Ostriches

When my son started school, he learned our nation’s anthem by singing it each week at assembly. One night, early in first term, I heard him in the bath, in full voice, ‘Australians all are ostriches, for we are young and free!’ I don’t know how he squared off the logic of the line, which he sang with conviction, but a national anthem that tries to get away with ‘girt’ is probably already in need of help, and I didn’t correct him.

I do not write opinion generally, for there is already enough of everything out in the big world, and it’s possible that as a writer, I keep my head in the sand. A few weeks ago, a spokesperson for the campaign opposed to giving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people a voice said colonisation had been good for Indigenous Australians. I think running water and houses were mentioned. Many writers countered this view and the debate went on for several days in several outlets with many different opinions and thoughts. I read them. Mention was made of the Stolen Generations, which is a shorthand name we often use because at one level we know what it means. Indigenous children were taken from their families by the state, which was specifically empowered to do so, because it was felt to be better for the children than remaining with their families and culture.

Those who’ve read my book For a Girl know I am a mother who grieves a lost child, a girl I named Ruth and relinquished for adoption when I was a teenager. Ruth was born in a relationship where power was unequal, in a culture and nation that wanted it that way, and she remains in my heart in a kind of twilight, affecting everything I do. The cost to me and my family of the decision I made has been lifelong, and I tell you this not so I can beat my chest but so that if you don’t understand it already, you will know that when children are gone even in this way, given away by someone with too little agency or too young to know better, it’s like dropping a nuclear bomb in a family. The radiation is worst at the centre of the blast, and it reaches out from there, harming everyone it touches.

Ruth was not taken the way Indigenous children were taken from their families, in a century of forced removal we are still in, and I cannot imagine enduring such a holocaust. One in five Indigenous Australians over fifty years of age are Stolen Generations survivors, the Australian Institute for Health and Welfare tells us. We also know, from the Institute’s research, that their health and welfare outcomes—and the health and welfare outcomes of their families—are poorer on every metric than Indigenous Australians who were not taken from their families.

If there had been a way to ask Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people ahead of time if they wanted their children taken from them, we don’t know what the answer would have been, but I can’t help thinking they would have said no. The Uluru statement from the heart was written after the longest consultation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, and it was read to us on their behalf with a poet’s gift by Professor Megan Davis, who has dedicated her life to preventing harm to children. It is a profound statement that can speak to your heart in the way some things can, but even if it doesn’t, it is worth listening to for its use of words. The statement asks for exactly what might have made a difference to the stolen generations of children and their families. It asks for a voice, which is the perfect word for a body or committee that can enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to participate in decisions about their lives and their children’s lives. They will have a voice. It asks for a permanent voice, and in Australia this means enshrining the voice in the constitution, so that wicked or incompetent governments on both sides can’t take it away. It is a humble request, wise beyond imagining, from people who have generations of suffering to contend with.

Uncle Fred Conway, a ranger over the country now called Carnarvon Gorge National Park in western Queensland, was asked at a smoking ceremony I attended a couple of years back why the gorge is called Carnarvon and not its traditional name. The questioner added proudly that in her state of Victoria, where things are better, places are being renamed. Uncle Fred looked at the questioner with eyes as clear as the water out there. He grew up at Woorabinda mission, he said gently, as he walked across the circle and put his arm around me, and if he did this, put his arm around a white woman, he’d be locked up. He’d lost his language, he said. He wanted the words but they weren’t there because as a child at the mission he was forbidden from speaking them. One of his friends had language. It was a great sadness to Uncle Fred not to have the words. The gorge is a sacred place, Uncle Fred went on, and we are getting better, he said.

So, here we are, ostriches all, at our moment in the time of getting better, perhaps the only one for the next century of living together, young and birdlike and free in our girt land. I already voted yes.

