’ Ah, that’s it, breathed Jo as the name brought back a flood of vaguely unpleasant memories. Unsmiling Granny Nurrung, she now recalled, had that extremely upright back because the Good Lord Jesus was walking approvingly by her side with every step she took.