Sea Eagle Dreaming

Non-Fiction
Location – Milingimbi, Australia
Written – June 2009
[This piece was published in 'Overland' Magazine, Issue 197 in November 2009. It was the first piece I had published in a magazine. I tried to keep the writing as simple as possible, almost like a children's story. I did this in an attempt to capture the feel of the place. To read it again makes me nostalgic for Milingimbi...]

The city went bad, so we moved to Arnhem Land.

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Our house is on stilts. I climbed the stairs of our new home, and put my hand on something that moved. I looked down to see a green tree frog hopping off the hand rail.

●

I sat by the window with a map of the island. I like maps. Especially maps without much on them. Sparse contours, broken lines of dots.

Amy thinks it’s odd that I can spend an hour poring over patchy folds of colour. But my eyes don’t just see the brown and green and blue. They see possibilities. The spaces are alive.

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In the afternoon the rain comes.

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Amy cut her foot in the ocean. She stepped on an oyster bed. The wound became infected, and made it painful for her to walk. I told her to put on her shoes, to keep the wound clean. She wore thongs. The wound swelled up red, with a tiny white blister. I told her to go to the clinic. She said she’d bathe it in the sea-water instead. We walked back to the ocean. She dipped her foot in the water and screamed. I rushed to look at her foot. A thread of blood washed away. The blister had burst, and a lone maggot crawled out.

●

The kids were fascinated by Amy’s sunscreen. She explained what it’s for.

“Black skin not get burnt,” one girl replied thoughtfully. “Because it’s healthier. What your homeland?”

“Melbourne.”

“Yaka, your homeland. Milingimbi? Maningrida? Elcho? ....Darwin?”

Most of the kids have never been to Darwin. Some have never left the island.

“I don’t know. We live here now...”

“What your skin name?”

“Gutjan.” Amy says.

“I don’t know mine,” I said. “I haven’t been adopted.”

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The orphan of Milingimbi.

●

The community is called Milingimbi. The island is called Yurrwi.

When the tide is highest, two-thirds of the island is submerged, and isn’t called anything.

●

We share our house with frogs that appear after rain. With spiders that live on the balcony, one with a furry egg-sack suspended in web. With geckos, I leave the outside light on and it attracts their dinner. With the snakes in our backyard, chasing frogs in the dark. With the giant cockroaches that scuttle across the kitchen floor at night, and take flight when you try to catch them. With ants alert to any spilt crumb or drop of cordial, you get used to them crawling over your legs while you sleep. With the birds that live in our backyard jungle, and with the dragonflies that herald the outback spring.

●

After a month we watched television for the first time. We were minding the house of a friend. He has a satellite dish. We flicked the TV on and saw Japanese businessmen. They were throwing beans off a balcony, praying for the economy to improve. I turned the TV off.

●

We walked out onto the mud flats as the sun set. The mud is baked hard. We spread our arms to the breeze as the air cooled. Amy laid flat on her back, with a sigh.

“Lay down,” she said. “The earth is still warm.”

We laid there looking at the sky. Crows hovered overhead. They made slow passes with a pffft pffft pffft of their wings, their heads darting about with quick eyes. Watching us. I sat up. Twenty crows were milling about, pacing the mud flats. I stood and they took flight, retreating to the mangroves.

“Hey Amy. Lay still a moment. I wanna test something.”

We laid back and waited. The crows returned. Making their watchful passes with the pffft pffft pffft of their wings, only metres overhead. They gathered around us again.

“They’re waiting for us to die,” I said. “They want our eyes.”

●

The rain stopped and the fresh air carried its scent. Black cockatoos screeched overhead. We passed a grove of pandanus, palm trees bulging with coconuts. Blue-winged kookaburras are flashes of colour in the canopy. The sound of insects was all around us.

“This place makes sense,” I said.

●

Simplicity.

●

The church is a relic. The windows are broken, the door swings open, and there’s dust on the uneven rocky floor. The Milingimbi community was started by Methodist missionaries, in the 1920’s. But they’re not here anymore. The only visible remnants are the broken church and the colourful missionary dresses worn by the women.

A Yolngu boy ran up to us.

“Give me lollie and I tell you I love Jee-bus,” he said.

●

There’s a sign in the only shop on the island, that reads:

“Children Must Wear Clothes In The ALPA! No Children Without Clothes Will Be Served In This Store!”

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Amy had to prepare her class for a standardised test. Every student in the Northern Territory had to sit for it. Her class wasn’t ready. She sat with one boy and tried to explain the hieroglyphics of text. It was the story of a kid who got chocolate cake on his shirt. The chocolate stain ruined his day. Amy thought the boy understood every word of the story. The boy waited patiently, and after some time Amy asked a question to see if he followed. There was a long pause.

“Miss,” he said, in his small voice. “I want to go hunting... Crab. Fish...”

