This is the runner up of the inaugural SBS Emerging Writers' Competition, chosen from more than 2000 entries on the topic of 'Growing up in diverse Australia'.
Dot, dot, dot the beige liquid over my brow and across my nose. Work quickly, it will soon dry down to a powder. Look into the eyes of the woman applying it. They’re coloured by river water. The water that fills the Maranoa and changes colour with her moods. Today they’re the yellow/green/brown of the river at dusk when the sunlight, spread out by the gum leaves, sinks into its muddy depths.
They’re still like the river at day’s end when a pregnant quiet descends. Holding the beginnings of nocturnal feasting. Waiting for the undercurrent of animal calls and insect scurrying to grow louder as the sun slips down to sleep below the treeline.
The sun is fully awake here in my bathroom. It’s streaming through the open window to reflect back at me from every surface. I want to shield my eyes. Maybe draw the blinds and go back to bed. But the woman won’t let me. She draws up her chin and rolls back her shoulders so that I’ll do the same. Many people fought to get you where you are today. Absence or silence would be a betrayal. Yellow/green/brown eyes bore into mine. Do it for the girl.
Last night,
Mum calls me to kill time on her way home from work. I sit on my bed ready to get the latest gossip from back home. As she drives, I hear every noise. The tick, tick, tick of the indicators and the whoosh of other cars.
The girl died by suicide Mum tells me.
‘But she must’ve been only 16’ I say. My sister’s age.
‘She was 15,’ Mum sighs, ‘and she was so loved.’
Tick, tick, tick. My knees go funny and the floor rushes up to hit my backside.
The girl died by suicide last year inside her prestigious private school. Seventeen years old and deeply loved. The same school my sister left when the bullying became unbearable.
The girl is my sister, who begs to stay home.
‘I hated it too bub just like you,’ I say, ‘but you have to go.’
She has thick ropey scars on her forearm. Just like me.
Mum hangs up. Minutes pass. I’m still sitting on the floor locking and unlocking my phone screen. I’d stopped myself from watching the videos all night. I knew I shouldn’t, they’d make me sick. But the images played over and over in my mind any way.
Little boys tied up and tear gassed.
The sickening crack.
‘Please I can’t breathe.’
What’s the point of protecting my headspace now? Death and violence in all their forms press in close to my body. So do the walls of my room. Pulling the blankets off my bed to cover me, the woman says, close your eyes. You have uni tomorrow. I ignore her. Just once, then I’ll be able to sleep.
Earlier that day
I slump into the lecture theatre late. Make sure not to sit next to anyone who’d talk to me. The woman is calling me but I ignore her.
Thank f##k, the lecturer is Aboriginal. She starts with the ‘this is me, this is my mob’ introduction. And I release the unease from my shoulders.
‘I might not look how you expect an Aboriginal person to look but that doesn’t make me any less blak,’ she says.
I side glance at the other students, no visible reactions. I chastise myself for always assuming the worst.
She plays a video of Alison Whitaker reciting her poem ‘A Love Like Dorothea’s’. Her words beautiful, true, subversive. Over beautiful sweeping shots of rivers, coasts and desert. I lean forward on the cool, hard desk. A panning shot of a coastal road. Then comes those images. Videos I promised myself I’d never watch again. A little boy being pushed to the ground by three big corrections officers. Cutting before the part where they forcibly strip him naked. Followed by a boy with a hood over his head. Tied by wrists, ankles, neck to a chair that looks like a medieval torture device.
The woman’s face pops up on my iPad just when I need her. Muddy eyes lock in my gaze. Look at me, she says, it’ll be over soon. Don’t look at it. Chew on your tears before they make it to your face.
Last week
I wasn’t much better. In a tutorial room where two of the walls are made of windows. One, to my left looks out over trees and a carpark. The other, to my right, looks back into the hallway. I’m the oldest person in this room by a long way. Everyone else is under 20. Apart from our tutor who I’ve decided I like because she doesn’t shave her legs.