Writing from the Bibbulmun Track

Despair and hope both

The forest is oddly quiet at first, all the way from Kalamunda in the Perth hills where the track starts, to Collie, over three hundred kilometres south. You wonder if winter is to blame—birds are quieter in the winter, aren’t they?—but the blackened trunks and epicormic growth of eucalypts in distress and the thriving weeds in the understory tell that other story, the one all Australia tells now, of fires both wild and planned, of millions of animals perishing. There’s a telephone number to call if you find an injured animal, although there are no injured animals; there are hardly any animals at all.

You have been told that volunteers help maintain the Bibbulmun track, including the forty-nine campsites with their three-sided sleeping shelters. One evening, early on in the hike, the weather turning foul, you opt for the shelter instead of your tent. You are treated to a run of storms, with lightning followed immediately by thunder, and rain then hail that crashes onto the roof and sounds like many billiard balls dropped onto tile. Shelter is a good word for what you experience, and you think of those volunteers and the work they do. Not long after, you meet a volunteer, at a riverside campsite, doing a routine maintenance check. The day before, he tells you, he fixed a table with a lean at another campsite. You know that table, you exclaim; your stove wouldn’t work properly due to the lean. Next time it will, he says, and you both laugh. You are re-reading The Lord of the Rings on this hike and you want to tell him that the volunteers would be the hobbits and heroes of this story but you fear something might be lost in translation so you don’t say anything.

The trees

The trees, all the way from Balingup to Denmark, over five hundred kilometres, ask you over and over to crane your neck and try to take them in. They are the biggest trees you have ever seen other than the Californian redwoods. They are like old friends and yet not friends at all, for you can probably only make friends with trees of one forest in a lifetime and yours is near Binna Burra in Lamington National Park, among Antarctic beeches, not here. Still, you crane your neck and learn their names, karri and tingle. There are birds now, and animals you’ve never seen before, and you do your best to learn their names too. You learn that tingle trees are Gondwana trees, just like Antarctic beeches. Once you know even a little, you feel more at home.

The sea

The sea appears one day and ignores you, despite your awe. You walk along cliffs and down steps to beaches to dive into blue-green water when the sun shines. You take a canoe across one inlet, as if you know how to do that, and walk across another with your pants rolled up as high as they’ll go and your boots around your neck.

Coffee etc.

The Wagon in Collie, the Shed in Balingup, the brand new Just Lofti in Pemberton, Ravens in Denmark and Naked Bean in Albany, make lifechanging coffee, and Garden Eats in Dwellingup adds cake with bitter cherry and sweet cardamom you wish you’d bought a second and third piece of for later. The Karri Country Good Food store in Northcliffe and A2 in Balingup welcome you to buy only the small amounts of things a hiker needs, teeny bags of nuts and dried fruit and olive oil and soap and chocolate. Crossings bakery in Pemberton offers the apple pie you’d do the hike again for, and the Green Pantry in Denmark stocks a lembas-like fruit and nut bread from Bred in Albany that sustains you for the final days.

The toasted sandwich from the Cape Café at Cosy Corner may be the best meal you’ll ever eat.

Boots or shoes, wet or dry

It’s the angst-ridden, ire-raising debate among hikers, many of whom these days swear by shoes and celebrate wet feet by wading the puddled track and through the rain. Not you. You wear rain pants over the heavy boots you swap out for Crocs in those long, deep puddles so the boots stay dry, you tell others, smugly. On the second-to-last day a squall turns into a dump of rain that pours water down your boots before you can get your rain pants on and you learn that even wet boots are all right.

Walkers are happy

With wet or dry feet, walkers may be happier than people who don’t walk, the Reids, Amanda and Julian, Tristy and Angela, and Lance and Jo, trail companions you could never have planned for who make the trail so much better. And Jim, your allocated Bibbulmun volunteer and a walker, who makes funny jokes about rats and bats. It is a thesis worth testing, the walker happiness thesis, because if it proves correct we should all just walk.

The whole may be more than the sum of the parts

You told yourself, before you left home, that a hike of a thousand kilometres is just like four hikes of two hundred and fifty kilometres and you have done one of those. It proves true, although you also start to see that the whole may be more than the sum of the parts. In the final days, you wonder what you’ve learned. You think you haven’t really learned anything. The Zen proverb quoted by a friend helps. ‘Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.’