●

We started with mussels. The women gather them at low tide, on the rocks off Top Camp. You throw them in the fire. When the shells pop open they’re ready. The ALPA shop was closed for a long weekend, and it gave us a good excuse to go hunting. The mussels are hard to find. Most of the shells are empty. Some looked intact, but with a tap we found them full of sloppy mud, and seawater.

Kids were fishing with hand-reels. They asked what we were looking for, I showed them the empty mussel shells. A boy resolved to help us. As I picked about in the sand, occasionally coming up with one, he’d return to present me with double-handfulls of them. Silently. The boy was about five years old. After some time, he showed me how. You overturn the rocks, and pick about in the sand underneath with a knife, or spoon. He handed me a knife and I started to find them.

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You make spears from the branches of a certain tree. I don’t know its name. Johnny showed me the one. It grows in the sand by the mangroves. He took the axe and disappeared into the leaves. When he found the right branch he chopped it at the base, and passed it to me. It must have been five metres long. We went back to the fire and he laid the branch in the coals. Turning it so it wouldn’t burn. When he’d heated the length of the stick he peeled the bark back, to the smooth wood underneath.

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There are cycads in the bush. Plants that have been around since the time of the dinosaurs. The Yolngu take the nuts from the plant and use it to make a sort of bread. The cycad bread keeps for a long time. They used to wrap it, and take it with them on overland journeys. But the nuts must be prepared properly. They’re poisonous, and if you don’t prepare them properly then you die.

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In the night there are stars.

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I always avoided the water. Then I learnt to fish with nets.

Paul attached a wooden pole to both ends of the long net. Five of us took up a length of it into our hands. Paul ventured out first, into the water and mangroves. There was a channel in the water, and I slipped into the brown. Up to my waist. We held the net up above our heads so it wouldn’t get snagged on the submerged logs. The water is an unknown language. As I was up to my chest, standing there in the water, one of the Yolgnu men saw his kids splashing at the water’s edge, and waved them away.

“Yaka! Bäru. Bäru.” He said.

I understand that much.

“No! Crocodiles. Crocodiles.”

●

The days are hot. Tamarind trees lend us their shade.

The Macassans brought them here. Yolngu used to trade with the Macassans, who came from what is now called Indonesia. The Macassans would live in Arnhem Land for several months of the year.

The Yolngu had a intricate system of trade with the Macassans, and with tribes as far away as Central Australia. Shortly after Federation, in 1901, the government introduced steep licensing fees for the Macassans, who’d gathered the trepang sea-cucumber from the shores of Arnhem Land for hundreds of years. In 1906 they were prohibited from entering Australian waters at all. The Macassans stopped coming. The Yolngu trade networks were destroyed.

Most people would say the Macassans brought the tamarind trees here for the tamarind fruit. But maybe it was also for the shade. The shade remains.

●

The trick to making a spear is in getting it straight. Paul saw the bend in my spear and showed me what to do. You put the bend in the hot coals. Turning, turning so it won’t burn. When the wood was soft he put the spear in the fork of a tree, and leaned on it. Pushing on the bend. The trick, he said, is to push hard enough so that the bend straightens. If you push too hard the gara will break.

At work, Paul told me he went fishing on his lunch break. He keeps his spears out the back of the storeroom. He showed me. Elegant, perfect. My gara is still bent. When the spear is finished, you can hunt turtle, and stingray.

●

The kids splash about in the Arafura Sea. They called to us. One boy rushed over, holding something in his hand. It’s a baby turtle. He handed it to me. It fitted on my palm. It’s beautiful, with shades of blue and gray. I thought it was alive. There’s more than one, the kids seem to be collecting them. A dog grabbed one of the baby turtles in its mouth and the kids yelled at it, “Sha! Sha!” Brandishing sticks like spears. Amy managed to retrieve it. By then we could see that the turtles were all dead.

We saw Pete, further up the beach. He was trying to fix the engine of his boat. Last night, some of his adopted Yolngu family tied up his boat too close to the waterline. When the tide came in his boat sank, wrecking the engine. The boat was filled with hundreds of turtle eggs they’d gathered that afternoon. The sea brought in the tide of broken shells and dead baby turtles.

●

Pete is balanda, like us. A whitefella. Him and his wife got divorced, a long time ago. So he started walking. He walked for four years, and he ended up here.

The other day he said he’d just been shipwrecked on Mooroongga Island. Him and nine members of his Yolngu family were fishing in a boat when the engine died.

“That must have been scary,” I said.

“Nah. Best time of my life, mate. We slept on the sand. Ate fish. Crab. Turtle eggs. After five days someone rang for a charter plane to bring us back.”

●

The bush south of Bottom Camp is out of bounds to balanda. We don’t go there.

●

Otis looks like a wise man. He’s fifty, with a full white beard, black face, and a tubby belly. He giggles easily. Every time I see him he has his tiny grandson on his shoulders. He calls his grandson “my father.”

