Adventures of the Cosmic Woman

Epilogue

'Who read what happened next?' Miss Garrkali said. She turned away from the whiteboard and looked around the room as all of two hands raised.

Mangatjay looked down at his textbook, "Australia: The European Occupation 1788-2056", sat there unopened.

Why didn't you read it? What were you doing?

'They all died,' Suzi Garrett said.

'They all just dropped dead?' Hao asked. 'Just like that?'

'What did it say in the book?' Miss Garrkali said.

'Yeah. That,' Hao said. Some kids chuckled.

'That's what happened,' Miss Garrkali said. She moved around her desk and looked down at her tablet, then up at the class again. 'The aliens - or whatever they were - knew to give the Infield clones just the right lifespan so that they'd do what had to be done and then just die. They dropped out of the sky. They fell into the ocean. All of them dead. Just like that.'

'And then the blackfellas took over again!' said Bunimburr as he looked around the room with a confident smirk.

'No,' Miss Garrkali said. The smile fell away from her face – that stern look they all hated. Tinged with enough sadness to touch the guilty conscience. 'Not quite that simple. There were a lot of hard years. A lot of death and disease and poverty. We had to rebuild. My parents used to tell me the stories. The original governments – what was left of them - tried to take back control but they just couldn't. It was a long time before they started to bring in members of parliament from Indigenous nations to help. It brought our cultures back together but it wasn't easy. There was a loooot of anger. A lot of distrust.'

'After what they did to us we should have kicked them all out,' Bunimburr said. The whites and even some of the Asian, Middle Eastern, and African kids in the room shifted in their seats.

'Do you really believe that would be the right thing to do?' Miss Garrkali asked, softly. 'We still have a lot of what they gave us. We still call the country Australia. We have medicines and doctors and procedures and technology that they brought with them. A lot of awful things happened, yes. But even in the worst years our Elders didn't want to hurt anybody. They didn't want to kick anyone out. Hate only unsettles the hater; hate is not the Australian way. The Elders wanted to let more people in and that's why we have such a rich and diverse culture now. Because we finally did what our Elders always wanted to do. We shared. We're still sharing. We're still learning to get along and there's still problems - but I think we're doing okay.'

'What about all those massacres and things?'

'Did Sophia do those things? Did Nazeem? Did Byron? Peng? They were terrible. Terrible things. And for a long time nobody acknowledged those terrible things, even though they lived in the country and enjoyed the goodness and peace that were stolen from those who suffered. But what happened to the occupying governments and their supporters was horrible as well. Some went to Africa and South America as refugees but they then had to adapt to life over there where they were not so well liked. We welcomed them to stay in a land that was home to them. Do you think that wasn't the right thing to do?'

'Nah.'

'Well, I hope I can change your mind,' Miss Garrkali said.

'Horrible things can lead to good things,' Sophia said.

'What do you mean, Sophia?'

'Well... um... um... we have like... theatre and movies and technology from the occupation, but we got them since horrible things happened to the indi... to your people.'