jarde (land: Gununa)
Thuwathu created vast valleys, winding waterways and scattered landscapes. His body slithered through Country and imprinted his shape into the skin of the land. Moving through time, his presence is still embedded within rock and soul. As Ancestral Being, he is part of every Lardil person, from limb to organ, he sustains life.
Latje Latje Country (Mildura)
A little Lardil girl and her brother grow up along the winding river on Latje Latje Country and underneath the canopies of dust-coated eucalyptus. They grow up faster than most kids do in a town festering in generational racism and drugs. But on good days, they fish on the soft green slow-moving river, underneath the cool shade of the old gums they sit with aunties and uncles and breathe in the hot dirt smell.
This town is dry and beautiful and painful. These kids grew up in a crumbling house with holes in the floors and busted leaking pipes. Despite this, they stitched the house together with love.
Her mother would cook big feeds out of leftovers they had in the fridge and the coins they found under the couch cushions. This little girl grew up in a house that held heavy melancholic memories, leaving the girl with invisible scars beneath her brown skin.
Her brother held the world on his shoulders as he walked through the streets of this bitter small town with a target on his Warrior's back. He walked home in the inky black of night and found himself in a hospital bed, battered and bruised from hateful hands. The girl was awoken in the middle of the night by her scared mother, with shaking hands and the shiny whites of her eyes bright and watery. The fear she felt for him stayed with her after that night.
bidngen (woman)
The strength of her great grandmother, grandmother and mother runs through her veins. Great grandmother Ida was the last tie to Gununa, her Ancestral land. Ida was a cultural leader, a speaker of Old Lardil and a warrior woman who had formidable skills with the nulla nulla. The girl never met her great grandmother, but she feels like she knows her in her mothers eyes and in her lightness of spirit.
The only memory this girl has of her grandmother is of her laying in her hospital bed with a tube snaking itself from her mouth to the beeping machine in the dusty corner of the room. Her skin was stark black against the cotton white sheets and her curly hair lay like a halo upon her pillow. Her shallow breaths cut through the silence of the ward.
burdal (song)
A digital collage made by the writer, called 'our story out here'. Source: Supplied
One day the girl picked up a violin and let the stories of her people pour from her fingers into steel strings. The girl played to her Ancestors to tell them she’s here and to tell them she loves them. She plays to the angry ocean tides and the waterways to soothe them and vibrate the sunburnt land.
kangka reman (word)
This girl devoured books one after the other. No book was safe from her as she flipped page after page. The stories consumed her so much she often believed she lived in those worlds. She believed in the characters who she felt were her papered kin.
She kept countless journals full of pictures, scraps of writing, unfinished stories and thoughts of a small child trying to make sense of what was happening to her and around her. As she read, she felt the scars inside her softly close over.
thuwara (flight)
She visited the rest of her family every holiday by air and sky. She feels she’s been living in two worlds separated by clouds, both magical and fleeting.
Nanna always read fairy tales to her and encouraged her imagination to leap and soar, as it so often did. Her Nan taught her how to knit and complete Sudoku’s in the crinkled folds of the morning newspaper. The girl sat with her Nanna enjoying apricot jam, toast and tea in the filtered light of a new day.
She and her Nanna would feed rosellas in the shadows of the Wurundjeri mountainsides. Nanna would warn the little girl about the cockatoos and their sharp claws, but they’d always seem to find her and latch onto her outstretched palms. The girls' screams echoed into the slopes of the mountains as the cockatoos screech and fly into the mist.
ngaltha (anger)
The girl cleans tables at her cafe job. Wiping, mopping, smiling and serving. Her first individual experience of racism left her shaky, sweaty and humiliated. Sitting alone in the laneway she breathes in and out, trying to filter out “Good to see an Aboriginal working for once” ringing in her ears. His leering eyes and the smirk infuriates her, but she doesn’t know how to react or what to do. She wasn’t prepared for the surge of anger that turned into frustrated tears.
warrka (sun)
The girl walks home from highschool in the stagnant heat on a fifty degree day, with her violin strapped to her sweat-soaked back. Fatigue dripped between her brows and her shoulder blades, watching as her peers drove home in air-conditioned cars.
She dragged her feet on hot concrete as she walked the long way home to the crumbling house. Her footsteps in time like waves against the shoreline.
yula (tide)
mela (tide: high, of great duration)
dulmarr mela (tide: medium high)
melabul (tide: slowly receding)
The memories are still locked behind the locked doors of her fading mind, for reasons she can't really explain. Except she trusts that someday she will be able to find the keys to open the doors and learn to hold herself with love and care.
This young woman still loves to walk in the heat of the day. The pain and love of her childhood mingle together. Tangled like her childhood sewing box she found last summer. Its dusty contents a time capsule of her childhood; stickers, bookmarks, shells and old violin strings.
The writer in her hometown of Mildura. Source: Supplied
As she sits on Wurundjeri Country she writes and time slides shadows along the swaying grass. Her whole life has been a push and pull between her muddled memories and her reality. This young woman writes along the snaking spine of the Maribyrnong and thinks of how waterways always return home; to salt and sea.
She thinks of how she’ll follow the yula and warrka back to her jarde. She thinks about returning back to the scrub and the river of Latje Latje Country where home beats as steadily as her bulja (heart).
This story is the joint runner up of the 2021 SBS Emerging Writers' Competition, chosen from nearly 4000 entries on the topic of 'Between Two Worlds'.