His father jumps off his shoulders and totters about. When he wanders too far Otis pitches a little shell or two at him and calls him back. Otis’s father is two years old, his name is Jim. He’s only recently been called by his Yolngu name again, as someone with that name died. Otis said Jim loves to dance to the yidaki, the didgeridoo. He picked up a piece of PVC pipe washed up on the shore, and played it like the yidaki. But Jim was shy to dance in front of us. He climbed back onto Otis’s shoulders.

●

There’s wreckage in the undergrowth near the airfield. The tangled remains of aeroplanes. They might be Australian Spitfires, or Japanese Zekes.

Milingimbi was bombed by the Japanese during World War II. There were dogfights above the island. The R.A.A.F made the airfield during the war, it was used to refuel planes.

A Yolgnu woman tells me that up the north of the island you can still find fortifications and fuel dumps left over by the air force. I went looking for them. I found nothing. The woolybutt, the pandanus, the cycads, and the stringybark forests gave me no clues. The kookaburras laughed at me. I went home.

●

Milingimbi is a dry community. I got thirsty, so I flew to Darwin for a beer.

I entered the Frogshollow backpackers to foreign grins. A world of people laid back in deck chairs, swilling bourbon, a group of Germans crouched by the pool smoking a joint. Swedes and Southern European women swanning about the pool in bikinis and tanned skin.

I rushed around the CBD, trying to get things done.

As I walked back to the hostel, drunk, I saw a pair of Yolngu women I recognised. They called out hello. Their serene, sober eyes reminded me.

“Tom. What you doing?”

“Walking. You?”

“Visiting family.”

“When are you going home?”

“Thursday.”

●

‘My Island Home,’ by the Warumpi Band, wasn’t written as an ode to Australia. The song pines for Elcho Island, in Arnhem Land.

●

On the morning of Easter Sunday we got up before dawn. There were three crosses facing the Arafura Sea. A group of older Yolngu stood facing the rising sun. One bloke gently strummed a battered acoustic as they sang hymns in English:

“He rose again/ he rose again.”

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The sun sets over the bush. The sun rises over the Arafura sea.

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A mob from Elcho came for Easter. They had a huge turtle. Miyapunu. The men cut it up on the sand. They had long knives. With the bottom half of the shell removed, they carved the flesh into large chunks, that were placed to one side. Each part was set into a different pile, and some into tins. Nothing wasted. They were getting ready to cook it up. I spoke with an older bloke. He handed me a bit of raw turtle meat to taste.

After cutting up the turtle the women place the chunks of meat onto hot coals, and atop the meat add a layer of a particular type of branch. The bloke said the leaves make the meat taste good. Then they put the empty top half of the shell over that, and cover the lot with a layer of sand. When the oven was complete they started to wander away, while it cooked.

I asked the bloke, “how long do you cook it for?”

“Oh, one hour, one-half hours. Half-hour. Two hours - something like that.”

●

Twenty people eat in the sand.

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I walk home on my lunch break. There’s a shortcut, a 4WD track across the patch of grassland between the ALPA shop and our place. It’s a narrow track, almost obscured by the long grass that rises to waist-height on either side. I keep a watchful eye out for snakes. As I walk, with the sound of chirping insects almost deafening, I sweat in the air. The air is warm and moist, like breath. I can feel it coming from the green. The air of the grass, and the trees, breathing.

●

Everything has its place, to the Yolngu. Every person, every animal, every fish, every plant, every object. Everything that it in this world, and everything that is not. That’s why balanda are adopted into Yolngu families. Then your place is known, and understood.

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While fishing we saw a sea eagle. It’d spotted the fish we’d sat on the mud of the mangroves. The eagle circled, and then left with a broad stroke of its wings.

●

We threw a few fish in the coals. After eating the mullet, Jack asked our skin names. Amy said she’s Gutjan, a subgroup of the Yirritja.

“I haven’t been adopted,” I said.

“You are Dhuwa,” Jack said. “Your wife Yirritja, you must be Dhuwa.” He asked Amy who adopted her. Jack thought about it, then said to me, “your skin name Wämut.”

My heart beat warmth through my body. As it always does. But you only notice it sometimes.

“Wämut,” he repeated. “Your totem is sea eagle. Damala. Your dreaming is sea eagle. Jabiru. Barramundi. You cannot harm these things, you must protect them. Every skin name protects their dreaming. This way everything is protected.”

I’m not an orphan. I never was.

Sea eagle dreaming.

●

We sleep with just a sheet to cover us. The Wet is almost over, and in the last week I’ve felt a tiny chill. It’s only a drop of a degree or two. But the weather is steady from one day to the next. When it’s the same temperature every night you notice that one or two degrees.

In the morning, I can tell the time by the temperature. You don’t need a clock. The heat climbs evenly, and the feel of it on your bare skin will tell you if you’ve slept in.

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I don’t like the word ‘Paradise.’ Paradise is just in your head.

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In the morning, Poppy the dog waits for me on the porch.