On the first week she stood at the front of the room and told us. ‘There are no wrong answers. C’mon don’t be afraid to say what comes to your mind. Everyone’s opinion is equally valid here.’
Now in that spot is a giant roll down screen. Projecting for us the film clip for ‘Treaty’ by Yothu Yindi. Familiarity washes over me. Yidaki sounding out over 90’s rock n roll was the sound of a thousand barbeques, car trips, community events and even weddings. Like the sound of Ray Warren calling a Broncos game. Or my aunts discussing who from back home was ‘jumping the back fence’. ‘Treaty, yeah! Treaty, now!’ was a refrain that had wrapped me up and rocked me to sleep in my infancy.
‘Please discuss in your tables,’ our tutor says.
In the room the blinds roll up automatically and I can see the woman at the window, looking at me.
“I’ve never heard that song before,’ says the kid sitting beside me. That’s how I think of everyone at my table; kids. Sometimes I see them, so young, fresh-faced, unsure, that I feel an overwhelming affection. Other times I want to put them in time out.
‘It must be something indie,’ he said doubling down.
Laugh with shock, disbelief and a hint of cruelty. ‘It’s an Australian classic actually’.
The woman narrows her eyes at me. Today they’re green and washed out by the sun.
How are they to know? She reminds me. They don’t know what you know, they don’t live in your world. They’re just kids.
Back then, the girl was me. At 11 years old I’m sitting in another classroom with another teacher at the front. One who absolutely shaved her legs, although we never see them under her severe black slacks. The type of woman who tells me ‘that’s not very nice’ when I explain to the class that my family calls January 26, Invasion day.
It’s a hot and sticky summer. The rows of louvres are wide open. Time for my least favourite part of the social studies yearly cycle. Indigenous Australia. Having yourself explained at you by dowdy, unkind teachers is a disconcerting experience. You, a living, breathing human become an anthropologised other. You’re told who and what you are, by the education system of a colonial government that’s still perpetuating a slow-motion genocide against you. And they expect you to listen politely and take notes. Don’t forget to include a margin and the date.
The heading on the glossy textbook in front of me reads something like “Effects of Colonisation on Indigenous Australians.” So, I’m hopeful that this year my mouth won’t feel like it’s filling up with invisible peanut butter to stop me from speaking. I know all about this topic. Having just returned from spending some of my summer school holidays in Mitchell, on Country.
On Country: Indigenous peoples don’t view the land like Europeans do. They believe they can’t own land because they are part of the land.
The textbooks don’t tell you about the bodily feeling when you’re on country for the first time in a year. They don’t know that there’s an invisible line between Roma and Mitchell and that once I cross it every cell in my body starts to sing. That when my feet hit the ground, electric energy rockets up my legs. I always twitch in my sleep for the first few nights. What the textbooks don’t tell you is that all humans are fed by, animated by, non-localised consciousness. It’s the same consciousness that’s in the tress, mountains, rivers, dirt. White historians can’t see that every single thing in the world is connected. They don’t know that for everyone single one of us our ‘soul’ exists outside of our bodies. It’s in the people around us. It’s in the landscape. I just happen to know where mine is.
Mum’s read Blood on the Wattle before the drive from Brisbane to Mitchell. So, she’s in fine form as our Toyota Pajero sped past fields of milo, cabbage, bundled up cotton. She knew all this anyway, she reckons. From our old people. And from the archaeological reports she gets as part of her job. Rock paintings, artefacts, mass graves. They’re all out there, buried knowledge, held by Country.
‘If you turn left at that road and keep going south, there was a massacre,’ she tells Aunty.
My brother and I peer fearfully down that road we pass it. As if colonial stockmen might start chasing the car with whips and shotguns.
‘There was a battle at the base of that hill. All around here blackfullas fought and died.’
‘Can’t we play I spy?’ My brother asks.
‘No look here, they massacred your ancestors around here’ She said as we passed through Yuleba.