When you finish, part of you wants to turn around and walk back, and not just for the apple pie. There was also the toasted sandwich.

Thirteen reasons why you should do the Carnarvon Great Walk and also hope

1. The dead animals on the road on the way in (which might not, at first glance, fit under hope as a title; bear with me). You tell yourself the kangaroos and possums are not as sad as the wombat and echidna. You are prioritising by species. There’s a fox, hard to prioritise, and a cow, same, and dark blood on the tarmac in places. You can’t afford to be self-righteous, however much you might like to. You killed a wallaby last year, driving to a national park at night because it suited your schedule.

2. Ranger Sheridan Lawton and Uncle Fred Conway, who show you how to be a better human by being better humans, offering, on the morning you are setting out, a smoking ceremony to mark the start of NAIDOC week for which the theme is heal country, heal our nation. The ceremony can cleanse away bad spirits, Uncle Fred says. Someone asks why the Bidjara and Karingbal peoples who own the land are not prominently named near the park entry as they might be in southern states. Uncle Fred grew up at Woorabinda Aboriginal Reserve, he says softly. ‘If I put my arm around a woman,’ he says, coming over and putting his arm around you, ‘I’d be locked up for two years.’ He wasn’t allowed to speak his own language. ‘I would like very much to have my language, but I don’t,’ he says. As for ownership of the gorge, Uncle Fred says, a special place, ‘I hope one day…’ You wonder how he can hope at all, given what he’s put up with. The sandalwood smoke is sweet.

3. The walk that first day through the gorge, which takes you into itself, stencil art handprints that are older than the Pyramids and ten times older than Jesus.

4. Two children you meet at the first campsite at Big Bend, twelve-year-old Jarrah humming the riff of a Star Wars theme, later blending it into the ancient cycad forest seamlessly, and nine-year-old Merrin, full of wry humour, who get up every morning to walk with their parents Jodi and Josh with not one complaint, not in your hearing anyway, a total eighty-five up-and-down kilometres over six days.

5. The trail for humans—not the one for feral pigs and kangaroos—through long grass and burned forest, marked by occasional orange arrows, of which there are just enough to help you decide you are so skilled with map and compass you could lead Bear Grylls out of trouble. You are grateful for head ranger Lindie Pasma who decided where to put the orange arrows and was teary at the smoking ceremony.

6. The forest on the Consuelo tableland, those giant mahogany trees—Eucalyptus laevopenia— coming to you as the old friends trees sometimes are. You sit with them a while and make tea.

7. The walking, one foot after the other, the walking, which makes sense when nothing else does, the walking, for which you may not require hope but which may slowly build hope back.

8. The sleeps, from first dark to first light in the freezing cold, and the shooting star at the moment you put your head out of the tent one midnight.

9. The last campsite, on top of the entire world, a sunset one day and sunrise the next, as if life could always be lived.

10. A wedge-tailed eagle, a king parrot, a pale-faced rosella, a currawong and kookaburras, a greater glider you hear chattering but do not see, and the calls of owls, a powerful, a barking and a boobook, for whom a mouse plague is not all bad.

11. Another boobook, this one’s eyes pecked out by noisy miner birds (perhaps the second worst species) that Uncle Fred picks up and puts under a tree near the visitor centre. ‘If he’s still there tomorrow, I’ll take him home,’ Uncle Fred says.  

12. The platypus you see before dawn on the last day, which duck-dives, surely a post-hope move, that duck dive, the sort of move Buddha might have made, after the bodhi tree, enlightened.

13. Gurrumul’s Djarimirri Child of the Rainbow playing on the car stereo on the road out, the first rays of sun on the gorge, the cows chewing and the kangaroos bounding over yellow grass, an eagle guarding something dead on the side of the road, and you driving slowly enough to keep it all alive for as long as you can.