Mum made sure I knew my history and I was glad my classmates would be hearing it too. We’re taking turns to read paragraphs of the textbook out loud to the class. Everyone speaks at a gratingly slow pace so, I read ahead to my part.
A large percentage of the aboriginal population died after the First Fleet arrived. Only a very small percentage of this was due to the frontier wars. Aboriginies were not to used to sugar and alcohol. Far more of the aboriginies died due to diseases, such as smallpox, than they did in skirmishes with the settlers. Their bodies were incapable of fighting off the diseases European people brought with them.
Lies. A flat-out, blatant, glossy lies
‘Nadia, read now please.’ The teacher’s voice is far away.
Tongue flat against the bottom of mouth, thick and heavy. Can’t say a word back. Not inside my body anymore. Everything around has turned unreal like I’m looking through a window at heatwaves on the highway. Everyone’s looking. Can’t make eye contact. Stare down at the calculator screen.
That’s when I see the woman for the first time.
You live in two worlds she said. One with the hidden truth. One with the constructed truth.
Now
the woman washes the beige from her fingers and picks up a bright pink sponge. Working quickly, I pat, pat, pat, the bottom of the egg shape across my face. Spreading my make-up, modern-day ochre, warpaint, across my skin before it dries into an unworkable mess. I meet the eyes of my reflection one last time before I leave for uni. This is a different time. Things have changed, I remind myself. The narrative has moved on and people are much better educated. It’s a hard subject for you at the best of times. You’re too sensitive. Remember, be kind to others.
Minutes later,
I slide into another uncomfortable chair in another stark, institutional room. There are no windows, so harsh fluorescent lights buzz overhead. The desk is too low for me. I have to slump and hunch to write my notes. Discussion begins. I breathe out, preparing to be discussed by the kids who learned from the coloniser’s textbook. I’m glad to be sitting next to a familiar face.
Equal and welcomed opinions fly.
On literary prizes on says, ‘they haven’t been doing this very long so, the longer they do it the more recognition they’ll get.’ They’ve only been storytelling and creating art for a hundred thousand years. During which time all life in the British Isles has been wiped out by four separate ice ages. But sure a few more years then we’ll be experienced enough to be prize worthy. I don’t say.
Can’t be kind, disengage.
“You know I’m feeling really triggered by the lecture yesterday,’ familiar face says to me.
Relief. They do get it.
I say, ‘I was too. It’s really hard to for me to see footage of the Don Dale torture at the best of times. Let alone without warning. Why were you triggered?’
‘I just think,’ she’s riled up, speaking angrily. ‘The lecturer should’ve acknowledged both sides of her heritage. She’s obviously white. She looks white. why would she stand up there saying ‘I’m black’? She didn’t have to be so angry about it either.’
I look for the woman. All I find in the black mirrors of my devices are my own watery, exhausted eyes.
*Names and some details have been changed to protect privacy
Nadia Johansen is the Runner Up in the SBS Emerging Writers' Competition.
Nadia is a Gungarri writer and poet living in Meanjin/Brisbane. She is studying a BFA in creative writing at QUT and has a love for contemporary indigenous storytelling. You can find her on Twitter or Instagram @GungarriGirl.
is on sale July 28. The featured writers include: Alana Hicks, Nadia Johansen, Amy Duong, Nakul Legha, Karla Hart, Sita Walker, Jason Phu, Trent Wallace, Tania Ogier, Miranda Jakich, Bon-Wai Chou, Prateeti Sabhlok, Amer Etri, Cher Coad, Sam Price, Rosie Ofori Ward, Lal Perera, Monikka Eliah, Serpil Senelmis, Margarita D'heureux, Maha Sidaoui, Kaye Cooper, Esmé James, Naeun Kim, Jackie Bailey, Michael Sun, Caitlyn Davies-Plummer, Hugh Jorgensen, Dianne Ussher, and Courtney Theseira.
Nadia Johansen, runner up in the 2020 SBS Emerging Writers' Competition Source: Supplied
